On Sat, 16 Jul 2005 03:04:24 GMT, in alt.home.repair DANGER:
RADON "Edwin Pawlowski" wrote:

They state:
What Are the Effects of Radon?


Miners exposed to high radon levels have been found to run an
increased risk of lung cancer. Radon in the home also presents a risk, but
generally at a lower level.

These studies were done in the 1950s and 1960s. Most (if not all) of
the miners where also heavy smokers. So many were smokers, that they
couldn't get a significant sample if they excluded smokers, so they
had to keep them in the sample. They compared the lung cancer rate of
the miners/smokers to the lung cancer rate of smokers-only. (They did
not consider the amount of smoking. I've never seen stats, but my
observations of miners as a group is that they are far heavier smokers
than the populaton at large.) The difference was very small, and many
researchers judged it to be statistically insignificant and the
studies non-conclusive.

That was judged to be an unacceptable and imprudent conclusion by
Health Physics community at the time, so a second committee was chosen
to review the results and *they* concluded that the differences while
indeed small, "might" be significant. That became the official party
line in the Health Physics community whose job and livelihood was
managing radiation risk. It just wouldn't do to find some natural
background radiation levels to be "safe" and without risk.

That has been the party line ever since but was pretty much ignored
and forgotten since the conclusions were so contrary human experience,
observation and common sense. Then in the 1990s when our culture was
running out of hysteria-of-the-month scares (global warming, nuclear
winter, no more water, etc.) this old bogeyman was resurrected.

It's perfect: you can't see it, can't feel it, can't smell it, can't
sense it, and can't find a single person that was effected by it. You
can only say that of 100,000 people exposed to it, *according to our
models and predictions* x-people surely must have been effected. What
the HP community does not say is that the predictive models were
designed *with the assumption* that there was an effect.

Well, a close relative of mine owns a radon testing service, so I hope
that in the future they require radon testing & mitigation as a
requirement of all home sales. If you can't get people to use common
sense, you might as well accommodate and profit from their fears :-)

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