BY TIM BONFIELD
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Tristate employers don't have to wait for Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana to decide how to spend their shares of a $206 billion settlement with the tobacco industry.
They can act now to fight the area's No. 1 cancer killer by encouraging employees to stop smoking, said organizers of a community cancer forum held Wednesday.
"We don't have to discover any new drugs or invent any new technologies to achieve reductions in cancer incidence and death," said Dr. John Winkelmann, director of hematology - oncology at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. "For the biggest cancer killers, we already have proven screening and prevention methods."
Cincinnati-area cancer incidence and death rates have exceeded state and national averages for years. Less well-understood is the dramatic impact of one type of cancer - lung cancer.
According to updated 1996 statistics, cancer kills 4,400 Tristate residents a year. More than 1,100 of those deaths come from lung cancer alone. That's nearly three times higher than any other type of cancer.
Warnings that smoking can cause lung cancer have been given for years. Yet Tristate smoking rates still exceed national averages. This is where employers can help, said several speakers at the cancer forum.
The forum was sponsored by the Central Ohio Valley Cancer Alliance (CorvCA). Among the ideas discussed:
- More employers could bar smoking at the workplace. Many do not.
- More employers could pay for part or all the costs of tobacco addiction treatment. Most do not.
- More employers could do business with health plans that make cancer prevention a priority. A recent survey of 172 area companies revealed that many do not know whether employees use their cancer screening benefits.
"If you walk away from this meeting with one idea you can implement in your organization, then we think it was worth it," said George Gross, managed health care director of Pharmacia & Upjohn Inc., a company that helped CorvCA analyze the local cancer data.
Many employers already pay for mammograms for breast cancer and PSA blood tests for prostate cancer, even though retirement-age people are most likely to benefit from the early detection.
Yet smoking cessation programs - which most employers do not pay for - can have long-term and short-term benefits, said Dr. Ralph Buncher, an epidemiologist at the University of Cincinnati.
"If you can get an employee to quit smoking at age 25, there's a whole array of diseases that employee will not get," Dr. Buncher said.
Smoking is linked to heart disease, chronic lung disease, emphysema and other types of cancer. It can aggravate asthma and bronchitis, complicate pregnancies and decrease sexual function in men.
