The second leading cause of lung cancer is radon. My high schooler came home and said her science teacher said everyone should do a radon test. I scoffed, but humored her by getting a kit from Home Depot and sending it away to a lab. The results came back very high. So I purchased an electronic radon monitor and it showed almost the exact same results. Well, crap. I installed a radon mitigation system and now the numbers are almost nil.
The difficult thing for me is that while I believe radon can cause lung cancer, I think products are often sold based on fear. “Second leading cause” doesn’t really mean anything in isolation, does it?
What slice of my mortality pie was radon before and after spending $5000? Could I spend $5000 to cut a bigger slice out of it in another way, like eating better or hiring a grizzly bear to make me exercise more often?
I think action is better than decision paralysis, but I wish I could make much more informed decisions.
For 93% of people the only cost is the $15 test kit to verify "yep, don't need to even think about it".
For the other 7% that then need to really do a cost-benefit the data is out there but you do need to go through your specific circumstances to get a meaningful number. The risk levels vary vastly (orders of magnitudes) between both the radon level and your life choices/situation, so it's relatively meaningless to share individual cost-benefit analyses.
Radon gas is a pretty big thing in construction where I live since our underground is mainly boulder clay (which apparently has or leaks or whatever a lot of radon gas). Anyway, In Denmark a little over 5000 get lung cancer every year, and 300 of thouse are from radon gas. Acording to our Kræftens Bekæmpelse (anti-cancer NGO) there may be an additional 25% risk of radon causing lung cancer if you smoke.
Since around 2000, it's been part of building regulations that you gotta build air-gapped foundations in family homes. Those who can measure radon gas are adviced to buy things to fight it, and you can reduce it to basically 0% for little money.
I never really considered it from an advertisement perspective as it's adviced by our government and non-profit NGO's. So there is that, if that helps you.
Scroll down to "Radon Risk If You Have Never Smoked". Looks pretty worthwhile to take it from
"very high" to "almost nil". If "very high" was in the range of the 2nd highest level listed here, that's 2% chance. That's for lifetime exposure but there's also multiple people living in the house.
If you DO smoke, the numbers look VERY good for spending some cash to get rid of radon. (Of course you should also stop smoking.)
$5000? I got a bunch of quotes and none came anywhere near that high and I live in a home that made it difficult to install the system (finished basement, large footprint, three stories tall, concrete outer walls (ICF), etc. I think the highest was $3,000 and the lowest $1,600. I ended up installing it myself for about $500 in materials.
Radon fan drawing from two basement surfaces (concrete slab crawlspace addition and original stone foundation with cement floor): $1,200.00 usd in 2020 with warrantied fan and included confirmation test kit. US mid Atlantic. The prior homeowner thought radon was a scam too. It doesn’t make sense as a scam for a one-time capital and labor purchase.
> What slice of my mortality pie was radon before and after spending $5000?
You'll never know. The same way people in the exclusion zone will never know if their thyroid cancer was always destined to be or if it really was related to the Chernobyl meltdown.
But spending (closer to $1000) to mitigate some risk from a known threat vector does seem thrifty.
I might not be in as tight with the grizzlies, but $5k a year for a personal bear trainer seems a bit low. For a regular brown bear sure, but the grizzlies are expensive
> What slice of my mortality pie was radon before and after spending $5000? Could I spend $5000 to cut a bigger slice out of it in another way, like eating better or hiring a grizzly bear to make me exercise more often?
I wish more people thought like this. Every time I go to the GP I want to get a printout of my mortality pie based on everything they know about me.
I was actually thinking of getting one too. Is there a particular Grizzly-as-a-service offering that you recommend? I'm also considering signing up for Ostrich-as-a-service, and am really struggling with this decision.
My approach is to think carefully about exactly what I want to know, word the question that way, then throw it to the AI and pray. I think this is better than ignoring it or spending too much time on it.
Question: Where does radon related mortality rank versus other mortality factors in the United States?
<AI "reasons" a bit>
...
Summary: Radon in perspective
Category / Cause Approx. Deaths per Year (U.S.) Rank / Context
Toxic agents (inc. radon, pollutants) ~55,000 ~2.3% of all deaths (includes radon part)
So AI says it's a bit less than 1% of preventable deaths (or something) annually. Probably puts it in the top 150 causes or so. What you want to do with that hypothesis, or whether you want to spend time sanity checking it, is up to you. Hitting the gym to avoid heart disease is like 35 times more important. A radon home testing kit to eliminate uncertainty about this particular <1% risk is a one time cheap thing though.
