Is the condition to be detected of public health importance

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The burden of suffering that the condition represents for the society should be large enough to warrant special effort. Priority should be given to conditions having a significant impact on the quality of life and survival of a large proportion of the population. Devastating but rare conditions should receive attention only after common causes of significant suffering or disability have been dealt with.
Are there effective preventive or curative measures to deal with the condition when it is detected at an early stage
Effective intervention may be carried out wholly or primarily within the health sector, may require intersectoral  coordination, or may depend largely on action in other sectors, agriculture . I may require action at the policy or programme level, involve community mobilization, or consist primarily of clinical treatment of individuals.  In some cases, there is no benefit to be derived from intervening before symptoms occur.
Is there a safe, ethical , and efficacious method for detecting the condition at a sufficiently early stage to permit effective intervention
Effective screening for some conditions may require invasive tests with risks that outweigh the potential benefits. The early detection of some problems or the appropriate follow-up of screening results may require methods that violate ethical principles, such as a person s right to autonomy, privacy, and confidentiality. If there is no safe and ethical method of screening and timely intervention, the possibility of using screening should be rejected and alternative approaches should be developed to address the problem . legal and ethical issues are discussed further in chapter.

The screening procedure must be accurate (both sensitive, with relatively few false negatives, and specific , relatively few false positives)and reliable (yielding reproducible results). It should have good positive and negative predictive values in the population to be screened (see glossary)certain screening procedures that have high predictive values in particular groups may groups may have poor predictive values in other . for example, mammography is an excellent tool for screening women over 50 yrars of age for breast cancer, but appears to be a poor screening test in younger women . 

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Is the cost of the screening and timely intervention operation warranted,given all the considerations covered in items 1-6 above, in comparison with alternative uses of the resources

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