Woman's common sex problem turned out to be deadly cervical cancer...as smear tests are to be given LESS often
A woman hit with advanced cervical cancer at 25 has urged others to attend every screening test—after she delayed her smear due to fears sparked by 'online horror stories'.
Jasmin McKee, now 26, from Southampton, began suffering lower back pain and bleeding after sex in 2023, but assumed it was due to her newly-fitted copper coil.
The operations manager had also 'put off' her cervical screening after reading fear-mongering stories online that suggested the procedure was painful.
But in March 2024, she eventually plucked up the courage to attend the test which, to her horror, confirmed she had the cancer-causing virus, human papillomavirus (HPV).
Around 99 per cent of all cervical cancers are caused by the HPV virus, which can be spread via sexual contact.
Doctors also discovered that Ms McKee had abnormal cell changes within her cervix, with a later biopsy confirming the presence of cancer.
Further scans showed the disease was stage three, meaning it had spread to nearby tissues.
Around 60 per cent of those diagnosed at this stage won't survive for longer than five years, according to Cancer Research UK.
'Everything just goes a bit numb… it's just such a big shock,' she said of learning the devastating news.
'I didn't want the people that I love the most feeling sad for me. I just didn't want them to worry.'
She immediately regretted delaying her screening test.
'It was nothing to worry about,' she said. 'I was in and out in 10 minutes and, for me, it was painless.
'[Cervical screening tests] are not an embarrassing thing, the nurses will do 20 of them a day, no one cares.
'It's so quick, it's nothing to be scared about and they can save your life.'
Ms McKee underwent surgery in November last year to try and remove the tumour, but doctors were unable to destroy it completely—and it continued to grow.
In January this year, she began radiotherapy, five days a week for three weeks, and decided to tell her family about her diagnosis.
Unfortunately, scans revealed the radiotherapy had not been effective, and chemotherapy was needed, which she underwent in April.
She is currently having eight rounds of chemotherapy every three weeks, and is expected to finish treatment in early September 2025.
'Once I'm better, I'm going to grab every opportunity and get as much happiness out of life as possible,' she said.
Ms McKee's story comes in the same week NHS England announced low-risk women aged 25-49 in England will now be invited for cervical screenings every five years, as opposed to every three.
This change will bring cervical screening in England in line with Scotland, Wales, and other European countries, and aligns screening intervals to that of women aged 50 to 64.
Those who test positive for HPV will be invited back for further checks, more often.
The approach is based on evidence and expert recommendation from the UK National Screening Committee and is based on analysis from King's College London showing five-yearly screening is just as safe as three-yearly, with the same number of cancers found.
The NHS say that, while the health service recognises changes to cervical screening can 'seem worrying', the new approach is based on robust scientific evidence and an expert recommendation from the UK National Screening Committee.
'The NHS cervical screening programme tests for human papillomavirus (HPV) and uses a better and more accurate test than before,' said a spokesperson.
'This means if you test negative for HPV, you don't need to be screened as often as your risk of developing cervical cancer is very low.
'If you test positive for HPV, we'll monitor you more closely with additional tests and follow-up appointments.
'This personalised approach ensures everyone receives the right level of screening based on their individual risk factors, providing better protection while reducing unnecessary procedures.'
The NHS website says anyone worried about symptoms of cervical cancer should see their GP.
Typical signs include unusual vaginal bleeding—such as during or after sex, between periods or after the menopause—pain during sex or in the lower back, pelvis and/or tummy, and changes to vaginal discharge.
Research published last year found the UK death rate among women from cervical cancer has dropped by 54 per cent over the last 25 years.
Experts say this is mostly due to of the HPV vaccine, which is given to teenagers and reduces cervical cancer risk by 90 per cent.