I’d argue that the leading cause is actually genetics. I come from a long line of people who smoked like chimneys from their teens until their 90s, with no cancers. My mother has spent her life in harsh sun with no sunscreen, and looks like an old handbag, but has entirely clear skin - but her partner, who wears strong sunblock, hats, and all the rest, has had skin cancer twice. So have two of his kids.
Meanwhile, my father’s second wife’s family have pretty much all had or succumbed to lung cancer. None of them smoke, and unless they all coincidentally chose radon-riddled homes in different corners of the U.S., there’s no correlative environmental cause - which leaves genetics.
Is it genetics or probability distribution? If it is genetics, shouldn't the native american be the most immune to smoking? (genuinely asking if there is such a data)
> Although there are over 50 identifiable hereditary forms of cancer, less than 0.3% of the population are carriers of a cancer-related genetic mutation and these make up less than 3–10% of all cancer cases.[
Took me 5 seconds of research. But keep arguing. Opinions are more important than facts.
"The second leading cause of lung cancer is radon"
Perhaps. I smoked for 30 years and I lived on and off in Devon for at least 15 years.
There is a bloody great pluton underneath Dartmoor in Devon and Bodmin in Cornwall and so on. Hence lots of lovely granite and radon and stuff.
This is the SW of England (UK). Radon emanates out of the earth and pools in cellars and the like and is a major health hazard. Ideally you know about the hazard and dissipate it. A simple fan will do the job.
I'm not sure it is the second leading cause of lung cancer. There are plenty of other pollutants to worry about.
I think Radon exposure is a serious matter, but its concentration in the USA either is probably overrated OR indeed you have a local geological problem. In Europe we even have the tradition of Radon Therapy for certain pathologies in Spa. Of course, one should do these therapies under medical consultation.
> How radon works: Cellular repair in the body is stimulated, the number of free radicals is reduced.
Yikes! Not only are free radicals increased, because you're being bombarded with ionizing radiation, but any cellular repair stimulated is because of the cellular damage done!*
I have to assume "the number of free radicals is reduced" is intentionally written awkwardly and in a passive voice, to avoid adding "...after the "radon therapy" stops.
Absolutely bunk science with no real evidence supporting. It’s like saying autism is created from vaccines.
A lot of the US has radon exposure. I don’t how people come out saying things like you do but at the end of the day it’s exposure to radiation. I have seen it all, people will say it only impacts children or the elderly. Or that it’s an overblown conspiracy. Radon is radioactive, I am sure there are discussions on safe exposure levels but mitigation is so inexpensive and normalized why risk it.
I have a brick house and a basement, and I have no radon mitigation system, and I live in an area where radon is generally a concern (southeast Michigan.)
Over the last couple years I've had some AirThings sensors collecting data. Last month:
- The one-day average radon concentration detected by the basement sensor crossed over 3 pCi/L once... for a very brief period. Around 80% of the time, the one-day average radon concentration detected by the basement sensor was below 2 pCi/L.
- The one-day average radon concentration detected by the main floor sensor never reached 3 pCi/L and was rarely above 2 pCi/L.
In fact, since January, the main floor sensor has still never reached 3 pCi/L even once, or really gotten all that close. The basement sensor, on the other hand, has reached 4 pCi/L three times this year, with a peak at 5.1 pCi/L for a brief period in May.
I hardly ever check this data, but it is nice to have it. I guess it would probably be wise to double check some other way to make sure that the AirThings sensors are outputting good information, but I have little reason to doubt it.
As long as I'm interpreting the data right, though, it suggests that despite having some of the worst case scenarios for my house, actually it's fine. So I guess it really does depend mostly on the land you're built on. (That, and, you should probably just check instead of guessing.)
So what is the necessary levels of exposure to have some kind of long term implications? With hand wavy claims to drive fear that certainly will make a pump in radon kits + drive more radon mitigation systems.
I've always been under the impression that there was radon in basements since it settles down there ... maybe the correlation is people who spend long periods of time in the basement with radon exposure (thats a guess fwiw).
My daughter wanted to live in the basement area, so I had it tested for radon even though I guess radon is less common where I live. It came back negative, so I feel okay about it...man, the things you need to remember to think about in life.
It was Jimmy Carter days and the OPEC Oil crisis. Prior to 1973... electricity and heating oil was cheap, there were many single pane windows that didn't seal completely. So the default condition was houses as originally built, cooler temps in Winter and more natural ventilation in houses with corresponding higher energy costs.
