MONDAY, April 6, 2009 (Health.com) — Jade Goody, the 27-year-old British reality-TV star, died in March of cervical cancer, a disease that rarely gets to a life-threatening stage—particularly in young people in developed countries. How could it happen?

Experts say her case makes it clear that Pap smears alone don’t save lives, and that some women end up with cancer because of inadequate care after a Pap smear.

From a disadvantaged background, Goody first had an abnormal Pap smear at age 16. She did have precancerous cells removed from her cervix, but when the hospital urged her to come back for follow-up care due to another abnormal Pap, she ignored it. “I was too scared,” she told the U.K. magazine Heat.

In contrast, Peri Smilow was age 33 and living in Boston when she had a “suspicious” Pap smear at the doctor’s office, but nobody followed up with her to recommend additional testing. Although she saw her primary care doctor every year, she didn’t return for another Pap smear for five years. By then, she was experiencing some unusually heavy bleeding. Her gynecologist diagnosed a ‘fibroid,’ and Smilow underwent a dilation and curettage (D and C ) to remove it. Lab tests showed that the tissue collected during surgery was cancerous.

“With proper follow-up of an abnormal screening test women really shouldn’t die from cervical cancer,” says Kathleen Brookfield, MD, PhD, of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. But they do.

Every year, 10,000 U.S. women are diagnosed with cervical cancer, and 3,600 die from the disease, according to Debbie Saslow, PhD, director of breast and gynecologic cancer at the American Cancer Society in Atlanta. Most—but not all—of these women either were never screened or had not had a Pap test for several years. However, appropriate follow-up is important, too, and it’s far from universally available in the United States.

Next page: Cigarette smoking can increase your risk of cervical cancer