Mike Miron already had quit smoking and didn’t have any symptoms when a scan revealed something suspicious in his lungs.A biopsy confirmed it was cancer, but the tumor was tiny, caught early though a lung screening program at Saint Agnes Hospital in Baltimore.

“That program saved my life,” Miron said of the International Early Lung Cancer Action Program.

“I would be dead right now. I literally would be in a casket.”

Instead Miron, 63, is hard at work as the head of the Annapolis Office of Economic Development. Miron had 12 percent of his right lung removed and a few months of chemotherapy treatments.

Now, he wants to spread the word about the early screening program, and was surprised that many nurses he interacted with while having surgery had never heard of it.

“There needs to be more education at the grassroots level,” he said.