It can be tough to find a medical study that is both important and compelling. But that was the opportunity presented to health reporters this week in the shape of a big study on a humble condiment, vinegar.
What makes this study even more wonderful, in a way, is that it was presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, a medical meeting that’s awash in high-stakes, big money, endlessly pitched and spun drug research.
In the midst of that madding crowd was Dr. Surendra Shastri, a preventive oncologist at Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai who needed an inexpensive, low-tech way to screen for cervical cancer – the leading cancer killer of women in India.
He found it in the form of sterile vinegar which bleaches suspect cells white when it’s swabbed on the cervix.
The vinegar test costs just $1 compared to $15 for a Pap smear. Pap smears aren’t routinely performed in India because they’re relatively expensive and they require medical infrastructure – testing labs and pathologists – that the country doesn’t have.
In a 12-year study of 150,000 women Shastri and colleagues showed that the test cut deaths from cervical cancer by 31 percent in women who were screened every other year compared to women who were educated to watch for cervical cancer symptoms and given access to a free Pap smear, if they could get to a hospital that provided them.
Researchers estimate the vinegar test could save 73,000 lives a year in the developing world.
“It makes me happy that this is my most-read ASCO story. Ever,” tweeted AHCJ member Matthew Herper, a health and science writer for Forbes.
The trial was widely covered. And out of an anthology of good reporting I could list here, the brightest flower was certainly this collaboration between Muneeza Naqvi, a writer for the Associated Press who is based in India, and AHCJ member Marilynn Marchione, who is the AP’s chief medical writer.
Woven around the facts and figures of the study are quotes from women and health workers who signed up for the project, all of whom were from the slums of Mumbai.
Their story uniquely illuminates the courage it took for these women to participate in this research:
‘‘There was a sense of shame about taking their clothes off. A lot of them had their babies at home and had never been to a doctor,’’ said one health worker, Urmila Hadkar. ‘‘Sometimes just the idea of getting tested for cancer scared them. They would start crying even before being tested.’’
Readers also learned that one of the health workers was beaten after people in the neighborhood learned that women would have to disrobe to be tested.
It’s becoming rare to hear details of the sacrifice and hard work that goes into pulling off a big clinical trial, and certainly we wouldn’t have seen these without the coordination and reach of an international newsgathering organization. Luckily, we still have some of those. And luckier still, some still flex their muscles to pull off these kinds of stories. Thanks, AP.