In 1973 fears that heating in Winter would get more expensive, saw an increase in home renovation. IR viewers were employed for the first time and IR images showed windows and attic vents as glowing with heat (as they had all along) and it looked like money escaping. Rubber seals on doors and windows. Double pane windows.
This trapped the radon in basements (and for some rising out of the basement onto the first floor) to be breathed by humans and gain higher concentrations for the first time in US history. Homes were hermetically sealed.
Since smokers bore the penance of sin... the rise of the '2nd leading cause' went unrecognized for years.
Radon is measurable, my CO2 detector also mesures radon. There is none in my well-insulated house.
Now in a basement in Brittany things would be different, but for most houses in most places, radon is negligible.
There also isn't a notable difference in cancers between radon-rich granitic places like Brittany and the rest of France. I feel like at least in France, the potential dangers of radon are well known.
It always struck me as odd that radon in basements seems to be a big thing in North America, but is relatively un(der)reported of elsewhere. Is this just a matter of the US being too cautious? Is there perhaps more radon in basements over there? Or does the rest of the world not give a shit for some reason?
It depends on which type of ground you build on. The Nordics are mostly granite and have a relatively big problem with radon gas, or at least enough that people in general care about it. Continental Europe is dominated by limestome which hasn't got the same problem.
I expect that Americans spend more time in their basements than people in most other countries (other than Canada). The kind of furnished basement that teenagers hang out in from That 70's Show isn't common elsewhere.
I don't know about "rest of the world", but I think in western Europe it is simply just another thing that gets inspected uneventfully, like making sure there is a fuse box.
When I finally got to buy a home, we chose one built in the fourties because we really didn't like the feel of newer homes. Love it, but yeah, plenty drafty..erm I mean, fresh air. I do have to worry about lead paint though, which I found out with a cabinet remake.
This depends very much on the soil composition. Some areas might have almost no radon, whereas others do. Here's a high-level view of radon probably by county (WA state), but you can find local maps that show it at the neighborhood level. We looked at the maps when buying our house, had it tested, and radon levels were high so we installed a mitigation system in our garage (which is the bottom level of our house).
This is also making things worse for houses with water damage and mold issues for the same reasons. The concentrations can rise rapidly as there is no dilution effect from leaks or open windows (most houses are always closed up in today's lifestyle).
Yeah, this title for the article is really terrible. The "why" that scientists are investigating is not why many lung cancers aren't in nonsmokers. The "why" they are investigating is "why are these non smokers getting cancer?". Once smoking stops being such a dominant cause, you put more energy into the other cases.
Except reducing the first cause does nothing about whether air pollution is a nontrivial factor. And nonsmoker cancers are a nontrivial proportion since they account for 10-25 percent of lung cancer worldwide, please just read the article.
Besides the base rate fallacy there is the fallacy of assuming only the biggest factor is what matters, when other factors are nontrivial weights already. Another fallacy is the fallacy of relativizing a problem framing by insisting on comparison with an obsolete problem --campaigns against smoking have done a lot, so why are we still comparing today's problems against the problems of the 20th century. It smacks of "well, things were even worse back then", which surely the base rate fallacy is not trying to suggest.
> And nonsmoker cancers are a nontrivial proportion since they account for 10-25 percent of lung cancer worldwide, please just read the article.
I read the article, but I can't tell if there's a real problem or not. Having "nonsmokers accounts for 10% - 25% of lung cancer worldwide" doesn't leave me any wiser or more informed. Maybe I missed it in the article, so the rest of my comment is pointless, but ...
What's the percentage of lung cancer in nonsmokers? 10% of the pop? 1%? 0.00001%? Whatever the answer is, why isn't it in the article? Then we can see what "10% - 25% of $BASE_RATE" actually is. If we're seeing "10%-25% of 0.0001%", then that sorta tracks as fine, TBH.
The article seems almost designed to mislead: What's the base rate of lung cancer in nonsmokers? What's the base rate of lung cancer in smokers?
For example, if the base rate of lung cancer in smokers is 25% and the base rate of lung cancer in nonsmokers is 0.1%, then I don't see a problem here; funds directed to eliminating the remaining causes of lung cancer will be better spent on other research.
OTOH, if the base rate of lung cancer in smokers is 25% and the base rate of lung cancer in nonsmokers is %15, then I see a real problem here: maybe we need to direct more research funds towards lung cancer[1].
