00:00Minister Dr. Jitendra Singh has launched indigenously developed HPV kits for cervical cancer and we have Padmishri rewarded Dr. Neera Bharkala who is actively working on this cervical cancer thing.
00:17Ma'am I want to ask like how these HPV kits are indigenously developed are different from already available international HPV kits?
00:26See the HPV kits which are available internationally are quite expensive and not affordable for us in national program settings specially.
00:33And indigenous kits are there which are obviously of a cheaper price.
00:38But the question which comes is that are they of the same standard to be able to give it to the national program and to tell women even otherwise to get it tested how much assurance they are.
00:47And there is strict criteria there internationally saying that yes this kit will diagnose correctly.
00:53Because to be honest you will not have a cancer so you need to be very very sure of the performance of the test.
00:58So we conducted this test in combination with WHO from research on cancer and using three very important and good laboratories.
01:06At the same time we made sure that we do it with technicians who are not very experienced.
01:11We did it with very basic trained technicians so that it is a replicable model when it rolls out into the field.
01:17And we found very good results with two tests that we tested and we have tested them also with fewer types.
01:23What happens there are a lot of HPV 15 types which are causing cancer but some of them hardly cause not even 1% of the cancers.
01:29And unnecessarily patients get a little nervous also about it and plus it is that many more women who need to go through more procedures.
01:36So we have developed this individually recommended common types 7-8 types test so that we are able to give a very good diagnostic accuracy and we can do minimum of referral and minimum of treatment and make it very very efficient.
01:55What type of like strains will help in detecting this cervical cancer and how early?
02:02So HPV detection actually is not recommended to be tested before 30 years.
02:07Many people get this infection but many will clear it up.
02:10In fact majority will clear it up.
02:12Less than 10% are going to have the persistent infection.
02:15It's like you have a flu and you clear it yourself because your body has immunity.
02:19So it gets cleared but if it clears in maybe a year or even two years.
02:24So those women who after the age of 30 still have this infection they are the ones who are at risk.
02:30They may or may not be developing it but we can start detecting HPV from there.
02:34If we find their persistent infection then we have simple tools to see whether they have some lesion or not.
02:41And to treat it also in a very simple way.
02:43Now we have portable tools for this battery operated which can go through last mile facilities
02:48and simple OPD treatments which the ladies in the cities also can avail of and get rid of the problem before it becomes a cancer.
02:55Ma'am we are talking about the word indigenous here and it will also reduce like an import and this thing like dependency on imports.
03:03What is your take on that?
03:05Now not only reduces it, we are hopeful that this will be a make in India effort which will go abroad.
03:10Because Africa for example has the highest burden of cervical cancer.
03:14So these tests are geared for all LMICs.
03:17Of course once they can scale it up to that level of manufacture,
03:20first provide enough for our country ladies and then be available to people abroad also.
03:25But we have great hope that these tests will do very well and will help in the global burden of cervical cancer.
03:30My last question would be like our minister also talked about women health is very crucial.
03:35But raising awareness is also like one point.
03:38So are we like planning to you know for you know send these kids to very young women or any vaccination we are planning in the future?
03:50No see this is the thing is that it's a little bit chicken and egg type of a situation that what do you do first?
03:55Raise awareness but you don't have the test available in the health centre then what is the point of that?
04:00So both the things have to go hand in hand.
04:02Once the tests are available then we can start promoting and telling people yes come and get the test done.
04:07But as I said for screening we don't recommend earlier than 30 years of age.
04:10Vaccination we recommend before 15 years of age.
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