Campaigns

PINCC's first campaign started in 2005 after founder Kay Taylor volunteered on a medical mission to Honduras and discovered the plight of poor women in third world countries. Since then, PINCC has expanded with campaigns in 9 countries and growing.

Africa

Every 10 minutes, a woman in Africa dies from cervical cancer and each year, more than 60,000 women die. Compared to the United States, Africa has nine times the incidence of cervical cancer - but, worse, each case is 24 times as likely to be deadly.
 

Central America

In El Salvador, women face a very high incidence of cervical cancer, more than double that of the overall world rate. According to the World Health Organization, the crude incidence rate for cervical cancer in El Salvador is 36.6/100,000 women, compared with 24.4/ 100,000 in Central America as a whole, and 16/100,000 worldwide.  Equally distressing is that more women in El Salvador get cervical cancer  than any other type of cancer including breast cancer. (WHO, Burden of HPV Related Cancers, WHO/ICO HPV Information Centre)  With a population of slightly over 7 million people, and with 60% of the female population between the ages of 15-64 years, there is a significant need for cervical cancer screening. (The World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook)
 
 In Nicaragua, we have been working in small clinics for 4 years, and recently working with Dr. Alvaro Garcia, head OB/GYN for
Managua’s Berta Calderon Hospital and residency program, to train centers in Ocotal and Jalapa. This visit, we also were invited to lecture and
demonstrate at the University of Leon’s hospital and medical school, explaining and demonstrating our program. They were excited and
welcoming, and asked us to start training their professors and residents on our return to Nicaragua in November. This is a great way to increase the useof our protocols, sending doctors out after their training already equipped to start such programs in the areas they will serve. We left some equipment, and will bring more to supplement the University’s currently incomplete LEEP machinery.

Our current challenge is beginning our mission in Peru, in June 2010. We were asked to come byPathfinders International, a wonderful organization working here for 30 years onwomen’s health issues. There was much confusion working both with Pathfinders (at Clinica Medisol ) and the huge Institucion Nacional Materno-Perinatal in Lima, coordinating doctors’ schedules, finding space for training and understanding expectations. This isn’t unusual at the beginning of a campaign, and we finished with all parties anxious to continue training and work more efficiently on the next visit.
The cervical cancer death rate is even higher here than in Africa (42 per 100,000) aswell as a rapidly rising HIV rate , so we feel a real need to help stem the terrible tide of unnecessary deaths among women here.

India

During our first visit in August 2009, we trained 14 Gynecologists to screen for precursors to cervical cancer using VIA (Visual Inspection with Acetic Acid) and to treat precancerous lesions using either Cryo-therapy or LEEP (Loop Electrical Excision Procedure) allowing for single visit diagnosis and treatment.