Cervical Health Care Updates From Brazil

GWHT Student Spotlight

In 2019, Luiza Perez moved to São Paulo, Brazil after graduating from Duke University, to spend her Hart Fellowship Year working with the Albert Einstein Foundation, an organization that runs a network of hospitals and a medical school.

Below, Luiza shares important updates and reflections from her time abroad.

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Luiza talking about the Callascope in a public clinic in São Paulo

After graduation, I wanted to return to my home country of Brazil and apply lessons I had learned at Duke. With the support of the Hart Fellows program, I was able to develop this project under Dr. Ramanujam’s mentorship. I am involved in building and sustaining a strong relationship with our partners in Brazil, designing our studies, collecting and analyzing data, and writing manuscripts.

I have also had the incredible opportunity to mentor undergraduate students as they learn about Brazil’s health care system, refine their research skills and strengthen their passion for reproductive health rights and access.

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Power of Social Media In Brazil, we were baffled by the power of social media when our Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices survey on reproductive health and cervical cancer prevention reached over 10K participants.

Our preliminary results also surprised us, as we learned that most women prefer speculum-free gynecological exams and would be willing to try self-sampling and self-imaging methods in cervical cancer screening.

The call to participants that was used on our partner’s social media and website, allowing us to reach over 10K participants

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Excitement about the Callascope Health care professionals are excited about using the Callascope as a triage device to help determine whether patients should seek conventional colposcopy and biopsy, which are often only available at tertiary centers and are hard to schedule in an over-burdened health system.

We are exploring health care providers’ perceptions about the barriers to gynecological care their patients face and their acceptability of novel technologies such as HPV self-sampling and self-imaging with the Callascope.

Improvised public gynecological oncology clinic established in the pandemic with tablets used to collect data from patients and their family members.

In addition, we are planning the first clinical study with new Calla prototype in which the device will be compared to the standard of care.

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