Clinical trials of a new drug hold promise for many Chinese women at risk of cervical cancer in the rural areas. Liu Baocheng

The young mother looked nervous, sweat appearing on her forehead, as a doctor injected her with a vaccine to protect her from cervical cancer.

Seconds later she looked at her right arm and smiled.

"Now, I feel safe and relieved," said Yao Junxia, 28, whose mother had cervical cancer and had to have a hysterectomy. "At first, I was little worried that I might miss this chance and not be vaccinated."

Yao is in an observation room at the Maternal and Child Healthcare Hospital in Xiangyuan county, Shanxi province. In the consulting room next door, however, Zhang Na, 25, sits on a plastic stool, struggling to hold back her tears after being told she is ineligible for the vaccine for the time being.

"It's because I'm breast feeding my daughter. She's only 15 months old," Zhang says. "I've being waiting for this vaccine since last December when the village doctor was recruiting volunteers for the clinical trial."

Zhang casts an envious glance at her eligible neighbors from Nanlixin. The village has a population of 2,600, a thousand of them women. It also has a relatively high incidence of cervical cancer.

Village doctor Huang Suying, 60, has seen a dozen women lose their lives to the disease in the past 30 years. Last year two more were diagnosed with cervical cancer.

It is easy to prevent and to cure if diagnosed early enough, but ineffective screening systems mean the disease has become quite widespread in parts of the coal-mining province of Shanxi on the arid Loess Plateau. The incidence and mortality rates of cervical cancer are almost 10 times higher there than the national average, says Dr Qiao Youlin, a prominent epidemiologist with the Cancer Institute of Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.

Latest figures released by the Cancer Institute suggest that in Xiangyuan county, 36 out of every 100,000 women die from cervical cancer, 10 times the national average, against the world's average rate of 8 out of every 100,000.