[ RadSafe ] Radon: POWERFULLY associated with LESS lung cancer byB.Cohen

[franz.schoenhofer at chello.at]

Howard, 

i address your mailing address to reach the so-called "International Radiation Protection Mailing List"., but of course it involves your message to a minor ext3ent.

What is most impressive is you comment that politics should follow science. Comparing to reality I think you are dreaming a nice dream. .  

RADSAFERS, I am really tired of following all your sophisticated calculations of tenths of hundreths of percents of whaterver Sieverts. Compüare it to the actual radiation doses in your country, .

Best regards.

Franz


---- Howard <howard.long at comcast.net> schrieb:
> Chris, your "APPARENT inverse relationship between lung cancer mortality and average radon concentrations" (emphasis added), disqualifies you as a serious critic of this most powerful epidemiologic study.
> 
> I and many others have tried to torture out of Prof. Cohen (at meetings of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and here, on line) a spurious "garbage in" explanation. Analyses assuming a hundred potential social skews results in the same: POWERFUL association in all stable USA
> county populations, with and without smoking and 100 other potential skewers.
> 
> I just took out of my wallet a cc of Cohen's graphs with bars of 95% significance used as points!
> The "corrected for smoking" graph seems identical to the total graph, bpth showing 
> mortality just 2/3 at the 4 Bq/meter-cubed level touted as dangerous, as at 1/4 that exposure.
> This is evidence for hormesis, not "apparent", but as definite as epidemiology can give.
> LNT seems disproven by this (all Cohen will claim).
> 
> Politics should follow science, not vice versa (I like this use of the word "vice").
> 
> Howard Long MD MPH Family Doctor and Epidemiologist
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Jun 16, 2011, at 6:22 AM, "Chris Hofmeyr" <chris.hofmeyr at webmail.co.za> wrote:
> 
> > Dear Proff Raabe and Cohen, Radsafers,
> > 
> > Prof Cohen's US-wide county-based radon studies caused quite a stir since 1995,
> > mainly because of the apparent inverse relationship between lung cancer
> > mortality and average radon concentrations. However, Cohen's main conclusion
> > was that the result was at variance with the linear-no threshold (LNT) model.
> > My own analysis of the data sets for two periods kindly provided by Prof Cohen
> > showed adamantly that there was in fact NO indication of a dependence on
> > average radon concentration up to the maximum recorded. Such a finding would
> > concur with Raabe's model of protracted low-intensity exposure (HPJ, July
> > 2011).  Human lifespan is too short to show discernible lung cancer induction
> > from domestic radon concentrations in the USA. 
> > 
> > However, uncertainty remains with respect to the question of the apparent
> > inverse relationship in Cohen's data between lung cancer mortality rates and
> > average county radon concentration, which some people wanted to interpret as
> > proof of hormesis. Significantly, in a 2006 paper on cancer risk from low level
> > radiation, Cohen did not cite his own radon data in support of hormesis or even
> > rejection of LNT.  In Cohen's data average county radon concentration was to
> > some degree anti-correlated with smoking prevalence, thus explaining the
> > inverse relationship in the uncorrected (for smoking) data. The smoking
> > correction to the data was consequently important for the 'real' dependence
> > curve. Unfortunately it was not possible to analyse the correctness of the
> > smoking correction, nor associated uncertainties, but I became convinced that
> > Cohen was not able to correct the data adequately for smoking, possibly
> > resulting in the persistent apparent inverse dependence of the 'corrected'
> > data.
> > 
> > A stark illustration of the overwhelming importance of extraneous factors -
> > most probably smoking - is to compare the female lung cancer data sets 1970-79
> > with 1979-94. There was a mortality increase of almost a factor of 2, whereas
> > male lung cancer declined very slightly between the two data sets (during
> > 1970-79 it was about a factor of 5 higher than the female figure).
> > Regards.
> > Chris Hofmeyr
> > chris.hofmeyr at webmail.co.za
> > 
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--
Franz Schoenhofer, PhD, MinRat
Habicherg. 31/7
A-1160 Vienna
Austria
mobile: ++43 699 1706 1227