[ RadSafe ] Indoor Radon

[Glennon, Patrick]

Listers,
No one has yet addressed my initial posting.  Instead the discussion has morphed into a debate on the proper value of the attached fraction of radon progeny.  May I suggest that we are missing the forest for the trees.  I think we would benefit more by looking at the larger picture.  That picture is that even using the EPA's numbers the proper response to indoor radon is ---"Big Deal, So What."  Radon may indeed be the second leading contributor to lung cancer after cigarettes but it is a way distant second; at least one order of magnitude and maybe more.  I grew up in northern NJ and know that the Passaic Falls in Paterson NJ are the second highest falls east of the Mississippi after Niagara.  Look them up using an internet search engine and you'll see that they are a good analogy for the radon/cigarette comparison.

Using information from EPA 402-R-03-003 "EPA Assessment of Risks from Radon in Homes" published in 2003 I find the following: (1) EPA estimates that reducing indoor radon concentrations to 4 pCi/l would avert approximately one third of all radon induced lung cancers [pg. 3], (2) 93% of all lung cancer deaths in 1995 were in Ever Smokers [ES] [also pg. 3], (3) depending on the model chosen somewhere between 2100 and 2900 of the cancer deaths in 1995 among Never Smokers [NS] were attributable to radon  [Table 5 on pg. 16], and (4) 157,400 total lung cancer deaths occurred in 1995 [again Table 5 on pg. 16].

It doesn't take many calculations to arrive at the following conclusions: (1) achieving EPA's concentration goal would save fewer than 1000 NS deaths per year.  Remember that this is in a pool of 157,400 lung cancer deaths per year!  The overall lung cancer death rate would drop by 0.6% --Wow, now that's significant!  (2) If all the resources spent on reducing indoor radon risks were instead diverted into persuading people not to smoke in the first place, you would only have to persuade about 1000 persons per year to become never smokers to get the same lung cancer death reduction; any more and you're ahead.  This is out of a population of over 250,000,000.  Should be do-able don't you think?

By the way, I have only addressed never smokers because I think it is patently absurd to focus on the (distant) second leading risk without aggressively addressing the first.

Patrick Glennon
Philadelphia




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