One in six people in the UK who are dying of lung cancer are non-smokers, with the causes being put down to growing levels of indoor and outdoor pollution.
Experts in lung cancer have revealed that a growing number of non-smokers across Britain are being diagnosed with the disease.
Many of these patients are being diagnosed at an incurable stage of the disease.
Rising car fumes, secondhand smoke, and both indoor and outdoor air pollution are being blamed.
Health authorities are now urging people to stop using wood-burning stoves because the of the carcinogenic properties of the soot they generate.
According to research recently published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, about 6,000 non-smoking Britons a year now die of lung cancer, which is about one-sixth of the 36,000 deaths from lung cancer each year.
That is more than those who die of ovarian or cervical cancer or leukaemia.
"If considered as a separate entity, lung cancer in never-smokers is the eighth most common cause of cancer-related death in the UK and the seventh most prevalent cancer in the world," the researchers state.
