About 200 women at Onwe in Ejisu Municipality of Ashanti Region have undergone free cervical cancer screening and health education.

Medical Students Association at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) partnered Onwe Government Hospital for the exercise.

Cervical cancer is an infection which causes cancer cells to form in the cervix.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says it is the fourth most frequent cancers in women in the world. It is the most common in Ghana.

An estimated 528,000 new cases from which 266,000 people died occurred in 2012 alone.

Over 85 per cent of cervical cancer occurs in low- and middle-income countries.

A study report published in the Journal of Global Oncology suggests improvement in the application of preventive strategies could considerably reduce the burden of cervical cancer in Ghana.

KNUST Medical Students Association emphasizes the preventive nature of the disease makes such outreach crucial.

Chairperson of Projects and Fund-raising Committee, Emmanuella Achiaa Osei-Tutu, says attention has been on the condition for two years running.

“It needs so much attention and since it’s preventable. It’s one of the biggest reasons to screen women and educate them on vaccination so they prevent the infection. It’s two years in running because cervical cancer is the most common gynaecological cancer as such it needs so much attention,” she said.

Financial and General Secretary, Nana Afua Agyemang Mensah-Bonsu, encourages women to go for regular screening and vaccination.

“Those who are not sexually active to go for a routine pap smear.

The good thing is that it can be detected at the early stages and interventions put in place to curtail the disease for those who are not sexually active yet, can go for vaccination,” she advised.

The outreach follows an earlier sensitization with Onwe Government Hospital which found most women were oblivious of the infection.

Conditions covered in previous projects comprise imperforate anus or anorectal malformation which leads to children’s inability to pass stool.

Some are curable cancer in children, known medically as Burkitts Lymphoma, as well as cleft palate and lip correction.