http://www.cancercompass.com/cancer-news/1,14748,00.htm?c=1004:5:1:2
This article shows the statistics of non-smokers/smokers and lung cancer. Very interesting article for all. I know it's a great debate for everyone, but I hope that someday lung cancer will get the funding it deserves and the stigma will be gone.
Cheryl
Thank you for sharing this article.
One issue the article and most studies fail to address is that the media....movies, magazines, etc.....made smoking cool & sexy for years. Dean Martin used to be on TV smoking....The Marlboro Man was the quintessential American Cowboy a.k.a. stud.
I think the high rates in non-smokers is directly correlative to the secondary smoke to which we were all exposed.
I mean restaurants, bars, offices, trains, planes were smoking dens for years. I taught in a high school. You could NOT breathe in the faculty room due to the smoke. So, whether you as an individual "smoked" or not, you indirectly "smoked" until the gov't belatedly started making laws to ban smoking in the workplace, public places, etc. to protect non-smokers.
I would suspect that now that they have these bans in place, lung cancer in non-smokers will decline in the years ahead. As for poor Dana Reeve, she was a lounge singer for years.....What had more smoke than a bar? My friend, a non smoker, was dx with lung cancer and she was an international flight attendant. Were you ever stuck in the back of a plane for 7 hrs. in the smoking section? One trip was toxic, let alone doing it for a living.
However, the real fact is that lung cancer is killing Americans, smokers and non smokers alike, and the US gov't has to get out of bed with big tobacco and protect the population and research the disease until they find a cure. They should also educate the public. There are things that could and should be done.
There should be a cure by now, period.
BTW, I wrote my Representative, Peter King, and my Senator, Charles Schumer, about the need for LC research. Neither one even answered me. That's our gov't at work......I didn't bother to write my other Celebrity Senator, Hillary Clinton, because years ago when she was first lady, I wrote her about breast cancer and got a terse answer from a white house lackey indicating that Hillary doesn't take a stance on issues. In my view, any first lady that wouldn't take a stand against breast cancer (until it was expedient for her) wasn't worth the price of a second stamp.
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