This is an IHeart podcast.

I'm Maeve Higgins and this is Solvable.

Interviews with the world's most innovative thinkers working to solve the world's biggest problems.

My solvable is tackling cervical cancer in low and middle income countries where 90% of cervical cancer deaths happen.

Wherever there's a pap smear available, that's what most women in the US and Europe know,

then cervical cancer is something that we don't even think about.

And so with very low resources, very little resources, without doctors, without even clinics,

we can go and screen women out in provinces and schoolhouses and workplaces,

and we can defeat cervical cancer.

And really what we're talking about doing is preventing cervical cancer. That is Dr. Vince Gennaro. He's an internal medicine doctor,

a global health specialist, and a social justice advocate. Now, here unsolvable, we do not shy away from the biggest problems, and this one certainly qualifies.

Cervical cancer is a disease that's fueled by social, economic and political inequities.

The World Health Organization puts the situation in pretty blunt terms.

Nine out of ten women who die from cervical cancer are in poor countries.

Cervical cancer is both preventable by vaccines and education and it's treatable. But when

prevention and treatment are missing, it means that some of the most vulnerable women in the

world are dying unnecessarily.

It probably goes without saying that this is not fair.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, cervical cancer is the number one cancer killer of women.

It's so sad because we've seen these amazing health gains for women made in maternal health and HIV care around the world.

So it's kind of a disaster to see that rising cervical cancer deaths undermine those gains.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer made some really scary sounding projections

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