This letter from Bonnie ran in the O&A Marketing News. 

Today Lung Cancer Alliance (LCA) hailed the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) for calling for a lung cancer screening program and more lung cancer research funding for military personnel and veterans. The resolution, unanimously adopted at the VFW annual convention, also calls upon Congress and the Department of Defense (DOD) to fund lung cancer research through its medical research program.

Today, Lung Cancer Alliance-Pennsylvania State Chairman, Jack Hill, MD, called on Pennsylvania State Senators, and other public health leaders, to support increased funding for lung cancer research and early detection. In a testimony in front of the Select Committee on Tobacco Settlement, Hill presented the facts surrounding Pennsylvania’s and the nation’s leading cancer killer, and urged that lung cancer no longer be ignored or under-funded.

Romidepsin is a new anticancer agent that belongs to a family of drugs called histone deacetylase inhibitors. These drugs can turn on genes in cancer cells that regulate cell growth and induce cell death (apoptosis). Unfortunately, the protein product of one of the genes activated by romidepsin, called p21, also interferes with the drug’s ability to induce apoptosis. Researchers think that combining romidepsin with other anticancer drugs may improve its ability to kill cancer cells.

Angiogenesis inhibition is an increasingly attractive strategy for the treatment of patients with lung cancer. Join us on Tuesday, September 26, at 1 PM EST, for a Web-based, CME live conference as Drs. Joan Schiller and Mark Socinski review antiangiogenesis in advanced NSCLC and describe ongoing research with agents in development.

A campaign is being launched in the UK to raise awareness about the risk that women face from lung cancer. Women Against Lung Cancer has been set up amid concerns of a rise in cases among young women in particular.

Lung cancer kills 13,500 women annually in the UK, and is responsible for 11% of all female cancers.

The sixth annual Lung Cancer Awareness 5K Run/Walk attracted about 450 people to Recreation Park in Binghamton Sunday. The event’s sole purpose, said coordinator Barbara Morrissey, is to raise awareness for the disease.

Although this article is from 2004, it is still relevant. 

“Since about 85 percent of lung cancer is linked to the patient’s own smoking, those with the disease are often dismissed as the guilty parties who knowingly puffed themselves sick.”

Researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center have documented a 25 percent increased risk of developing one of a number of cancers in first-degree relatives of lung cancer patients who have never smoked compared to families of people who neither smoke nor have lung cancer.

In 1984, a nuclear engineer named Stanley Watras set off the radiation alarms at his office at the Limerick Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania. The source of his contamination was not his workplace, but his home, which was built on a vein of uranium. Readings revealed the level of poisonous radon gas in his home was almost 700 times that of the federal standard – a health-risk equivalent to smoking 135 packs of cigarettes a day.