Cervical cancer screening in Austria

Austria's target population of women aged 20 years and over consists of 3 million people. There is mainly opportunistic screening, except in one county with a target population of 120000, in which organised screening has been practiced for several years. There are approximately 1.5 million smears annually, exclusively taken by gynaecologists. The recommended screening interval is 1 year. The slides are screened by MTs with a maximum workload of 12000 smears annually in 65 laboratories, mainly headed by pathologists. As shown by Vutuc and colleagues (Wien Klin Wochenschr 1999, 111, 354-359) the opportunistic screening system covers 60% of the Austrian target population leaving an unsatisfactorily high rate of underserved, mainly postmenopausal, women. Nevertheless, the cervical cancer mortality rate could have been decreased to one third during the past 40 years.