DANA REEVE and SECOND HAND SMOKE

Dana Reeve died Monday, six months after she learned her cough was caused by the worst of all cancer killers, lung cancer. It was an unimaginable and seemingly unfair event, occurring just two years after she lost her paralyzed husband, actor Christopher Reeve. Dana Reeve was 44.

Dana Reeve coughed for a year before she knew why. She never once thought of lung cancer. She had never smoked. The cancer threat never entered her mind, so she tragically did not take the cough too seriously, she said in one of her last public interviews. Older men with voices turned gravelly by decades of heavy smoking get lung cancer, most of us assume. Certainly not young women who have always shunned cigarettes.

What the lung association and other experts are telling people about the risk to non-smokers are their best guesses — that it may be caused by yet unproven toxic exposures, such as asbestos, radon, arsenic, air pollution, and certainly secondhand smoke. Studies now blame at least 3,000 lung cancer deaths every year on exposure to secondhand smoke.

Dana Reeve was a former cabaret singer, who spent years in smoky venues, her friends have pointed out. That is their best, and so far only, guess about how this happened to her. "But lung cancer happens to people with no history at all of secondhand smoke. They don't work in smoky places, they don't live with a smoker," said Wie, at the cancer center. "So there has to be
something else at work here. Genetics, something in a person's genetic makeup that predisposes them to lung cancer, may play a role." -- AZSTARNET