In the News: Highlighting Grounds for Health’s Role in Innovative Technologies

The Daily Beast, an award-winning online publication that reports on politics, health, pop-culture, world news and more, recently highlighted Grounds for Health’s work with startup MobileODT.

In “A Cervical Selfie Might Save Your Life,” author Shoshana Kordova outlines the potential for this emerging technology, which gives trained providers the ability to detect cervical cancer and pre-cancers with a mobile phone.

Since 2014, Grounds for Health has assisted in MobileODT’s pilot program to assess the device’s effectiveness and feasibility in low-resource settings. Grounds for Health Clinical Director Ellen Starr mentioned that MobileODT’s potential lies in more than detecting cancers.

Kordova writes:

The cervical selfies spread body consciousness beyond Afghanistan. It was at a flower factory in a remote agricultural area of Ethiopia that Ellen Starr saw firsthand that educating women about their own bodies was an unexpected benefit of screening them for cancer.

Starr is a women’s health nurse-practitioner and the clinical director of Grounds for Health, a Vermont-based aid organization that works to diagnose and treat cervical cancer in Latin America and Africa. The aid group started using the MobileODT devices last spring, and when Starr joined a trip to Ethiopia in October, she saw women gathering in the factory lunchroom to peer at photos of the bright-red cervixes on the (male) community coordinator’s iPad after a round of cancer screening. “What we found as a side advantage,” said Starr, “is that women really like seeing their cervixes.”

At the moment, most of the Grounds for Health screening of women aged 30-49 is being done by local health providers who wash the cervix with vinegar and look for white lesions with the naked eye, with the mobile colposcopes reserved for quality assurance and remote feedback on those findings. The NGO treats women with lesions the same day to ensure they don’t fall through the cracks. Starr said she would ultimately like to be able to give a mobile colposcope to all their local health providers—there are 410 of them in four countries—so they can consult with local experts and referral facilities for second opinions, as well as collect data on the results and keep track of patients with abnormal findings.

Starr notes that screening would be essential even if programs vaccinating girls and young women against Human Papillomavirus (HPV), the virus that causes the disease, are highly successful. “It’s going to be 30, 40 years before we can eradicate cancer through vaccination,” she said. “It will be wonderful when we do, but in the meantime we don’t want to lose all those people who are beyond vaccination age but could still develop cancer.”

Thank you to The Daily Beast for highlighting our role in the emerging technologies that can make deaths from cervical cancer a thing of the past.

Read: A Cervical Selfie Might Save Your Life

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MobileODT: