Former televangelist Tammy Faye Messner, formerly Tammy Faye Bakker, posted Tuesday on her website (service is currently unavailable) a message about her health.

Messner, 65, reports that doctors have stopped treating her cancer. She was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1996 and announced in 2004 that the disease had spread to her lungs.

“I am down weight-wise to 65 pounds, and look like a scarecrow,” the Charlotte resident shared on her site. “I need God’s miracle to swallow. I look at young people and wish with all my heart for just one day of ‘feeling great.’”

Messner, whose daughter and daughter’s friends are taking care of her while her husband, Roe Messner, is off building churches, went on to write, “the doctors have stopped trying to treat the cancer and so now it’s up to God and my faith. And that’s enough!”

Divorced from Jim Bakker in 1992 while he was serving a sentence for financial fraud, Messner is half of the famous Bakker pair that founded a Christian retreat in Fort Mill, S.C., and built a multimillion-dollar evangelism empire. She also starred on the VH1 reality show Surreal Life and is the author of several books, among them her recent I Will Survive…and You Will Too!

Debra Brewer, a women is to sue the Ministry of Defence for £75,000, claiming that hugging her dockyard worker father caused her cancer.

Debra Brewer has been diagnosed with the asbestos-related condition mesothelioma, a form of lung cancer. The 47-year-old’s father, Phillip Northmore, worked as a lagger at Devonport Dockyard in Plymouth for five years in the 1960s when she was a child.

An inquest into his death in August 2006 found he had died from small cell lung cancer, which was linked to asbestos.

Mrs Brewer said she remembered he would always arrive home from work covered in dust but as a young child she never imagined that as she played with her dad, the dust he was coated in could be life-threatening.

John Messham, industrial disease specialist at Debra’s solicitor Bond Pearce, said: “Mesothelioma causes a great deal of suffering to its victims and their families. Asbestos diseases are potentially fatal and so it vital that such cases are dealt with efficiently but also with sympathy and compassion.

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Rep. Charles Norwood, a Georgia dentist who rode to office on a Republican tidal wave in 1994, died Tuesday (Feb. 13, 2007) after battling cancer. Rep. Norwood, 65, died at his home in Augusta, Ga. House members paused for a moment of silence in his honor.

Rep. Norwood suffered from a chronic lung disease and later developed metastatic cancer that spread from his lung to his liver.

The vacancy created by Norwood’s death will be filled by a special election, to be held no fewer than 30 days after the vacancy is created, according to state law.

When women and men have lung cancer of the same stage and are given the same treatment, the women are more likely to survive, according to the findings published in the journal of Chest.

Lung cancer “is the number one cause of cancer deaths in both men and women worldwide,” Dr. Robert James Cerfolio and colleagues from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, write.

Several studies using data from national cancer registries have shown that men and women differ in lung cancer survival. The present study was different in that it determined survival in men and women who were diagnosed with lung cancer, treated based on the same algorithm, and then followed for up to 7 years.

The study included 1,085 patients, 671 men and 414 women. There were no significant differences between the sexes in terms of race, other diseases, smoking history, lung function and the treatment received.

At 5 years, 60 percent of women were still alive compared with 50 percent of men. Moreover, women had consistently higher survival rates for all stages of disease. As to why survival was better for women, it may relate to them being more responsive to chemotherapy, Cerforlio and colleagues report.

Allen Carr, who was considered as world’s best anti-smoking guru died of lung cancer yesterday. He was 72.

Carr helped convince millions of people to give up smoking. He claimed to have helped 10 million people to give up smoking, including leading figures such as the Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson, the actor Sir Anthony Hopkins and the footballer Gianluca Vialli.

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International cancer researchers warned today that burning solid fuels and frying food at high temperatures in poorly ventilated rooms raise the risk of lung cancer.

Scientists at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) said indoor emissions from burning biomass fuel — such as wood, charcoal and dung — as well as emissions from high-temperature frying, could lead to cancer.

