Don’t think that just because you live a healthy lifestyle you are immune to lung cancer.

Don’t suppose that simply since you reside a wholesome life-style you’re resistant to lung most cancers.

We’re two ladies with one too many issues in widespread. We each lived our grownup lives in Salt Lake Metropolis, are nurses, faculty professors, had been by no means uncovered to radon or occupational hazards and are non-smokers. We shared the mistaken perception that our wholesome existence would shield us from severe illnesses.

The one-too-many issues we’ve in widespread is that we had been each found to have superior non-small cell lung most cancers attributable to a typical genetic mutation activated by Salt Lake valley air pollution.

Although we had been/are faculty of nursing professors and skim medical literature, neither one among us realized respiration polluted air put us at greater threat for lung most cancers, in line with the CDC. We blithely assumed non-smokers didn’t get lung most cancers. Too late we discovered many research have proven long-term air air pollution publicity is poisonous sufficient to trigger lung most cancers in individuals like us.

We discovered the onerous method that, typically, lung most cancers can stay early stage and asymptomatic for a few years and stable tumors normally take many years to develop. However in 2013 lung most cancers in an 8-year-old lady in China, attributable to air pollution, set off alarm bells all through the world.

In 2019, 300,000 lung most cancers deaths globally had been linked to publicity to out of doors air air pollution. In keeping with the CDC, as much as 20% of lung cancers happen in non-smokers.

We discovered our ignorance isn’t unusual. We had been each initially labored up by our household physicians for different attainable causes for our fatigue, persistent cough and shortness of breath with train, delaying our diagnoses and remedy. That is typical of lung most cancers, the number one cancer killer in the U.S.

As a result of non-smokers aren’t screened for lung most cancers, and the early-stage signs are delicate and self-reported, it isn’t usually diagnosed till Stage III or IV, when it’s rather more troublesome to deal with, and survival is low — precisely our state of affairs. Too late we additionally discovered that air air pollution additionally increases the size and grade of lung cancers, and even impacts our capability to outlive by lowering the effectiveness of our remedy and by making us extra vulnerable to recurrence.

Fortuitously for us, there may be an oral chemotherapy medicine we take that may lengthen our lives by a couple of years, however this isn’t the way in which we anticipated to reside them, with debilitating signs, intensive medicine-generated negative effects and really costly medical prices.

The World Well being Group has declared air air pollution a leading cause of most cancers, and there may be no safe level of air air pollution, similar to there is no such thing as a protected variety of cigarettes an individual can smoke. However air air pollution additionally causes a listing of different illnesses nearly as long as those from smoking — nearly each sort of lung illness, coronary heart and blood vessel illnesses, impaired fetal improvement, chromosomal injury, being pregnant issues, mind and neurologic issues like strokes and Alzheimer’s, sort II diabetes, accelerated growing old and untimely demise.

We share our tales within the hope you and your well being care suppliers received’t wait till it’s too late to be taught extra concerning the unfavorable penalties of continual publicity to air air pollution. Lung most cancers is an actual chance, and it shouldn’t be thought-about solely after every part else has been dominated out. It’s only one among many poor well being outcomes that must be thought-about when signs first seem in non-smoking sufferers.

We additionally difficulty a name to arms for all who reside on this stunning state to work with our elected officers to alter public coverage and to combat towards proposals that may enhance air air pollution, such because the inland port and water rights inflicting Nice Salt Lake to change into a dry, poisonous mud producing wasteland. We should advocate for more healthy air to guard ourselves and those that come after us, and an finish to public coverage that advantages the few on the expense of the various.

Behind each summary statistic on the well being hazards of air air pollution is a human face — somebody’s partner, mom, father, grandparent, brother, sister or new child child — somebody who was denied a protracted, wholesome life merely due to the air they breathed. We hope listening to our tales and seeing our faces can result in fewer tales like ours.

Angela Deneris, Ph.D., CNM, FACNM, is a professor, medical emeritus, on the College of Utah Faculty of Nursing, was a working towards nurse-midwife for 40 years and school within the Nurse-Midwifery and Girls’s Well being Nurse Practitioner Program for 30 years, retired and resides in Sugar Home.

Cordelia Schaffer, RN, MSN, CHPN, has been a nurse educator at Westminster Faculty since 2008. She has labored in well being care since 1985, specializing in hospice, and resides close to Rose Park.