My expectation is that, with smoking so rare, lung cancer in the combined population must be very low, compared with the time when smoking was not rare.
-----------------------------------
[1] Actually the problem is worse than that: if there was a singular cause for that 15% in my example, then we it would have been cheaper to target that cause instead of spending dollars reducing smoking.
I do wonder if non-smokers are segregated based on second hand exposure: have a parent/spouse who smokes. Casino employees may have to spend a full shift bathed in smoke.
Yes, also, the base rate of smoking in different groups is important to take into consideration to prevent the base rate fallacy.
Very few Chinese American women smoke (~2%), so if smokers and non-smokers have the same chance of getting lung cancer not caused by smoking, then the number of non-smokers with lung cancer will be a larger proportion.
If 100% of some group would be non-smokers, then obviously 100% of lung cancer cases in that group will be in non-smokers.
It's similar to misinterpreting the fact that most people that were hospitalized from Covid-19 were vaccinated.
I think a large contributor is poor indoor air quality - of all types, not just one specific pollutant - causing inflammation and thus cancer. Homes have gotten far tighter in recent years, and people buy ever more cheap furniture and inexpensive consumer products. So you have formaldehyde and other VOCs off-gassing, you have plasticizer vapors, nanoplastics in the air from synthetic furniture and cloth, you have refrigerants leaking from appliances and from insulation foam… I don’t think nearly anyone understands just how many unique poorly-studied chemicals are emitted into your indoor air by your average set of household products. That’s all to say nothing of common and better-understood air quality issues from gas cooking, radon, mold, etc.
So we have all these irritants in the air, and we have the most airtight homes in human history by orders of magnitude… what did we think was going to happen? That you could slap a laughably undersized carbon filter on an air purifier and call it good? Or that a limited number of too-small ERV systems would help? At some point we will need a radical rethinking of our approach to health and safety of new technology.
Houses weren’t so much better, but people are living in those houses longer (well, that’s true about all cancers). Perhaps one reason California life expectancy is better than other states is that they can mostly keep their windows open year round.
There is an entire article linked here, saying that they, Scientists, don't know what the causes are, even though they're actively trying to search for a cause.
Imagine if there was an environmental science forum that sat around pontificating with mistrust about software performance. Chances are people would mock it and marvel at their ignorance.
But here we have a forum of (largely) software developers looking at the experts on environmental health and going, "Why are they so stupid? It's obviously <radon> <modern junk> <etc>".
It's not limited to environmental health, it affects all kinds of articles on social sciences. Commentary full of people who aren't domain experts wondering why the domain experts are all so clueless because Mr Software Engineer has it all figured out.
So, first of all, trusting the NYT - or most major newspapers - on any article involving “science” is… somewhere between delusional and hilarious. They get things wrong at roughly the same frequency as a Facebook meme page.
Secondly: “Scientists” are not some monolithic group. On any subject you can imagine there are scientists claiming they know all, some claiming we know nothing, some with hypothesis A and some with B and some with Z.
Finally… I outlined a reasonable mechanism in my comment (indoor air pollutants increasing by orders of magnitude; home air tightness increasing by orders of magnitude; many of these pollutants are known to increase the risk of lung cancer.) Why not debate the argument itself, instead of making appeals to authority?
I love that the article mainly points out that it is unknown why asian women have an unusually high rate of lung cancer but the entire HN comment section (except for 1 thread) is just going on about radon.
Every time you look up something related to Radon, it's always cited as "the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking"
I wonder if that's really true.
Radon is a big deal where I live. Most homes have a radon mitigation system which is a 20-watt fan that goes over your sump pump hole, and runs continuously to a vent on the roof.
I bought an Airthings radon monitor because of that stat, and one thing that I have learned is that those mitigation systems do not necessarily work. I have a system that works, but initially, even though my house had a system, it did not reliably keep the radon levels below the federal action level.
Barometric pressure, temperature, and HVAC all seem to have some bearing - tightening the house for air leaks actually did a lot of good in keeping levels low. Also, sump pump failures or ground water levels can "push" radon into the house. I dug a deeper sump pit and also put a secondary radon fan to pull air out of my sub-foundation drain pipes to ensure the air below the house is cycled.
Still, in Boulder County, my house will fail its radon test after a 2 hour power outage.
I am an evangelist for continuous radon monitoring, alerts and tests.
