THE shameful failings,

revealed again this week in the CervicalCheck smear test review carried out by the UK-based Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), is still more evidence that women’s health doesn’t get the priority it deserves.

Over 1,000 women had their smear tests re-examined, and a staggering 308 of these registered results that were ‘discordant’ with the original findings.

That means the original results were wrong. And, as a consequence, 12 women have died – because a cancer diagnosis was not made earlier, when something could have been done about it.

The profundity of that – 12 women dead – is simply impossible to capture in words.

Those women were taken from their own lives and from the lives of their partners and children and those who loved and of the pain. Some women have taken their own lives.

Proportionately, this horrible condition affects more people than diabetes.

And, this is the point. Endometriosis research is literally in the halfpenny place as compared to the work being done on diabetes.

The United States government has invested at least €2bn in diabetes research in the last 20 years, €800m in 2008 alone, with the EU pumping in over €320m also that year. Globally, hundreds of billions of euro are spent every year on diabetes medicines and patient care.

But, there’s a famine when it comes to research funds for endometriosis.

This is clearly because – except in the most extremely rare cases – endometriosis only affects women.

And women’s concerns are over there – at the back of the queue. needed them. It’s a cluster-bomb of inadequacies, a human disaster that can’t ever be forgiven.

Tragically, the abuse of women’s health is not unique to Ireland. It’s everywhere.

In Britain the BBC has conducted a huge survey on endometriosis – that littleknown but enormously debilitating, painful and life-changing condition that affects one in every 10 women.

And, if so many women in the UK are tormented by endometriosis, then the same is true of women in Ireland.

Symptoms range from painful, heavy periods to intolerable, torturous, piercing agony – described by one woman, who took part in the BBC survey, as like sitting on broken glass.

So excruciating is their suffering that some women choose radical surgery such as hysterectomies to rid themselves