Re: Apparent anti-correlations between geographic radiation and cancer are no...

[BERNARD L COHEN <blc+@PITT.EDU>]

On Fri, 10 Jan 2003, Kai Kaletsch wrote:



> From: "BERNARD L COHEN" <blc+@pitt.edu>

> ...

> > The solution to this is my approach of studying lung cancer in

> > U.S. Counties vs radon exposure. For starters, according to LNT about 10%

> > of lung cancers are due to radon, so this is already a 10-fold advantage.

> > More important, my study involves 1600 counties which allows very

> > elaborate treatment of confounding factors. This treatment is reviewed in

> > paper #7 on my web site,   www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc

>

> Have you ever treated terrestrial gamma radiation as a confounding factor in

> your radon vs lung cancer studies? In other words: Is it possible that the

> negative correlation you see between radon and lung cancer has nothing to do

> with radon, but is rather an effect of gamma radiation or something else

> that is related to radon by a physical mechanism?



	--There are no data on gamma radiation for counties or even for

states, so I can't do this directly. But radon is surely more important in

the link to lung cancer than is gamma radiation. Also, I have shown that

the effects I observe are found for each region of the nation, and for

individual states (on average). Also, gamma radiation should be positively

correlated with radon levels, not negatively correlated as would be

necessary to change our conclusions.







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