Why so few get screened for lung cancer, the deadliest cancer in the U.S.
A combination of strict eligibility criteria and special requirements for insurance coverage mean that less than 6% of Americans at high risk gets screened for lung cancer.
It was Thanksgiving 2021, and Michael Young was at Target buying a turkey baster. “I’m in the parking lot, and my chest starts to feel like somebody’s sitting on me,” Young recounted. But he didn’t think too much of it and waited until February to tell the doctor about these on-and-off chest pains. “8:30 a.m. Monday morning, the cardiologist calls me and says, ‘We have a problem; we need to talk,’” Young said. The heart scans had found lung cancer.
A 63-year-old Black man from Massachusetts, Young never smoked, but he had almost all the other risk factors. With his father in the United States military, he grew up on Air Force bases where they would use the now-banned insecticide DDT against mosquitoes. “As an 8-year-old, a whole bunch of us would chase the DDT truck down the road as it’s going on spraying the neighborhood,” Young said.
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