Re: Radon and Lung Cancer: What the studies really say.

["Richard L. Hess" <lists@richardhess.com>]

At 08:53 PM 6/18/2003 +0000, epirad@mchsi.com wrote:



>People who live in high radon counties smoke less etc, etc.

>

>Until the inter county variability of smoking and correlated factors are

>adjusted for, these generalizations are meaningless.



Bill,



I'm trying to follow this...but why would the smoking level vary on a 

per-county basis? If we were talking one or two counties, perhaps that is 

true, but we're talking about 3000+ counties in the U.S.



At that point, wouldn't smoking per county be much more random and the 

variations tend to cancel, other than broad regional preferences? Also, if 

two neighboring counties had similar socio-economic backgrounds and 

cultural tendencies, wouldn't smoking be similar in these as well?



To me, speaking without a deep statistical analysis, smoking is far LESS a 

confounder than RELOCATION, but presumably, even that would tend to average 

out with the breadth of Cohen's study, wouldn't it?



Cheers,



Richard 



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