Researchers handing out colon cancer test kits at Omaha DMV as part of innovative clinical trial

July 19, 2024, 9:17 AM CDT / Source: TODAY

By Sarah Jacoby

Earlier this year, Juanita Thomas, 63, went to her local Department of Motor Vehicles to register a car.

For Thomas — a retired housekeeper, mom, grandmother and great-grandmother in Omaha, Nebraska — cancer was the last thing on her mind that day. But, while at the DMV, she was approached no fewer than three times by people offering her a free colorectal cancer screening kit.

Finally, she relented.

"I brought it home, and I sat it down and looked at it for a couple of days before I even used it," Thomas tells TODAY.com. It wasn't until her kids brought up "Black Panther" actor Chadwick Boseman, who died at age 43 due to colon cancer, that Thomas was finally convinced to take the test.

The kit, a fecal immunochemical test (FIT) that detects blood in stool, was easier to take than she expected. Using a pre-paid envelope, she mailed it to a lab for analysis. Thomas couldn't see anything wrong with her sample herself, so she was shocked to receive a call later that the lab had actually found blood in her stool.