Exactly. You can have an abnormal pap smear for reasons other than cervical cancer or pre-cancerous lesions that can cause you to have unnecessary biopsies. Not everyone in monogamous relationships have trust issues. Some people in monogamous relationships should have trust issues. If you aren't in a monogamous relationship, get your yearly pap, otherwise, it has been proven safe to go three years between paps.

But there are 15 times as many PC diagnoses in the US. So, doesn't that mean the mortality rate for cervical cancer is higher than that for prostate cancer? It's probably the case for both types of cancer that early detection would cut the mortality rate even more.

Actually, there is new research that suggests that PSA testing for men is doing more harm than good, and the next few years will probably see a lot of debate around which men to test and how often.

Most men by the age of 70 will have a diagnosis of prostate cancer, and in fact in autopsy series, prostate cancer is found in almost all men over that age. It is not the cause of death, however. Prostate cancer comes in two flavors, aggressive and indolent. Pretty much the same thing happens in breast cancer. They are both cancers of aging. The indolent variety is just there and doesn't cause any problems and probably doesn't need to be treated. The problem is that it is difficult to figure out who has aggressive and who has indolent prostates cancer. They are now recommending that men not be screened for prostate cancer because the treatment is so aggressive and unnecessary for the vast majority of the patients diagnosed with prostate cancer who would have otherwise gone on to die of something else, never having suffered from their disease. Cervical cancer screening, however, has been a big success, and the natural history is very different because the disease is a viral based cancer rather than a hormonally fed cancer such as prostate and breast cancer.