In 2023 NHS England announced a plan to 'eliminate' cervical cancer by 2040, aiming for a prevalence rate of below four per every 100,000 people.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
39 minutes ago
- The Guardian
As a visibly physically disabled MP, my view on the welfare bill is clear: we need a reset and fast
In March 2020, when the Conservative government looked like an outlier in appearing to pursue a Covid strategy centring on herd immunity, for the first time in my life I felt raw, hot fear. Thinking of my toddler and what might happen if I caught coronavirus and was treated under the then Nice guidelines 'frailty' score was too much. I sobbed deeply. After 10 years of austerity, I knew then that disabled people would pay an enormous price for the pandemic thanks to the government's handling of it. Disabled people did: almost 60% of Covid-related deaths involved disabled people in that first wave. I vowed then that I would do all I could to use my skills and experiences of 20 years working in disability law and policy to deliver a country that treats disabled people with dignity and respect. Five years later, I am one of the only visibly physically disabled members of parliament. I was proud to be elected last year as the first person to have grown up in my constituency to go on to represent it in parliament for more than a century. I am proud, too, that Labour's manifesto committed to championing the rights of disabled people, and to the principle of working with disabled people to ensure our views and voices are at the heart of all we do. Consequently, since April, I have been engaging relentlessly with government, at the very highest level, to change its proposals as set out in the universal credit and personal independence payment bill. I made it clear from the start I could not support the proposals on personal independence payments (Pip). Pip is an in-work benefit, designed to ensure disabled people can live independently. There are 4 million disabled people in poverty in the UK. As a matter of conscience, I could not support measures that would push 250,000 disabled people, including 50,000 children, into poverty. Nor could I accept proposals that used a points system, under current descriptors, that would exclude eligibility for those who cannot put on their underwear, prosthetic limbs or shoes without support. The concessions now announced are significant, including that all recipients of Pip who currently receive it will continue to do so. I know this will be an enormous relief for many of my nearly 6,000 constituents in receipt of Pip and for disabled people across the country. However, I will continue working, as I have done from the beginning, to look at these concessions carefully against the evidence on the impact upon disabled people, including my constituents, and disabled people's organisations. Fundamentally, I will be looking for further reassurances that the detail will fulfil Labour's manifesto commitments to disabled people. The social model of disability must be central to this – removing barriers to our inclusion in society. Proposals must take a mission-led approach across all five missions to break down barriers to opportunity for disabled people. I hope to see three things from government, embedded in the text of the amendments, if the bill reaches the report stage. First, the review being led by Stephen Timms, the minister for social security and disability, must not be performative. The government must not make the same mistake twice. I strongly recommend bringing in a disabled expert on equality and employment law, such as Prof Anna Lawson at the University of Leeds, to support this work. Second, the government must consult disabled people over the summer to understand the impact of the proposed changes from November 2026 on future claimants. These must mitigate risks of discrimination for those current recipients with similar disabilities and against pushing new disabled claimants into poverty after November 2026. In doing so, it must produce an impact assessment that also reflects the impact of unmet need for future recipients on health and social care services, and clarifies the application of new criteria on those receiving Pip if they get reassessed. Third, growth must mean inclusive growth. In implementing the £1bn employment, health and skills support programme, there needs to be a clear target for closing the disability employment gap. Importantly, there needs to be a commitment to a sector-by-sector strategy on closing this gap and a skills training strategy for the employment support workers enabling disabled people into work. These approaches outperform cuts or sanctions in getting disabled people into sustainable employment. This matters. The Conservatives left us with a pitiful 29% employment gap and 17% pay gap for disabled people. The Labour government has an opportunity to bring in a new era of policymaking for disabled people that takes a laser focus in closing this gap. The disability sector believes that this can be reduced by 14%; generating £17.2bn for the exchequer. We must seize this moment to do things differently and move beyond the damaging rhetoric and disagreements of recent weeks. In line with the prime minister's statement that reform should be implemented with Labour values of fairness, a reset requires a shift of emphasis to enabling disabled people to fulfil their potential. I will continue to engage with government and disabled people's organisations, to fight for a country that treats disabled people with dignity and respect. Marie Tidball is Labour MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, chair of the all-party parliamentary group on autism and co-chair of the disability parliamentary Labour party Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The Guardian
