Thanks to a link on Michelle Malkin's blog to a post by Cathy Seipp's daughter Maia, I found this
Lung Cancer Alliance webpage describing an epidemic of lung-cancer among non-smokers, as reported by Heather Wakelee, M.D of the Stanford University Clinical Cancer Center:
"Our paper provides firm data about the number of people who develop lung cancer who are never-smokers. Though we had estimates of these numbers before, we didn't have a comprehensive study that could really put those numbers in perspective. We can now say that lung cancer in never-smokers is as big of an epidemic as cervical cancer in women. Our study lays a foundation upon which further research can build looking at whether rates of lung cancer in never-smokers are increasing, and exploring the case of this disease. Underscoring the magnitude of this problem will hopefully increase awareness of the need for better treatments for all lung cancer patients."
And this item, from the Lung Cancer Alliance press release:
Laurie Fenton, LCA president, praised Dr. Wakelee for her research.
“For years the public health establishment has refused to address lung cancer as a disease, fueling the negative attitude toward lung cancer patients – whether they smoked or not – and using the stigma of smoking to justify the underfunding of research,” said Fenton. “Now we face an epidemic of lung cancer, particularly in nonsmoking women.”
Given the new figures, an estimated 14,200 women who have never smoked will die of lung cancer this year, nearly four times the total number of women – 3,700 – who will die of cervical cancer.
