New Delhi, Nov. 5: India’s first mass screening programme for cervical cancer may take off in Bengal in three months, drawing on private funds, while proposals for government-financed early detection of cancer remain largely unimplemented.

Calcutta’s Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute plans to launch in January 2010 a screening effort to find women at risk of developing cervical cancer under a project supported by biotechnology company Qiagen.

The institute will offer women from Howrah, Hooghly and South 24-Parganas a diagnostic test that looks for infection with the human papilloma virus (HPV) — a sexually transmitted virus — known to lead to cervical cancer.

Institute doctors said they hope to screen 50,000 women over a five-year period, and provide preventive therapy selectively to infected women who have pre-cancerous cervical lesions.

Cancer of the uterine cervix is the most common cancer among women in India, striking about 100,000 in the country annually. But studies have established that HPV diagnosis and early therapy can prevent this cancer.

“The biological changes caused by HPV infection happen over many years. The goal is to detect and treat the precancerous lesions to prevent the cancer,” said Partha Basu, head of gynaecological oncology at the institute.

Research has shown that a single round of HPV testing can significantly reduce the number of deaths from cervical cancer, but India does not have any government-funded population-screening programme.

“There has been no attempt to introduce population screening yet,” said Bhudev Chandra Das, former director of the Institute of Cytology and Preventive Oncology (ICPO), Noida, and an expert on HPV screening.

“All the screening in India so far has been through research projects or sought by individuals through the private sector,” Das told The Telegraph.

A health ministry proposal for early detection of cancer to be implemented across India has made poor progress with most of the funds diverted to cancer treatment, oncologists and ministry sources said.

Under this proposal, about Rs 17 lakh was to be available every year for each district, primarily for screening people for various cancers.

A health ministry official said while the money may not have been used for early detection, it has largely been spent on cancer control.

“Many states need to develop infrastructure in their districts for early detection and follow-up,” the ministry sources said. “Some of these funds may have gone into building up cancer (treatment) and radiotherapy services.”

But many oncologists believe more resources should be invested in early detection. About two-thirds of patients with cancer in India turn up only in the advanced stages of the disease when it is hard to cure.

The screening project by the Chittaranjan Cancer Institute will focus on rural areas, said Jaydip Biswas, institute director. “We hope to reach out to women in villages through mobile health teams, with help from local people,” he said.

A senior Qiagen official declined to specify how much funding the company would provide for the screening project. The project is intended to raise awareness about cervical cancer and make screening accessible to the population, the official said.

The search for the most reliable and the most cost-effective diagnostic tool may be contributing to the delay in a population screening programme, Das said. The best available HPV diagnostic tool costs about Rs 1,500 per test today.

The ICPO plans to evaluate another HPV diagnostic tool from Qiagen expected to cost only $5 (Rs 235) per test on about 5,000 women in a district of Uttar Pradesh over the next 18 months.

“Most women infected with the HPV are likely to get rid of the virus, but those who remain infected are at a higher risk of developing cervical cancer,” Basu said.

Research during the 1980s helped established that the sexually-transmitted HPV induces genetic changes in cells of the uterine cervix that can cause cancer. Two companies are marketing vaccines against HPV.