Bonnie Addario, a lung cancer survivor who raised millions of dollars and campaigned for more resources to prevent and treat the disease, and to hold out hope for other patients, died on Aug. 25 at her home in San Carlos, Calif., in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was 77.
“The complexities from her surgeries, treatments and other maladies weakened her body,” her husband, Tony Addario, said in an email. “Her death was not directly from lung cancer, but lung cancer was certainly an initial contributor.”
Ms. Addario and her family founded GO2 for Lung Cancer, one of the largest such organizations devoted to patient advocacy and support, after she had worked her way up from a secretarial job at a petroleum products retailer to the company’s presidency.
She was 56 when she first experienced shooting pains in her chest. Initially misdiagnosed, she later underwent a full body scan and was found to have Stage 3B lung cancer, which had spread to the lymph nodes in her chest.
She was treated with radiation and chemotherapy beginning in late 2003. The following spring, surgeons removed a tumor and part of a lung.
Ms. Addario had smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for 25 years, but she said lung cancer had also been prevalent in her family’s medical history; an aunt, uncle and grandfather all had the disease. She often noted that though lung cancer has been stigmatized in a blame-the-victim kind of way, it also afflicts many nonsmokers, including young adults.
Lung cancer is only one of the diseases associated with smoking, Ms. Addario told The Washington Post in 2016, but it “got stuck as the one everyone knows about, so there are people who feel, ‘Well, you smoked, and you brought this upon yourself, and therefore you deserve what you get.’ That is why funding for lung cancer is so low.”
“My thought,” she added, “is: I’m a mom, I’m a wife, a sister, a daughter. Do I deserve to die because I smoked? I don’t think so.”
In 2006, she and her family founded the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation (which later merged with the Lung Cancer Alliance to form GO2 for Lung Cancer) to promote public awareness of the disease, early detection and treatment. To support research, she and her husband that same year established the Addario Lung Cancer Medical Institute, based in San Carlos.
“Following her own diagnosis, she turned adversity into action — channeling her experience into a movement that put patients first,” her foundation said in a statement. The organization said that she had raised tens of millions of dollars from individuals, philanthropies and corporations, uniting “survivors, caregivers, health care providers, researchers, industry leaders and policymakers to confront this disease.”
The American Cancer Society has projected that about 226,650 new cases of lung cancer will be diagnosed in 2025 (110,680 in men and 115,970 in women), and that about 124,730 patients (64,190 in men and 60,540 in women) will die of the disease this year.
In 2024, Ms. Addario’s foundation distributed about $1 million in grants and had assets of about $20 million.
Some of the contributions it has received came from drug companies. KFF Health News, a nonprofit organization, reported in 2019 that the foundation was among many patient advocacy groups that sided with pharmaceutical companies in opposing a Trump administration proposal that would have limited drugs available to Medicare patients.
“The funding A.L.C.F. received from pharmaceutical companies,” Mr. Addario said in an email, “was not connected to any policy positions, but rather to advance our broader mission of improving outcomes for all people living with lung cancer.”
Bonnie Jeanne Attabit was born on Nov. 13, 1947, in San Francisco, to Leon Attabit, a supervisor for Pacific Bell, and Marguerite ()’Brien) Attabit, who managed the home.
She graduated from high school in 1965. By the 1980s, she told The Post, “I was a single mom with three kids, and I wasn’t receiving any child support or any of those good things. I had a job during the day with Kelly Girl, a temp agency, and then at night I cleaned banks with my kids.”
After being hired as a secretary to the board chairman of the Olympian Oil Company and Commercial Fueling Network in the Bay Area, she rose through the ranks to become the company’s president. She held that post for seven years. She also became the first woman to head the California Oil Industry Marketing Association.
“I’m one of those people — if you put a barrier in front of me —- I will find a way around it,” she told The Post.
Lucky to survive long enough to become a potent advocate for cancer patients, Ms. Addario said she was inspired to start the foundation after Dana Reeve, the wife of the actor Christopher Reeve, died of lung cancer at 44 in 2006, less than two years after the death of her husband, who had been paralyzed from the neck down in a horse riding accident.
Ms. Addario was the author of “The Living Room: A Lung Cancer Community of Courage” (2019, with Jon Land). The book takes its name from a monthly live-streamed virtual support group for lung cancer survivors, an effort sponsored by her foundation.
In addition to her husband, whom she married in 1983 and who is the chairman and chief executive of the Addario medical institute, Ms. Addario is survived by her daughters, Danielle Hicks and Andrea Parks; a son, Jared Beltramo, from an earlier marriage, which ended in divorce; nine grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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