39 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Britain in 2025: sick man of Europe battling untreated illness crisis
The same 11 young women turn up around the clock at the emergency ward of Furness general hospital in Cumbria. The group are well known to staff, other services – and each other. Aged between 19 and 35, they have all led troubled lives. Some grew up in care, most need mental health support. All have fallen through society's cracks and now gamble with their lives for a safe place to sleep. They know where to look to find the precise amount of medication to take for a non-lethal overdose, guaranteeing them an overnight stay in hospital. Some resort to swallowing household objects to secure a bed for the night. These 11 women accounted for a staggering 9% of the 45,228 A&E admissions at the Barrow-in-Furness hospital last year, at a cost to the NHS of at least £250,000. But they are far from unique. One NHS leader described a 'chilling pattern' of self-harm among vulnerable people whose regular refuge is now their local hospital. It is not confined to the young. Older people, known on some wards as 'revolving-door pensioners', are deliberately self-neglecting so they can be looked after in hospital, particular in winter when energy bills are high. The Guardian has spent months interviewing GPs, nurses, social workers, NHS leaders, academics and residents in some of the most deprived corners of Britain as they grapple with the worsening effect of deepening poverty on a health service in crisis. Through a series of pioneering schemes in north-west England, clinicians have uncovered what one NHS manager described as 'medieval' levels of untreated illness. In poorer places where GPs and community nurses have all but vanished, A&E attendances have almost doubled since 2010, driving up ambulance call-outs by 61%. Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is due to unveil the biggest NHS transformation plan in a generation next month, aiming to shift healthcare from hospitals to communities and from treatment to prevention. The challenge is stark. Britain has the lowest life expectancy in western Europe and one of the highest tallies among rich countries for preventable deaths. NHS bodies in the regions have been ordered to slash their budgets in half, cutting as many as 13,500 jobs, leaving senior figures alarmed about how this squares with Streeting's focus on community care. In parts of Blackpool, Barrow, Burnley and Blackburn, areas with some of the worst deprivation in England, the Guardian learned of children suffering from both obesity and malnutrition as families increasingly rely on cheap processed food. Babies are being fed reheated formula milk, potentially causing serious bacterial infection. Other families risk food poisoning by turning off their refrigerator overnight to save money. 'There's a certain sense of despair among professionals,' said one NHS leader. 'We're trying our best but I'm not sure how much we can do. It's deep-rooted, it's extreme, but it's a symptom of something broader and deeper happening across all society.' The NHS has become focused on treatment rather than prevention. But in parts of Lancashire and south Cumbria, health leaders have been taking a new approach aimed at tackling conditions before they become crises. On the Ryelands estate, a pebble-dashed maze in Lancaster, Lizzie Holmes, a community nurse, has spent two years persuading residents to have free health checks. The community, historically one of the poorest in Lancashire, is a desert for doctors and dentists. Residents are all but invisible to the NHS until they are blue-lighted to hospital or turn up at A&E. Many have not seen a doctor for years, pushed away by the 8am scramble to see a GP and the months-long waiting lists. Holmes, who was awarded the prestigious Queen's nurse award last year, has become an unofficial social worker and even amateur plumber to win the trust of reluctant residents. Last year she unblocked a patient's kitchen sink in return for his promise to get checked out. The man, in his late 50s, was a virtual recluse and was thought to be living with multiple chronic conditions but was refusing to get help. Her DIY plumbing turned out to be a life-saving intervention: he had been living for years with undiagnosed pneumonia, suspected bowel cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). COPD is a collection of lung conditions that kill people at a higher rate in the UK than anywhere in western Europe, and are much more prevalent in poorer areas. 'There's two outcomes if Lizzie hadn't kept knocking on his door,' said Claire Niebieski, the head of population health in Lancashire and South Cumbria. 