A sobering reminder from local women
“We are two women with one too many things in common. We both lived our adult lives in Salt Lake City, are nurses, college professors, were never exposed to radon or occupational hazards and are non-smokers. We shared the mistaken belief that our healthy lifestyles would protect us from serious diseases,” began a sobering editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune last week.
Two professors of nursing, non-smokers, both of whom, after living most of their adult lives on the Wasatch Front, have been stricken by advanced lung cancer triggered by our air pollution authored the moving piece.
An unsettling statistic in the editorial demonstrates the seriousness of the air pollution issue. “In 2019, 300,000 lung cancer deaths globally were linked to exposure to outdoor air pollution. According to the CDC, up to 20% of lung cancers occur in non-smokers.”
Simplistically, air pollution’s disease burden is virtually the same as that from cigarette smoke–the association is weaker but still significant. Virtually every type of lung disease is caused or exacerbated by air pollution. There is now a substantial body of research correlating pollution and increased rates of other types of cancer as well–breast, lung, prostate, cervical, brain, and stomach cancer, and childhood leukemia.
They remind us that, “Behind every abstract statistic on the health hazards of air pollution is a human face — someone’s spouse, mother, father, grandparent, brother, sister or newborn baby — someone who was denied a long, healthy life simply because of the air they breathed. We hope hearing our stories and seeing our faces can lead to fewer stories like ours.”
Our failure to address and minimize air pollution on the Wasatch Front has real consequences, and creates real victims. We can do better, and we thank all who are alongside us in the fight for a healthier, brighter future for all Utahns. And thank you to the authors of the editorial, Angela Deneris and Cordelia Schaffer for sharing their stories and shining light on the seriousness of our air pollution problem.