From a girl who came from the West Coast where the ban of smoking cigarettes in work places was enacted in January 1995 and banned in restaurants three years later, it was a shock to move to the D.C. area and find you could still smoke indoors in some establishments directly outside The District.
My doe-eyed, granola crunching, outdoorsy, non-smoking California self was definitely taken aback at the amount of smokers around me. Even some two and a half years later, it still shocks me on my morning commute to find myself walking behind someone to the Red Line (D)Re(a)d Line who has a cigarette in their hand at 7:30 in the morning.
Naturally, with a health communicator’s strategic mind, I began to tally the amount of men and women I witnessed lighting up during my morning jaunts to work between the hours of 7:30 and 9:00 a.m.
My findings? Interestingly enough, the majority of the people I witnessed were women around the ages of 30-55 strutting in pencil skirts and pumps with a lit cigarette balancing in their hand. To be frank, I was shocked when I tallied the numbers. Really, ladies? After all the facts we know about tobacco?
So what does it all mean? (On a macro scale that is…)
After doing some digging I found a correlation to my micro-observations. Nationally the number of women who smoke is continuing to rise, meanwhile the number of male smokers is on the decline. According to Cancer.net, approximately 17 percent of women in the United States smoke. And from 1991 to 2005, the number of new lung cancer diagnoses in women in the United States increased by 0.5 percent per year, while the number of new lung cancer diagnoses in men decreased by 1.8 percent per year. I also found between the years 1930 and 1997 the number of women dying from lung cancer increased by a whopping 600 percent. Scary numbers? Yes.
Even scarier…did you know lung cancer is the number one cancer killer in the U.S.?
In fact 158,683 people in the U.S. died from lung cancer in 2007 alone, including 88,329 men and 70,354 women.
With the month of November being National Lung Cancer Awareness Month, it’s important to bring to light a disease affecting a HUGE group of our peers, colleagues, family members and friends. Although smoking is the number one cause of lung cancer, there are several other risk factors including:
- Secondhand smoke from other people’s cigarettes (ahem…)
- Radon gas in the home
- Things around home or work, including asbestos, ionizing radiation, and other cancer-causing substances
- Medical exposure to radiation to the chest
- Chronic lung disease such as emphysema or chronic bronchitis
- Increased age
Take a moment and get involved this month! You never really know whose life you could be affecting. Check out some of the advocacy links below:
- National Lung Cancer Partnership Facebook
- Lung Cancer Alliance PSA’s
- American Lung Association: Fighting for Air Campaign
Thoughts, stories or questions? Let’s have a conversation and spread the word!