WHO, IARC Launch Training Program for Cervical Precancer Care

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have launched a program to strengthen screening, diagnosis, and management of cervical precancer. The program, available through the WHO Academy platform, aims to expand the skills of frontline health providers and support countries working toward the cervical cancer elimination goals set for 2030.

The initiative was announced on World Cervical Cancer Elimination Day as part of WHO’s broader effort to reduce the global disease burden. While this disease is preventable, most women treated in public institutions still arrive with advanced stages of cancer, underscoring the value of early detection and trained personnel, says Lucely Cetina, Head of the Comprehensive Model for Locally Advanced and Advanced Cervical Cancer Care (MICAELA), Mexico’s National Cancer Institute (INCan).

IARC estimates that over 660,000 women were diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2022 and nearly 350,000 died from it. The WHO Cervical Cancer Elimination Initiative proposes that countries reach the 90–70–90 targets by 2030 to move toward elimination: vaccinating 90% of girls against human papillomavirus (HPV) by age 15, screening 70% of women at ages 35 and 45 with a high-performance test, and ensuring that 90% of women with cervical cancer receive treatment. Achieving these benchmarks requires expanded workforce capacity, particularly among professionals conducting screening and managing screen-positive cases.

The new training program is divided into five modules designed for a wide range of professionals, including midwives, nurses, general practitioners, community health workers, supervisors, health officials, and students. The courses combine e-learning with on-site practical guidance to support direct service delivery and community participation. IARC has previously developed training tools such as the Atlas of Colposcopy and the Atlas of Visual Inspection of the Cervix, which receive about 100,000 visits per month and have been used to train hundreds of master trainers and providers worldwide. These resources underpin the new curriculum and reflect the agency’s long-standing role in supporting screening quality and clinical consistency across countries.

Mexico illustrates the challenges the training program seeks to address. INCan reports that while cervical cancer is 99.7% preventable and early-stage cases are curable in 95% of patients, about 75% of women treated in public institutions arrive with locally advanced disease, and 10% present with advanced or metastatic cancer. In early stages, the disease typically shows no symptoms, contributing to delayed diagnoses. When symptoms do appear, they may include abnormal bleeding, persistent discharge, or pelvic pain. Risk factors such as smoking, malnutrition, immunosuppression, and chronic diseases increase the likelihood of HPV persistence and progression.

These clinical and operational gaps intersect with broader health-system dynamics. Scaling preventive strategies requires financial incentives aligned with early detection, explains Héctor Barillas, General Manager, Wiener Lab. Barillas proposes changing the widely used model of Predictive, Preventive, Personalized, and Participatory medicine to add a fifth category: “Profitable.” He argues that without economic structures that generate value from prevention, countries will struggle to adopt tools that reduce long-term disease burden. He says that while technologies exist to identify women at risk of cervical cancer through AI-supported screening and imaging, prevention is often treated as a cost rather than an investment.