'He would have been found dead at home or he would have been a 999 call away from spending months and months in hospital.' To date, Holmes's team has reached 164 residents, almost all of whom were highly unlikely to seek help before presenting at A&E. For just five of these patients, this preventive approach saved the NHS more than £170,000, according to an internal analysis. Most of this saving is mainly because they would no longer need a hospital bed (£2,089 per patient per day). The savings to the NHS would rise to millions of pounds across the Ryelands estate. The proactive approach has reduced A&E visits from the estate by 5% over two years, compared with a 5% increase in parts of the community without this focused approach, according to NHS modelling. A similar pilot in Poulton, in Lancaster, has led to an 11% fall in A&E attendances. It is a reversal of the trend across Britain since 2010. As more of the NHS budget is spent on hospitals, community healthcare has gone into retreat. There are far fewer neighbourhood nurses and GPs per head than in other wealthy nations, driving up A&E visits. With nowhere else to turn, some people attend A&E as many as 300 times a year at a cost of £2.5bn to the NHS, according to the British Red Cross. A fifth of these repeat A&E visits come from the poorest 10% of the country. The retreat from preventive care has harmed the NHS and the wider economy, experts say. Britain now spends more on health-related benefits – £75bn a year – than on defence. One in 10 people in England and Wales receive either disability or incapacity benefit, the number having grown from 2.8 million in 2019 to 4 million today. The cost to the economy of long-term sickness is estimated by the government at more than £300bn a year – one-and-a-half times the budget of Streeting's Department of Health and Social Care. As poverty deepens, the NHS feels the pain. A comprehensive study for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2014 estimated that £29bn of spending by the health service was associated with poorer areas, where people are sicker and more likely to use A&E. One of the report's authors, Prof Donald Hirsch of Loughborough University, said the cost of poverty on the NHS today would be closer to £50bn a year if those ratios were the same. 'In fact, it could be much higher,' he said. The preventive approach in Lancaster is one of several quietly radical programmes under way in Lancashire and south Cumbria, a vast area spanning Blackpool, Barrow-in-Furness, Burnley and Blackburn, towns with some of the poorest and sickest communities in Britain. One senior regional manager said less affluent areas were bearing the brunt of the NHS's retrenchment. 'People are attending hospital with cancerous lumps bursting through their skin,' they said. 'It's almost like medieval times when healthcare wasn't available.' Dr Andy Knox, the medical director of Lancaster and South Cumbria integrated care board, said Britain's health and social care system was not sustainable without an 'unrelenting focus on tackling health inequity'. He said: 'The truth is that right now, in the UK, we value some people significantly more than we value others. And this is actually costing us in terms of economic and societal wellbeing.' The need for action was urgent, said Knox, who was awarded an MBE in 2013 for tackling health inequalities. 'We have not created a healthy society and, particularly for our most disadvantaged communities, this is now having a profoundly negative effect and placing huge pressure on our health and care system.' The mortality rate among under-75s in Blackpool is by some distance the worst in England for cancer, cardiovascular disease and for all causes, with the average man dying at 73 – six years younger than England's average, and now the youngest in the UK. Blackpool has four times the average number of drug deaths, nearly double the rate of smoking deaths, the highest proportion of alcohol deaths and the highest rate of serious mental illnesses in England. Deaths from alcohol, drugs or suicide are the highest in England and more than twice the national average. In 2021 the then health secretary, Sajid Javid, made a speech in Blackpool in which he described the huge differences in health access and outcomes related to race and socioeconomic status as the 'disease of disparity'. Last week his successor Streeting also chose the town as the location for his first speech on health inequalities. In it he pledged to ensure more NHS funding goes to poor areas to help tackle the fact that they have fewer GPs and longer waiting times for care. 'The NHS doesn't do enough to address the unjust, unequal way in which illness presents itself in our country,' he said. Preventing the continuation of deep multi-generational illness is the work of Blackpool Better Start, a national lottery-funded initiative bringing together the NHS, NSPCC, council, police and, crucially, a six-strong team of trusted local parents, known as community connectors, who are better at winning the confidence of families than official agencies. The work starts before children are born, with a community connector making regular visits to Blackpool Victoria hospital's antenatal ward to enrol new parents and offer advice on drinking and smoking in pregnancy. Birth registrations have been moved out of the town hall and into three family hubs, formerly Sure Start centres, so every newborn must come through its doors to be given support. Every expectant parent in Blackpool is offered free perinatal classes, typically costing about £296 in other parts of England. Other universal courses are aimed at nurturing the bond between mothers, fathers and their babies – a key issue in a town with the country's highest proportion of children in care, at nearly three times the national average. 