LAST WEEK’S SOLUTION, No 1219:

ACROSS: 1 Pizza 4 Hackles 9 Gin palace 10 Cargo 11 Saloon 12 Billy-can 13 Sisals 15 Alehouse 18 Beer hall 19 Unless 21 Oak trees 23 Bygone 26 Email 27 Espionage 28 Yachter 29 Known

DOWN: 1 Pegasus 2 Zonal 3 Ayatollah 4 Hoax 5 Credible 6 Local 7 Structure 8 Lounge 14 Speakeasy 16 Honky-tonk 17 Fleetest 18 Boozer 20 Shebeen 22 Relic 24 Otago 25 Spur

DOCTORS fear the falling numbers of women attending cervical check appointments is due to the crisis of public confidence in the HSE scheme. It’s true that the fallout from Vicky Phelan’s High Court action, in which she settled her case against a US laboratory over an incorrect smear test, has not helped matters. Nor the parade of women, dead and alive, who followed in her footsteps after they were failed by the CervicalCheck screening process.

But that’s not the defining reason for women’s abandoning it in droves. The real problem is the invasive nature of smear tests which, although they can save lives, are, for many women so traumatic that they have to be sedated beforehand. It’s no wonder that the CervicalCheck debacle helped translate their dread into avoidance. In this time of remarkable scientific know-how, of multiple vaccines produced in the blink of an eye against an alien virus, it’s remarkable that a more user-friendly method of early cervical cancer detection is not on the table.

For all the talk in recent years of alternatives like self-tests or using urine samples to test for types of HPV (human papilloma virus) that are high risk for cervical cancer and which, if negative, might make smear testing redundant, women are still guilt-tripped into subjecting themselves to smear tests every few years.

If Vicky Phelan’s experience has caused women to doubt their faith, then perhaps a continued drop-off in the numbers coming forward for smear tests, will force the wondrous world of modern science to come up with a more palatable alternative.