The World Health Organization has identified burning solid fuels, such as coal, wood, or dung, as one of the top ten causes of disease in the developing world.  Women and children who are at home most of the day have the highest risk.

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Gerald Boyd was the first black managing editor of The New York Times. He died earlier this week of lung cancer. Boyd was diagnosed with lung cancer in February and was keeping unwell for most of the year. However he kept his condition private from his friends and colleagues.

Boyd is credited for his ability to mobilize a reporting team and surround a story to capture every important fact. He was tough and demanding and had a huge heart. And while he left the paper under sad circumstances, he also left as a well-respected newsman.

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The lung cancer drug Gefitinib has been taken off shelves in the United States due to ineffectiveness. But it remains effective in some Taiwanese lung cancer patients, according to a study published in the journal Lung Cancer.

The study, conducted by the National Health Research Institutes, involved 65 non-small-cell lung cancer patients and found that more than 50 percent of participants responded to the drug therapy — while only 10 percent respond in Western studies.

A genetic mutation of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) was found in most patients who responded to Gefitinib. The mutation is rare in Western countries but much more common in East Asian countries where the mutation increases the likelihood of developing adenocarcinoma.

About 6,800 Taiwanese patients develop non-small-cell lung cancer every year. Of these, 65 percent of cases are adenocarcinoma. Of this group, 57 percent will have the genetic mutation. And roughly half will respond to Gefitinib.

According to the European researchers, simple radiation treatment combined to chemotherapy after lung cancer surgery can double the survival time for patients with cancer that hasn’t yet spread through the body.

The patients had stage 3 lung cancer, which has spread to lymph nodes outside the lung but not throughout the body. Such patients often have the visible tumors removed and then get chemotherapy, too, to delay any further spread.

Dr. Jean-Yves Douillard, professor and head of medical oncology at Centre Rene Gouducheau, Nantes, France said, “In this study 47 patients with lung cancer survived for at least five years”. Dr. Douillard and colleagues in Italy and Spain tested 840 lung cancer patients, of whom 232 agreed to extra radiation treatment. The treatment doubled survival for some, but not all of the patients, Douillard told a meeting of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology in Philadelphia.

He added “This is the first time that a clinical trial has examined the effectiveness of radiation after surgery for lung cancer”

“The results show that radiation treatment should be considered for resected (surgically treated) non-small cell lung cancer with involved mediastinal lymph nodes in addition to chemotherapy.”

Douillard said that, just because the triple combination of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation works in some cancer patients, for other patients that kind of treatment may be too much therapy.

Lung cancer is the world’s biggest cancer killer, taking the lives of 95 percent of its victims. It kills 1.3 million people globally every year — more than 160,000 in the United States alone.

Because lung cancer rarely causes symptoms until it has spread, most people are not diagnosed until it is too late, and surgery, chemotherapy and radiation can only extend their lives for a few months or years.

Smoking is the biggest risk factor for lung cancer — and 90 percent of all lung cancer cases are related to smoking. But family history is a risk factor too and can nearly double the risk of developing the deadly disease.

A study published in the October issue of Chest found by studying a population of Japanese adults that people with a first-degree relative — mother, father, or sibling — who had lung cancer had a 95 percent higher risk of contracting the disease. Those who smoked had the greatest risk, but those who did not smoke were still at risk. And women were more at risk than men. The type of lung cancer most associated with family history is squamous cell carcinoma.

The results of this study do not yet translate into recommended guidelines for screening. But those with a family history of lung cancer should make their physicians aware of their history. And perhaps one day people with family history will be identified as high-risk for lung cancer and will be included in further studies. In the meantime, these individuals should avoid all contact with all inhaled and second-hand smoke and should protect their children from all forms of tobacco smoke.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 180,000 cases of lung cancer are diagnosed each year. About 170,000 die from the disease every year. It’s the second leading cause of death for men and the third leading cause of death for women.