Cervical cancer can be stopped, and Isabel Scarinci intends to deliver the knockout blow in Alabama

• Nov 11, 2025
• Tihany

A few days later, in her office in Birmingham, Scarinci is still thinking about the woman with needle marks on her arm. Most cervical cancer is a “disease of poverty,” she says. It’s preventable if people have access to vaccination and to reliable medical care. That’s part of the reason Alabama, a poor, rural state with a tattered social safety net, has been hit so hard. For Scarinci, though, Operation Wipe Out began not in Chambers County but across the globe in Sri Lanka, where she became involved in a similar project sponsored by the Rotary Club of Birmingham.

In the past 75 years, the medical understanding of cervical cancer and its prognosis have changed seismically. “Pre-World War II, more women in this country died from cervical [and uterine] cancer than from breast cancer,” says Warner Huh, a gynecological oncologist who leads UAB’s OB-GYN department. The 1940s saw the widespread adoption of the Pap smear, a test that collects cells from the cervix to detect potentially cancerous ones. But it wasn’t until around the turn of the 21st century that physicians came to a deeper understanding of the relationship between HPV and cervical cancer — and then, with the HPV vaccine, the means to sever that link. “People in the 2000s started making the connection,” Huh says. “If we screened well, with a better test, and vaccinated, there’s very little reason why any woman should develop cervical cancer.”

In 2018, the World Health Organization launched a global initiative to eradicate cervical cancer. That same year, before Scarinci had joined Rotary, she and a colleague, oncologist Edward E. Partridge, who belonged to the Rotary Club of Birmingham, began talking with his fellow club members about teaming up with counterparts in Sri Lanka on their own project. Sri Lanka is a small island and its people are relatively well-educated, the two reasoned. “We said, This is an opportunity,” Scarinci recalls. “This is a country that can eliminate cervical cancer.” She and Partridge suggested that the country’s Ministry of Health boost childhood vaccination and revise its screening guidelines, using not just Pap smears but also tests for HPV infection.

But they didn’t communicate this directly. “I think a lot of governments will resent the United States’ influence,” Scarinci says. Instead, she emphasizes a holistic approach to public health. Doctors and governments alone can’t heal society; they need buy-in from the people who make up that society, and from the institutions that can foment social bonds, like the local Rotary club. Scarinci could offer “evidence-based strategies”; it would be up to the Sri Lankans to take that information to their government.