My house is a raised foundation and they covered all the ground underneath with plastic and put perforated pipes underneath that pull the air out. Radon went down 10x. The company has a 5 year guarantee.
I bought one of those because I have a couple radium clocks and a nice sample of uraninite, which is a tiny collection compared to the real enthusiasts but probably more radioactive stuff than the average person has. Radon is in the decay chain.
I've never seen above 0.7pC/L which is pretty good, although I don't know what proportion of the activity that is there is natural, or how much more it would be without the fan. I'm not sure what the natural radon levels even are in my area, I think the radon fan is just part of code here.
I bought a house in the hills of Los Angeles and we tested for radon. Turned out it was very high, and LA is one of the few places in California that has high radon. We got it mitigated, and it wasn't that expensive. I talked to neighbors and real estate agents, and no one wanted to know anything about it. I was shocked. Everyone is pulling the wool over their own eyes here.
Do you have a source for the high radon in LA? According to this county source it is pretty low in LA county but much more pronounced in Ventura county (1% homes with high levels vs 14%). I imagine there is some potential for accumulation effects but this is probably much worse in markets where the homes actually have basements.
> Every time you look up something related to Radon, it's always cited as "the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking"
> I wonder if that's really true.
That claim is in fact based on extremely poor research methodology. It is made by combining the linear no-threshold model of radiation damage (which contradicts everything we know about cellular repair and hormesis) with evidence from "case-control studies", a kind of retroactive hand-waving that has nothing whatsoever to do with a "controlled trial", despite the name.
I have never heard of radon as a domestic health concern (40+, have owned multiple houses). Does this vary by country or relate to mitigation industries in a locale?
Varies by geography, so yeah, by country as well. It's a major issue in the US as per the comments in this thread, but here in Australia, almost the entire country[0] has indoor radon levels at 5% or less of the concern threshold level[1]. A few people near certain industries may need to be concerned, but it's not the issue it is in the US.
If I recall correctly it can accumulate more readily in basements, so that's another factor. The house I grew up in had an exhaust system installed due to elevated radon levels.
> Leah Phillips, of Pewee Valley, Ky. Doctors first mistakenly diagnosed her with asthma and then anxiety. Later, they said she had pneumonia. When an oncologist finally told her in 2019 that she had metastatic lung cancer, he gave her six to 12 months to live. “Go home and get your affairs in order,” Ms. Phillips remembered him saying. She was 43, and her children were 9, 13 and 14.
(One of many cases mentioned in the article.)
Before you head for the lab, to start researching "why" - maybe you should tighten up the standards for diagnosis and testing? That could enormously improve the qualities & quantities of life for a huge number of patients.
Readit News
What slice of my mortality pie was radon before and after spending $5000? Could I spend $5000 to cut a bigger slice out of it in another way, like eating better or hiring a grizzly bear to make me exercise more often?
I think action is better than decision paralysis, but I wish I could make much more informed decisions.
For the other 7% that then need to really do a cost-benefit the data is out there but you do need to go through your specific circumstances to get a meaningful number. The risk levels vary vastly (orders of magnitudes) between both the radon level and your life choices/situation, so it's relatively meaningless to share individual cost-benefit analyses.
Since around 2000, it's been part of building regulations that you gotta build air-gapped foundations in family homes. Those who can measure radon gas are adviced to buy things to fight it, and you can reduce it to basically 0% for little money.
I never really considered it from an advertisement perspective as it's adviced by our government and non-profit NGO's. So there is that, if that helps you.
https://www.epa.gov/radon/health-risk-radon
Scroll down to "Radon Risk If You Have Never Smoked". Looks pretty worthwhile to take it from "very high" to "almost nil". If "very high" was in the range of the 2nd highest level listed here, that's 2% chance. That's for lifetime exposure but there's also multiple people living in the house.
If you DO smoke, the numbers look VERY good for spending some cash to get rid of radon. (Of course you should also stop smoking.)
You'll never know. The same way people in the exclusion zone will never know if their thyroid cancer was always destined to be or if it really was related to the Chernobyl meltdown.
But spending (closer to $1000) to mitigate some risk from a known threat vector does seem thrifty.
https://www.epa.gov/radon/health-risk-radon
I wish more people thought like this. Every time I go to the GP I want to get a printout of my mortality pie based on everything they know about me.
Question: Where does radon related mortality rank versus other mortality factors in the United States?
<AI "reasons" a bit>
...