'If a baby doesn't feel safe, even though they're being fed, there's a failure to thrive,' said Tracy Greenwood, a health visitor for more than 20 years, who has seen babies failing to gain weight due to attachment issues. More than one in seven new mothers contacted by Better Start reported having four or more adverse childhood experiences, such as abuse and neglect, which is associated with higher levels of health and behavioural difficulties in their own children. Since 2019, the multi-agency scheme says, it has seen a 19% increase in breastfeeding take-up and a 6% fall in babies being born pre-term. It reports an 11% drop in the number of five-year-olds suffering from tooth decay – an issue affecting one in three children of that age in Blackpool, compared with one in four nationally – in part thanks to 'supervised brushing' programmes in schools. Blackpool's use of community connectors, local parents employed by the NSPCC and often recruited on Facebook, is seen as crucial to its success. Families in the most deprived areas felt judged and feared being reported to social services, said Jenny Armer, the chair of the Ryelands estate residents' group in Lancaster. Prof Jennie Popay, a sociologist who leads Lancaster University's Centre for Health Inequalities, said this mistrust was understandable. 'The overwhelming message [from the NHS and other institutions] is that [poor health] is how people behave and that's really stigmatising for people who live really difficult lives,' she said. Thousands of families in Blackpool are in the grip of the worst living standards on record. Emma Hobbs, a Better Start community worker, has heard new parents talk of reheating old bottles of baby formula instead of 'throwing money down the sink', increasing the risk of bacterial infections. 'We've had parents telling us they were turning off their fridges at night because they couldn't afford the electricity,' said Vicky Morgan, a development manager. She worries every winter when money-saving experts encourage families to 'heat the person, not the room'. 'It's dangerous [and] it doesn't apply to under-fives,' she said. Across England, 40% of 11-year-olds are overweight or obese, a trend that has grown steadily since 2010. Children in poorer areas are more than twice as likely to be obese at ages five and 11 than those in wealthier areas. Prof James Fleming, a GP in Padiham, near Burnley, has observed a troubling new phenomenon in children nationally: they are obese and malnourished. The cost of living crisis has normalised diets that rely on cheap and calorie-dense foods, he says, with disastrous lifelong consequences such as increased risk of disability, premature death, diabetes, osteoarthritis and some types of cancer. 'We're normalising poor nutrition and poor health,' Fleming said. Last year he organised a grant for a local school, expecting it to spend it on the playground. Instead, it spent it on food. 'The teacher said: I want every child to have a full tummy. That was really upsetting,' he said. Back on the Ryelands estate in Lancaster, the school summer holidays are looming. Armer, the chair of the residents' group, organised 42 food parcels for the estate at a cost of £2 each last year. In the final week of the summer holidays, only six families could afford to pay. Children are missing school, she says, because the bus is too expensive. A four-mile round trip costs £4 a day – £80 a week, or £780 for a full school year. 'That really concerns me and just shows how much families are struggling,' she said. In Fleetwood, eight miles north of Blackpool, NHS bosses spotted that a large number of children were failing to turn up to mental health appointments. They realised it was because families could not afford the two-hour round trip on public transport. Since moving the service to Fleetwood, the child and adolescent mental health services waiting list has fallen to almost zero. A&E attendances for children in mental health crisis have decreased by 59%. At Furness general hospital in Barrow, the 11 young women are no longer routinely found in A&E. They sat down with clinicians to explain why they self-harmed to secure a bed for the night. They described a complex range of mental health issues, dating back to childhood, that had never adequately been addressed, even though many, if not all, had been seen by NHS professionals. A more comprehensive support plan is now in place and the A&E attendances are starting to fall. 'Health has to work in a different way,' Niebieski said. 'It can't continue to expect that these people will access care in the usual way. For some people the barriers they face are so great that it's impossible.'
