There is a blight upon our country. It’s called lung cancer.

 

Mr. President and Mr. Speaker, we urge you to lead us out of this valley of death and despair.

 

Lung cancer will kill 160,000 of us in 2012. That’s three times more than any other cancer. Among those hardest hit will be the men and women of our armed forces, past and present.

 

And when it comes to gender equality, lung cancer is an unfortunate area of catch-up, with lung cancer diagnoses among women up six-fold in 30 years. The toll is staggering. More than 70,000 women will die of lung cancer in 2012 – almost 80% more than will die of breast cancer.

 

Then there is this little known and disturbing fact: one in five women with lung cancer never smoked. That’s twice the rate seen among men with the disease. No one knows why.

 

We wish we could be hopeful, but while there have been dramatic improvements in the survival rates for many other cancers, the fact is that lung cancer remains a death sentence. The five-year survival rate for stage IV lung cancer – the most common staging at diagnosis – is just four percent, where it was decades ago.

 

Any way you look at it, lung cancer is a national disaster demanding your attention

 

We are calling on you, Mr. President and Mr. Speaker, to come together – to look beyond partisanship to our common humanity – and to point the way forward in the fight against this dreadful disease.

 

There is so much you can do.

 

On the legislative side, it is time to pass the Lung Cancer Mortality Reduction Act, which seeks to halve the number of lung cancer deaths by 2020.

 

You can devote more federal dollars to lung cancer research. Consider that per death, lung cancer receives just a fraction – less than 10% – of the dollars that go to breast or prostate cancer.

 

You can advocate for public education and for more attention to screening.

 

And you can take a closer look at the incidence of smoking and lung cancer among our active duty and veteran servicemen and women. It’s the least we can do in defense of those who defend us.

 

First and foremost, you can drag this killer out from the shadows and declare lung cancer a national health crisis.

 

On a personal level, there is this: For the sake of the nation and of your families, stand up and take a public pledge not to smoke.

 

Teach us – our children in particular – that smoking is unhealthy. Acknowledge that it is hard to stop but worth the effort. Most importantly, move us past this sorry game of blame-the-victim and help expose the insidious and unspoken notion that because most people who get lung cancer smoked at one time, they somehow “deserve it.”

 

Mr. President, Mr. Speaker you have a rare and powerful opportunity. Over the next five years, more than 1,000,000 Americans will be diagnosed with lung cancer. You can help save many of them. Do something.