The state Department of Veterans’ Affairs would receive funding to conduct a lung cancer detection study under a bill receiving general file consideration Feb. 17.

LB987, introduced by Omaha Sen. Bob Krist, would require the department to contract with the University of Nebraska Medical Center Eppley Institute for Research in Cancer and Allied Diseases for a study with a sample of up to 500 veterans to validate diagnostic technology for the early detection of lung cancer. The department would be required to report the results of the study to the Legislature no later than July 1, 2011.

Omaha Senator Bob Krist’s father died of lung cancer in 2004. The cancer was linked to exposure to asbestos, a carcinogen which can cause both lung cancer and mesothelioma, a cancer that may affect the lungs as well as other major organs and tissues. Now, Krist is hoping to translate his loss into a study that could benefit hundreds of Nebraskans at risk for developing lung cancer.

Cancer doesn’t know any boundaries or borders; the disease affects all of us worldwide.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 12 million people are diagnosed with cancer each year. Cancer kills more people than AIDS, malaria, and TB combined, but the good news is that approximately two out of five cancers are potentially preventable.

In recognition of World Cancer Day, which takes place every year on Feb. 4, the WHO is supporting the International Union Against Cancer to promote ways to ease the global burden of cancer.

Omaha Sen. Bob Krist’s father died of lung cancer in 2004, less than two years after it was diagnosed.

The cancer — from asbestos exposure as an electrician and Navy veteran — was diagnosed late, as are many lung cancers, Krist said.

Lung cancer is a death sentence if detected late.

But it can be treated if detected early enough, Krist said. In fact, 92 percent of those with early-stage lung cancer are alive after five years.

Cancer diagnostics company Biomoda, Inc. (OTCBB: BMOD) (www.biomoda.com) today applauded Nebraska State Sen. Bob Krist and his co-sponsors for introducing legislation to screen up to 500 Nebraska veterans for early-stage lung cancer.

“The Nebraska Legislature has taken another step toward saving lives,” said Biomoda President and CEO John Cousins. “Lung cancer is the deadliest cancer killer, primarily because it is too difficult and too expensive to diagnose in its earliest stages when it is most treatable.”

One out of 14 Americans will be diagnosed with lung cancer during their lifetime. Unfortunately only 16 percent will survive, because the majority will be diagnosed too late, when the cancer has already spread beyond the lungs. Lung cancer remains the country’s number one cancer killer. It is expected to take the lives of more than 160,000 Americans this year, more than prostate, breast, melanoma, liver and kidney cancers combined.

Most people do not even know that lung cancer takes more lives than all the other major cancers combined. It will kill more than three times as many men as prostate cancer and nearly twice as many women as breast cancer.

Yet lung cancer receives only a small fraction of research funding.

All patients are stigmatized whether they smoked or not and no one seems to care that over 60% of new patients are former smokers or people who never smoked at all.

An advocacy group on lung health plans to work with health authorities in 12 countries from 2010 to reduce indoor fuel burning, which causes respiratory diseases and lung cancer and kills 2 million people a year.

More than 3 billion people, or half of the world’s population, still use biomass fuels like wood, dung and coal for cooking and heating in poorly ventilated homes and this results in severe indoor air pollution.

Indoor air pollution caused more than 1.6 million deaths worldwide in 2000, according to the World Health Organization, 90 percent of them occurring poor communities in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific.

As cancer ravaged Ralph Kinkead’s lungs, the veterans agency that was supposed to offer him caring support — and dollars for dignity and dinner — gave him the cold shoulder.

He blames the Franklin County Veterans Service Commission for costing him his health, his home and nearly his life.

“They treated me bold and cold,” the Vietnam veteran said. “They acted like, ‘We don’t give a (expletive) about you.’ Between all the screw-ups and ‘You have to go back and wait,’ I didn’t get help.”

Stacy Richey admits she hasn’t been a “political animal,” but a couple of bills in the U.S. House and Senate have changed that.

Richey, nurse coordinator for the Surgical Lung Cancer Program at the University of Kentucky’s Markey Cancer Center, wants all of us to write letters to Sens. Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning, and to our representatives urging them to get behind the Lung Cancer Mortality Reduction Act of 2009.