Lung Cancer and Radon

[Fritz Seiler <faseiler@nmia.com>]

Comment # 2 by Fritz Seiler and Joe Alvarez on the
"De Minimis, Radon and Societal Risk" Thread.

The third comment which was announced in our last post, concerns
the risk of exposures to radon and its progeny.  Here, three main
points need to be made:

One, as long as the data base consists of nearly all of the U.S.
population, as in Bernie Cohen's data set, any individual in a sub-
group of N persons, exposed to a particular radon daughter
concentration, shares the same risk m / N, where m is the number
of expected lung cancer fatalities estimated as an ‘a priori' risk in
that sub-population.  Again the average number of days of lost
life expectancy can be calculated and is equivalent to the estimated
number of m fatalities.  A division by the number N cannot change
that equivalence.  Evaluating the ‘a posteriori' risk is like 'Monday
Morning Quarterbacking', it shows quite clearly what the best
estimate should have been, by inspecting what the actual loss of
life and life expectancy was.  But then, we talked about the 'a
priori' and 'a posteriori' problem in the first post.  Here, we have
to make another important point: Although the interpretation of
Bernie's data has been savagely attacked, nobody has seriously
questioned the validity of the experimental data, whatever they
are allowed to mean.

Two, with regard to these much maligned data, we have made
a rather interesting discovery (Seiler, F.A., and J.L. Alvarez,
"Is the ‘Ecological Fallacy' A Fallacy?"; to be submitted shortly).
It will influence risk calculations and thus the cost-risk-benefit
calculations discussed on this thread in a rather decisive way.