Gayle Zinda

Wow! What a response we have gotten over our recent appearance on NBC channel 15 last night. For those of you who do not live in Wisconsin the clip will be up on our media page soon. First we would like to say thanks to Evrod Cassimy and his team for taking time to come out and help raise awareness to the effects of second hand smoke.
Gayle recently attended a city council meeting here in Stoughton, WI to ask that smoking be banned in public places after an experience she had at a local restaurant. The city council voted and and passed it 6-2. This just moves it to the state level and does nothing in the city of Stoughton. Basically they are just going to follow what the state decides instead of changing themselves like Madison has already done. The media happened to be at this meeting and decided to do a story on Gayle and what she is trying to do being that she is a Lung Cancer Survivor. We have had a flood of e-mails of people expressing their opinions. We obviously raised some awareness last night. Although most of the e-mails were in support of our efforts there were a couple against it. I would like to share one comment that stood out to me and let you be the judge as to if this person should be deciding our future safety. “How about you just shut the f*&$% up and let people live their own lives instead of trying to force your opinions on everyone else? You want the ban, No one cares about what the rest of us want. Yes, I smoke and I don’t care. If you don’t like it move to a mountain.” My first thought after reading this was how I don’t care what the rest of us want? Hmmmm I guess this guy does. Again, we are not trying to make smoking illegal. We just want it banned from public places. It is a fact that second hand smoke is harmful! I am going to share some statistics with you that are shocking and hardly known. 10-15%of the new lung cancer cases this year will come from people who never smoked. To put this into perspective that’s about 25,000 people! Lung Cancer will claim more lives this year than breast, prostate, colon, liver, kidney, and melanoma combined. The 5 year survival rate of lung cancer is just 15% up only 2% in the last 30 years. You can make a difference no matter where you live in the country. Start with your city and go to the council meetings to express your opinions, write your state representatives, congressmen and women. They do listen and your opinion does matter! If you would like more statistics or information on Lung Cancer please visit www.lungcanceralliance.org. Thanks again for sharing your opinions with us! Quote of the day:“The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.” – Kahlil Gibran

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 8:32 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.