Re: Lung cancer mortality from radon versus mortality from other <plus> Radon...

[RuthWeiner@AOL.COM]

I would like to inject a real-life "risk-based" decision into this decision.  This is a true story:


Friends of ours -- a family that includes small children -- just purchased a house.  The house has aluminum wiring, painted asbestos "popcorn" ceilings, and no particular radon mitigation.  They just spent quite a bit on asbestos removal, and can't immediately afford both replacement of the wiring and radon barriers.  They asked me (and this is a bit of oversimplification) which I thought they should do.  My answer was unhesitating, and I told them not only is the aluminum wiring a very real fire hazard, while the radon hazard is putative at best, but had they had a fire, they might have wished to have left the asbestos in place and just added some coats of paint.


Now I would like to ask the folks who base their contentions on the Iowa study: if you  only could afford to mitigate one risk, which would you mitigate: radon, asbestos in the ceiling, aluminum wiring in the walls?  This is a real question and I look forward to the answers.


Ruth


Ruth Weiner, Ph. D.

ruthweiner@aol.com