A study published in last week's New England Journal of Medicine looked at Stage II cervical cancer as the outcome and found that testing for HPV DNA was about twice as accurate as Pap smears. Pap smears will "soon be of mainly historical interest" says a Professor of Gynecology at Stanford Dr. Paul D. Blumenthal. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/health/07virus.html?partner=rss&emc=rs... Don't tell that to laypeople just yet. There are plenty of stories of fortuitous finds on Pap smears. This is one area where researchers in the ivory towers fail: they don't understand how defensive people are about testing. Tests may enter the public sphere rapidly but they don't tend to leave it all that quickly if you notice. I would like to elicit a comment from Dr. Blumenthal about which will be of historical interest first: the Pap smear or him! It takes at least ten years for a profound finding like the HPV testing result to really penetrate the "lay-consciousness." The main benefit for this test is in the developing world. It's the big tragedy that cervical cancer a sexually transmitted disease is mostly a problem of the developing world. 275 000 women will die this year of cervical cancer 80% of whom reside in the developing world. A $5 test as accurate or more accurate than a Pap smear would save a lot of lives in the developing world.