(Radio Iowa) – Public health experts who attended the Iowa Cancer Summit in Ankeny this week say raising the tobacco tax and putting more money towards radon mitigation can help address the state’s high cancer rates. Iowa Cancer Registry director Mary Charlton says the state lawmakers need to raise the tobacco tax by at least one dollar.  “We see lots of counties in Iowa where the lung cancer rates are increasing. That is unheard of in the rest of the country, that lung cancer rates are increasing anywhere. And we have many counties in Iowa where they are increasing,” she says. The 2025 Iowa Cancer Registry estimates lung cancer will cause the most cancer deaths in the state this year Lung cancer is also the third most common type of cancer for new cases in the state. The report estimates there will be more than 25-hundred new cases of lung cancer in the state this year.

Charlton says radon is a mitigating factor for lung cancer. “If you smoke and your house has a high level of radon, you have an exponentially higher risk of getting it. It’s not one thing at a time, and so we cannot, to the detriment of other risk factors that we know cause cancer, only focus on one,” she says. Charlton says the public needs to understand environmental and agricultural exposures are important but so are lifestyle habits like smoking, drinking and using tanning beds.