[ RadSafe ] Re: Radon and Lung Cancer

[Wesley]

Ruth,

Geographic epidemiology has always fascinated me.  Perhaps my fascination is
because it is so visual and, at the superficial level, easy to understand.

It can certainly stimulate the imagination and generate conjectures about
cause. However, sifting out actual causation can be very difficult due to
the many possibilities. For example: migration (i.e., people moving,
especially at retirement age), race, regional customs, religious customs,
sunshine (the competing issues of vitamin D and skin cancer), regional diet,
trace minerals in soil (and hence food crops), air pollution, medical care,
genome differences, altitude (and oxygen tension), radon, external gamma
dose, cosmic ray dose, childhood vaccination, fraction of population going
into the military, highway safety (design and maintenance of roads, speed
limit), average highway distance traveled per year, dental care, etc. 

Best regards,
Wes
Wesley R. Van Pelt, PhD, CIH, CHP
Wesley R. Van Pelt Associates, Inc.
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Ruth Sponsler [mailto:jk5554 at yahoo.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2007 9:24 PM
To: Otto Raabe; Wesley; 'RADSAFE'
Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] Re: Radon and Lung Cancer

Hello all -

A note:

Another region of interest for comparisons is the
rural Midwest (the entire belt from the Dakotas to
Illinois and south to Texas), which is mostly flat and
has fewer socioeconomic/racial disparities than the
South.

An interesting comparison can be made using this map
of life expectancy (females)

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/organizations/bdu/usbodi/map2.gif

and maps of radon

http://eetd.lbl.gov/IEP/high-radon/frac4.htm

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~radon/
http://eetd.lbl.gov/IEP/high-radon/USgm.htm

http://www.epa.gov/iaq/radon/zonemap.html  

Note especially Iowa, southern Minnesota, and the
eastern Dakotas.  Contrast with Oklahoma and Texas.

~Ruth



--- Otto Raabe <ograabe at ucdavis.edu> wrote:

> At 08:36 AM 2/13/2007, Wesley wrote:
> >I would like to remind you of my paper in Health
> Physics (October 2003):
> >EPIDEMIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS AMONG LUNG CANCER,
> RADON EXPOSURE AND ELEVATION
> >ABOVE SEA LEVEL - A REASSESSMENT OF COHEN'S COUNTY
> LEVEL RADON STUDY
> ****************************
> Dear Wes,
> 
> I believe that the cellular oxygen tension is about
> the same no matter what 
> altitude you reside. If you grow up at high altitude
> you will develop 
> bigger more efficient lungs, If you move to a higher
> altitude you will have 
> an increase in red-blood cell concentration. In any
> case, at the cellular 
> level there will be about the same biologically
> balanced oxygen tension. No 
> radiation effects are expected.
> 
> There is a general correlation between higher radon
> and altitude.  That is 
> somewhat of a coincidence.  There is also an inverse
> correlation between 
> latitude and oxygen concentration. A mathematical
> regression will treat 
> decreased oxygen and increased radon as somewhat
> mathematically correlated 
> even though they are not related, but decreased
> oxygen is not necessarily a 
> causative factor in this relationship. It is just a
> partial surrogate for 
> increased radon.
> 
> When Prof. Cohen evaluated just the former
> Confederate (southern) States 
> where there are few high altitude Counties, he got
> the same inverse 
> relationship as for the whole nation. Therefore, I
> concluded altitude is 
> not a directly important factor in the inverse radon
> -lung cancer relationship.
> 
> Otto
> 
> 
> **********************************************
> Prof. Otto G. Raabe, Ph.D., CHP
> Center for Health & the Environment
> University of California
> One Shields Avenue
> Davis, CA 95616
> E-Mail: ograabe at ucdavis.edu
> Phone: (530) 752-7754   FAX: (530) 758-6140
> ***********************************************  
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