Mammography rate in Brazil below recommended levels

Fewer than 25% of Brazilian women aged between 50 and 60 years old had mammograms in 2013, a number almost three times smaller than the World Health Organization (WHO)'s recommendation of 70% annual coverage among women over 40 years old. That coverage rate is Brazil's Ministry of Health's recommendation for women aged 50 and older.

The finding is part of a survey covering public healthcare services – called the Unified Health System (SUS) – conducted by the Brazilian Society for Breast Health. It revealed that while a reasonable inventory of mammography equipment can be found at the public healthcare network as a whole, a vast majority of screening units are located in the South and Southeast, Brazil's two richest regions. Moreover, they are generally located in capital cities, leaving non-metropolitan areas uncovered.

According to Ruffo de Freitas Junior, chairman of the Breast Health Society, rather than a lack of awareness of the importance of having regular mammograms, the biggest issue is that the screening facilities are often out of reach.

“Take Goiás state for example – in many areas, women have to travel over 300 kilometers to the nearest public mammography service, which means it could take them a whole day to have a plain mammogram,” he said, noting that women tend to just avoid the hassle when there are no symptoms. “All in all, it would take them as long as a whole day to get screened, plus another one to pick up the results, and a third one for the follow-up appointment. It's three days off work, or when they might have to find someone else to look after their children and clean up the house,” Ruffo pointed out.

Coupled with the poor regional availability of public, free-of-charge screening services in the country, even in locations where the screening equipment is available, it is often underused. “A large number of devices available at public health services simply turn out to be idle. Here at the Federal University of Goiás for example, there is one mammography unit available for our SUS service which is only used in the afternoon,” the doctor said. According to him, the key is to improve management, which would result in a larger staff of qualified technicians, thus enabling the screening service to operate all day and provide double the number of screenings.

Translated by Mayra Borges