Australian women are not getting pap tests as often as they should, and dying from cervical cancers that likely could have been caught and stopped.

As many as a thousand women per year are diagnosed with cervical cancer in Australia - 224 of them died in 2013.

"It's because those cancers were found too late," said the chief executive of the Australian Cervical Cancer Foundation (ACCF), Joe Tooma.  "That's why we really need to find those women who aren't getting regular pap tests so we can save their lives," he explained.  Sexually active women aged 18-70 should get pap tests every two years.  But only 43 percent of women in Australia do so, according to the ACCF.

But cervical cancer screening detects low-grade abnormalities in about 100,000 women every year and high-grade abnormalities in about 30,000 women.

"We know how to prevent probably 98 or 99 percent of cervical cancer by vaccinating people, boys and girls, against the human papillomavirus (HPV)," Mr. Tooma said.  But even if girls in their early teens go through with all three doses of the cervical cancer vaccine, they'll still need regular cancer screening because the vaccine protects against only two of the three known viruses that cause cervical cancer.