The at-home pap smear alternative is here

The last thing anyone wants introduced to the most intimate parts of their body is a cold metal object. 

Of course, that is an annual experience for many women—and for an important reason. The speculum is the primary tool used in scraping cells from a woman’s cervix, essential for screening for human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, which is behind a majority of cervical cancers.

However, thanks to femtech innovators, this uncomfortable procedure may no longer be necessary for all women who want to screen for cervical cancer.

The story: The FDA has approved the U.S.’s first at-home pap smear alternative, the Teal Wand.

• The wand device, developed by Teal Health, allows woman to take a swab sample from the vagina and then mail the sample to a lab for HPV screening.
• The approval comes after Teal Health’s U.S. clinical study found at-home screening to be as accurate as in-clinic pap smears.
• The company’s overall aim is to increase cervical cancer screening rates.

Goodbye, pap?: The discomfort many women experience around their annual pap smears is anxiety-inducing at best—and a barrier to important preventive care at worst. Women have long called for a better alternative.

• The pap smear, of course, has been a medical boon for decades. It is named for Dr. Georgios Papanicolaou, whose 1943 paper introduced the method for cervical cancer screening. Since then, cervical cancer, which used to be the top cancer killer of American women, has become easier to manage with earlier detection.
• However, the question of whether this method and its inherent discomforts should still be recommended to all women every year has been contentious.
• Still, many women continue to be behind on recommended screenings, with fear and discomfort being leading causes.
• Last year, we discussed what it would mean for women to have an at-home alternative to the uncomfortable, nerve-wracking in-office pap smear when we covered the Papcup, a tampon-based HPV detecting at-home test developed in the UK.

As part of their clinical study, Teal Health asked women about their preferences for an at-home alternative to the pap smear, and the results were unsurprisingly in favor.