Jean Kittson, a Mosman comedienne, will be heading an awareness drive in the Ovarian Cancer Month, which aims to raise recognition and much-needed funds for the disease which hits an Australian woman every 11 hours.

“Women’s bits are still a bit of a mystery and in between periods and pap smears and Brazilians and visible panty lines, most of us get sick of talking about them and put them on the backburner. But we’ve really got to talk about it”, she said.

“I had been to my gynecologist in the fall. I'd had a complete checkup. I thought (the) Pap smear would check everything. I didn't even know that it didn't cover ovarian cancer.”

While cervical cancer can be detected with a Pap smear and breast cancer can be detected with mammography, but there is no routine screening tool for ovarian cancer, which causes more deaths than any other cancer in the female reproductive system.

“It's just very hard to find”, said Dr. Daniel Metzinger, a gynecologic oncologist at the University of Louisville's James Graham Brown Cancer Center.

“And once you get the cancer, it progresses rapidly, so we need something that can really detect it early”, he added.

According to the American Cancer Society report the figures between 2001 and 2005, show a decline. But it still takes thousands of lives.