Thank you.
I am Tom Kosatsky, as introduced. Thank you so much for having me and my colleagues Sarah Henderson and Anne-Marie Nicol.
The National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health is one of six such centres funded by the Public Health Agency to increase the game, to up the game of public health practice across the country. We do it by letting people know about what's new, about what's effective, and by working with public health practitioners across Canada to do that. We're housed at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, where I'm also the medical director for environmental health. Radon is one of my interests.
I'll speak to lung cancer—not to smoking, although, as you've heard, it will come into the conversation—and radon in terms of public health policy for Canada. If you can follow the slides, you'll see that the first one looks at the importance of lung cancer across the country. It's the second leading cause of cancer in men, third in women, but the leading cause of death from cancer in both men and women. I'm not sure everybody knows that. It's far more important as a cause of death than breast cancer, as an example, in women, and far more important than rectal cancer, colon cancer, or prostate cancer in men.
The next slide looks at some of the historic evidence linking smoking, which everyone now knows is linked with lung cancer. Even when I was born, around when those studies were done, this was something that was denied. You remember those ads: your doctor smokes Marlboro.
It was found through studies of doctors that they demonstrated that smokers had 25 times the lifetime risk of lung cancer—