Lung cancer demands attention and funding
Corporate America is on the breast-cancer bandwagon. But if they truly cared about women's health, they'd focus on the real killer. Breast cancer is politically correct.
Meanwhile, the invisible killer has nearly everyone fooled. Women -- and men -- are dropping like flies from lung cancer. For every breast-cancer death there are four lung-cancer deaths. For those who smugly think whoever gets lung cancer deserves it, you are dead wrong. Of new lung-cancer diagnoses, up to 20 percent never smoked. More than 50 percent are former smokers. Lung cancer in those who never smoked is the number three cancer killer.
Breast-feeding women reduce their chances of developing breast cancer. Do women who did not breast-feed deserve breast cancer? Do we point fingers at colon-cancer victims because they did not consume enough fiber? Do we condemn to death those with diabetes, heart disease or AIDS for having not taken proper precautions to prevent these diseases?
Nobody deserves lung cancer. It's time to stop treating lung-cancer patients as second-class citizens. It's time to direct funds to stop this stealth killer. It's time for North Carolina to use tobacco settlement money for lung-cancer screening.
Dusty Donaldson
High Point
Comments (1)
To report abuse of the comment feature on this site, please use the feedback form at the bottom of any page.
I would like to see both diseases eliminated. Smokers, however, even by your percentages: (50%--former smokers
30%--implied as 20% are non smokers)
yields a composite score of 80% percent as smokers. I know that I am lumping to groups but that is what you have given us in this article. So smoking is significantly co-related to cancer. People who get breast cancer don't seem to have any correlation to a specific life style.
This may be pushing things a little but if the 80% who are or who have smoked did not smoke, imagine how the rates of lung cancer might plummet. (When you use the word "former smoker", I made the assumption that that person didn't just smoke a few cigarettes).
Posted on November 26, 2007 3:40 PM