The medical director of the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene says women will likely die of cervical cancer if Gov. Scott Walker's budget proposal eliminating $266,400 for cervical cancer screening prevails.

"I see at least 1 - 2 high-grade lesions every day during cytologic evaluations," Dr. Daniel Kurtycz says in prepared remarks to be given Wednesday to the Joint Finance Committee, which will consider Walker's budget request. "Without follow-up, there is no doubt that some of these lesions will become invasive. Because cervical cancer takes at least two years to run its course, sometime after 2015, we will have women dying of cervical cancer as a predictable consequence of the funding reduction for testing in this budget."

Kurtycz, a member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, notes that the screening program was begun in the 1950s when "we literally had wards of women dying of invasive cervical cancer. We learned it was a preventable disease with intervention. The whole cost of our cervical cancer screening program will probably be less than the care of one hospitalized patient with advanced cervical cancer."