The Guardian
39 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Downing St has a radical change in mind for the NHS: shifting its focus from treatment to prevention
In Lancaster the community nurse Lizzie Holmes knocks on doors to persuade people who are unwell but reluctant to accept NHS help. In Blackpool, 'community connectors' help low-income families get their children into healthy habits early in life. Both do necessary, vital, proactive work known as health prevention – stopping illness occurring in the first place and spotting it early when it does. The idea is that this will create a virtuous circle of a healthier population and thus less need for NHS care. But while the initiatives described in a Guardian investigation are imaginative and effective, they are also atypical of the way the NHS works. Over recent decades governments of different political colours have talked about turning the NHS from a service primarily focused on treating illness to one that does far more to prevent disease in the first place. A raft of expert reports over those years have urged ministers to make exactly that transformational change. It has never happened. However, on Thursday Keir Starmer, the prime minister, and Wes Streeting, the health secretary, will pledge to ensure that it finally does. It will be one of the 'three big shifts' in the way the NHS operates, which Labour has promised to implement since taking power almost a year ago, that will be set out in their 10-year health plan. There is a widespread consensus that those shifts – from analogue to digital, treatment to prevention and hospital to community – are essential if the health service is to escape its longstanding crisis and be able to deal with the rising tide of illness caused by the ageing population and lifestyle-related diseases such as obesity. The great paradox of health prevention is that although a mountain of evidence has long shown it works, very little of it actually occurs. A recent paper by the King's Fund thinktank outlined four key benefits of doing it. First, it is effective; public health improves. For example, tobacco control policies have led to less lung and heart disease. Second, 'preventing people getting sick, or preventing sickness getting worse, can reduce demand on services that are increasingly under pressure'. Third, prevention can bring wider economic benefits, by making people better able to work – a priority for a government grappling with an unprecedented 2.8 million people being too sick to do so. And, lastly, that the approach makes the health system more cost-effective in the long term. But, the thinktank added, health prevention is not just the NHS's responsibility. Government as a whole has a key role to play. For example, it could insist on reformulation of food to make it healthier or regulating to ensure better quality housing. Local councils can help too, for instance by tackling air pollution through congestion charges and low emission zones. The colossal overall annual costs of obesity (£98bn UK-wide), smoking (£43.7bn in England alone) and alcohol harm (£27.4bn in England alone) suggest that firm action by the UK government, such as the indoor smoking ban in 2007 and the sugar tax in 2018, could reap dividends. For example, being overweight is linked to 13 types of cancer and drinking alcohol to seven. However, the 10-year plan is unlikely to contain any radical new moves on public health. Instead it will give the NHS the heavy lifting to do. It will be told to move beyond the sickness service it has been since it was created almost 77 years ago and urgently reinvent itself as one that is prevention-focused, that measures success by patients kept out of hospital, not treated in them. That will require more screening, more vaccinations, more health checks, more self-care and more conversations with patients about leading healthier lives. It will also require initiatives like those in Lancashire to be adopted everywhere and for a revolution in the NHS's thinking, culture and modus operandi. The service's future, and the nation's health, mean this time it has to happen.
