Health experts urged Ireland to introduce a national screening program for cervical cancer after a report published on Tuesday revealed deaths from the disease are higher than in Britain and Northern Ireland.

Research reported in the British Journal of Cancer showed that deaths from cervical cancer have dropped since Britain introduced a screening program in 1988.

But the number of women dying from cervical cancer in Ireland, which has no nationwide program, has been increasing by an average 1.5 percent per year since 1978.

“These results show that the number of deaths from cervical cancer is increasing only in Ireland,” Dr Anna Gavin, the director of the Northern Ireland Cancer Registry and a co-author of the report, said in a statement.

“It’s pretty clear that the introduction of the national screening program stopped cases of cervical cancer and deaths increasing in the UK,” she added.

Gavin and Dr Harry Comber, director of the National Cancer Registry in Ireland, compared death rates from cervical cancer between 1971 and 2000 in England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland.

Eighty-three percent of women aged 20-59 are screened for the illness on a three or five-yearly basis in England and Wales.

In Ireland, women in one health board area, covering about 9 percent of the population, are offered regular screening over a five-year period. Opportunistic screening is also available.

Cervical cancer is the second most common cancer of women worldwide with more than 470,000 new cases each year, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in France.

About 230,000 women die from the illness each year, more than 80 percent of deaths are in the developing world. Screening detects early changes and abnormal cells in the cervix. If the disease is diagnosed and treated the survival rates are good.

“The results mirror what happened in the Nordic countries in the 1960s and 1970s, when cervical cancer death rates decreased sharply in countries that introduced screening. Norway’s deaths from cervical cancer continued to increase until they introduced a screening program,” said Comber.