November: Lung Cancer Awareness Month
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month. What are you doing to protect your lungs? Many people say they don’t smoke and presume they are safe. However, they work with or live with smokers. Perhaps they go to public places where smokers are. They are exposed to secondhand smoke, a combination of smoke given off by the burning end of a tobacco product and the smoke exhaled by the smoker.
We are exposed to more than 4,000 chemicals identified in secondhand smoke; 250 are harmful, and 50 of them cause cancer.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. National Toxicology Program, the U.S. Surgeon General, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (see American Cancer Society Web site at www.cancer.org), secondhand smoke is a human carcinogen (cancer-causing agent). It causes lung cancer and heart disease in non-smoking adults. In children, it increases the risks of sudden infant death syndrome, lung infections such as pneumonia and bronchitis in children younger than eighteen months, and increases the number and severity of asthma attacks in children.
Some people think if they separate smokers from nonsmokers, ventilate buildings, and clean the air, those measures will help. However, no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke exists. To protect our lungs and those of our children, we need to lobby and vote for laws to make all public buildings totally smoke-free. We need to seek places where we can be in a smoke-free environment.
Copyright © by Yvonne Ortega November 17, 2009