Epidemiologia y control del cancer del cuello uterino en America Latina y el Caribe

Abstract

Cervical cancer is a serious health problen in Latin America and the Caribbean. To determine the magnitude of the problem the authors had access to the mortality data supplied by the countries to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the incomplete morbidity data obtained from cancer records, and the special studies and reports compiled by some detection programs. The quality of the information available for the analysis of mortality is uneven, and is generally dependent on the degree of development of the countries, but has the essential merit of conveying the wide differences that exist among the countries. Those differences are brought out by truncated rates of mortality per 100 000 women (age 35 to 64 years) which, in descending order, are 29.5 to 21.6 in 11 countries of the English-speaking Caribbean, Chile, Mexico, Paraguay, Panama, Guyana, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Venezuela; 18.2 to 8.1 in Belize, Peru, Ecuador, Uruguay, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina and the Dominican Republic; and 6.8 to 0.6 in the United States of America, Canada, Puerto Rico and Honduras. In terms of the distribution of deaths from cervical and breast cancer as proportions of all deaths from malignant tumors using data from 1980, the countries with higher proportion of deaths from cervical cancer(Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile and Venezuela),countries with the higher proportion of deaths from breast