Is cervical cancer (Cervical Cancer) an infectious disease?

  Cervical Cancer is an infectious disease!  For most of you, this is not an idea that you would expect, but we emphasize the very basic and important concept that cervical cancer is an infectious disease! It is preventable, treatable, curable and eradicable.  Cervical cancer is caused by human papillomavirus infection. If we can prevent HPV infection, we can say that we can prevent cervical cancer; if we don’t have HPV infection, we can say that we won’t get cervical cancer. This is already established and this is recognized by everyone. What is commonly referred to as cervical cancer is invasive cancer of the cervix. Other precancerous lesions, which we call cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN), include carcinoma in situ of the cervix, which we classify as CIN3.  HPV infection, especially high-risk, persistent infection is the cause or the underlying cause of cervical precancer and cervical cancer. Almost all different levels of CIN have a significant percentage of HPV detection rate, up to 99.8% in case of cervical cancer. That is, if there is a chance of infection with high-risk HPV types, such as 16 and 18, then the relative risk of developing cervical cancer can be 100 to 250, so HPV infection is one of the most important factors. In other words, HPV can be found in almost all pathological samples of cervical cancer, thus confirming HPV as the main cause of cervical cancer and making cervical cancer the only cancer with a clear etiology among all human cancer lesions at present.  HPV infection is not uncommon or even relatively common in young women under 30 years of age (18-28) who are sexually active. But most infections are transient, called Transient, just a carrier of HPV, The Carried, or carrier, is a carrier, like a carrier of hepatitis B. Most can be cleared within a year or two. So it should not cause undue panic. Only persistent HPV infection can develop into different levels of CIN or cervical cancer. Generally speaking, an HPV infection that is not cleared can develop into different grades of CIN: CIN1, CIN2, CIN3 within a year or two, and after almost 10 more years, it may develop into invasive cancer. An HPV infection, which may be cytologically negative at the beginning, may have about a 5% chance of developing into CIN after about six months if it is not cleared, and if HPV continues not to be cleared, after another six months, i.e., one year has passed, it may develop into low-grade CIN in 50% of cases, as shown in the table. Generally speaking, within one year, 70% of HPV infections are cleared, and if two years pass, about 90% are cleared. This means that in one or two years, 6 to 24 months, most can be cleared, and if not cleared, they may develop different grades of CIN. HPV infection is common in women of childbearing age. HPV can be cleared, or stable, or cause intraepithelial neoplasia or cervical cancer. If it is just HPV positive and cytology is negative, it can be left untreated. So it’s not that if one is HPV positive, one is necessarily given anything to treat. One has to take into account the cervical cytology information to decide further treatment measures, for example, do we need to consider colposcopy, cervical biopsy or perform cervical conization?  The cervix is one of the few internal organs that can be examined with the help of a simple instrument (speculum). Cervical cancer also has relatively clear causative factors, so it is the most likely cancer to be the first to be attacked and cured. Screening for cervical cancer is very important to detect precancerous lesions and early cancers of the cervix at a very early stage, so that patients can be diagnosed early and receive appropriate treatment. Together with the development and use of the vaccine for the causative factor (HPV), the outlook and prognosis for the treatment of cervical cancer is the brightest.