November 2025 Set for National Lung Cancer Awareness Month: Highlighting Disparities and Low Screening Rates

This resolution officially supports designating November 2025 as “National Lung Cancer Awareness Month,” encouraging the President to issue an annual proclamation for its observance. Essentially, this is a formal acknowledgment from Congress that lung cancer is a massive public health issue that needs a serious spotlight. The bill’s main purpose is to promote public awareness, education, and research focused on prevention, early detection, and treatment across the board.

The Sobering Facts Behind the Awareness Push

If you’re a busy person, here’s the one number to remember: lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the U.S., killing more people than breast, prostate, and colorectal cancers combined. The resolution spells out the sheer scale of the problem, projecting that in 2025 alone, over 226,000 people will be diagnosed, and nearly 125,000 will die from the disease. While we often focus on smoking, the bill points out that 10 to 20 percent of diagnoses are in people who have never smoked, a proportion that is actually growing. This means that even if you’ve lived a perfectly healthy life, this is still a health issue you need to know about.

Who’s Getting Left Behind in Screening?

One of the most critical parts of this resolution is how it highlights massive gaps in screening—and this is where the real-world impact hits home. The bill notes that as of 2021, around 14.5 million Americans were recommended for lung cancer screening, but only 16 percent of those high-risk individuals actually get screened. That’s a huge missed opportunity for early detection, which drastically improves survival rates. For veterans, the numbers are even worse: less than 3 percent of the estimated 1 to 2 million eligible veterans get screened.

This isn't just about not knowing; the resolution points out structural hurdles like limited facility availability and transportation barriers preventing people from accessing the low-dose CT scans used for screening. The bill also flags significant disparities, noting that Black men have the highest incidence and mortality rates, and nonwhite individuals are 13 to 18 percent less likely to be diagnosed at an early stage. By formally recognizing these challenges, the resolution aims to direct future educational and research efforts toward the communities that need it most, helping to close these deadly gaps.

Stigma, Science, and the Path Forward

The resolution also addresses the often-ignored issue of stigma, noting that the association with smoking creates barriers to early diagnosis, treatment, and research funding. This stigma negatively impacts patients’ quality of life, making it harder for them to seek help or for researchers to get support. On the positive side, the bill highlights ongoing research breakthroughs in biomarker identification and targeted therapies, which are improving survival. The goal of this awareness month is to encourage the public, healthcare workers, and policymakers to focus on mitigating risk factors, increasing screening uptake, and ensuring that advanced diagnostics and treatments are accessible to everyone, regardless of their background or where they live.