Summary: Radon in perspective
Category / Cause Approx. Deaths per Year (U.S.) Rank / Context
Heart disease ~680,000 #1 overall cause of death
Cancer (all causes) ~613,000 #2 overall cause
Chronic lower respiratory disease ~145,000 #5 overall (includes COPD, etc.)
Lung cancer due to radon ~20,000–21,000
Subset of cancer deaths; about 3–4%
Toxic agents (inc. radon, pollutants) ~55,000 ~2.3% of all deaths (includes radon part)
So AI says it's a bit less than 1% of preventable deaths (or something) annually. Probably puts it in the top 150 causes or so. What you want to do with that hypothesis, or whether you want to spend time sanity checking it, is up to you. Hitting the gym to avoid heart disease is like 35 times more important. A radon home testing kit to eliminate uncertainty about this particular <1% risk is a one time cheap thing though.
Meanwhile, my father’s second wife’s family have pretty much all had or succumbed to lung cancer. None of them smoke, and unless they all coincidentally chose radon-riddled homes in different corners of the U.S., there’s no correlative environmental cause - which leaves genetics.
Took me 5 seconds of research. But keep arguing. Opinions are more important than facts.
Perhaps. I smoked for 30 years and I lived on and off in Devon for at least 15 years.
There is a bloody great pluton underneath Dartmoor in Devon and Bodmin in Cornwall and so on. Hence lots of lovely granite and radon and stuff.
This is the SW of England (UK). Radon emanates out of the earth and pools in cellars and the like and is a major health hazard. Ideally you know about the hazard and dissipate it. A simple fan will do the job.
I'm not sure it is the second leading cause of lung cancer. There are plenty of other pollutants to worry about.
https://www.alpentherme.com/en/therapy-health/therapy/radon-...
Yikes! Not only are free radicals increased, because you're being bombarded with ionizing radiation, but any cellular repair stimulated is because of the cellular damage done!*
I have to assume "the number of free radicals is reduced" is intentionally written awkwardly and in a passive voice, to avoid adding "...after the "radon therapy" stops.
* - And it's not gonna be a net positive!
Just because you have a tradition of something doesn't mean it's effective. Or safe. Or wise.
A lot of the US has radon exposure. I don’t how people come out saying things like you do but at the end of the day it’s exposure to radiation. I have seen it all, people will say it only impacts children or the elderly. Or that it’s an overblown conspiracy. Radon is radioactive, I am sure there are discussions on safe exposure levels but mitigation is so inexpensive and normalized why risk it.
Over the last couple years I've had some AirThings sensors collecting data. Last month:
- The one-day average radon concentration detected by the basement sensor crossed over 3 pCi/L once... for a very brief period. Around 80% of the time, the one-day average radon concentration detected by the basement sensor was below 2 pCi/L.
- The one-day average radon concentration detected by the main floor sensor never reached 3 pCi/L and was rarely above 2 pCi/L.
In fact, since January, the main floor sensor has still never reached 3 pCi/L even once, or really gotten all that close. The basement sensor, on the other hand, has reached 4 pCi/L three times this year, with a peak at 5.1 pCi/L for a brief period in May.
I hardly ever check this data, but it is nice to have it. I guess it would probably be wise to double check some other way to make sure that the AirThings sensors are outputting good information, but I have little reason to doubt it.
As long as I'm interpreting the data right, though, it suggests that despite having some of the worst case scenarios for my house, actually it's fine. So I guess it really does depend mostly on the land you're built on. (That, and, you should probably just check instead of guessing.)
I've always been under the impression that there was radon in basements since it settles down there ... maybe the correlation is people who spend long periods of time in the basement with radon exposure (thats a guess fwiw).
https://www.canada.ca/radon
https://takeactiononradon.ca/
Deleted Comment
In 1973 fears that heating in Winter would get more expensive, saw an increase in home renovation. IR viewers were employed for the first time and IR images showed windows and attic vents as glowing with heat (as they had all along) and it looked like money escaping. Rubber seals on doors and windows. Double pane windows.
This trapped the radon in basements (and for some rising out of the basement onto the first floor) to be breathed by humans and gain higher concentrations for the first time in US history. Homes were hermetically sealed.
Since smokers bore the penance of sin... the rise of the '2nd leading cause' went unrecognized for years.
Now in a basement in Brittany things would be different, but for most houses in most places, radon is negligible.
There also isn't a notable difference in cancers between radon-rich granitic places like Brittany and the rest of France. I feel like at least in France, the potential dangers of radon are well known.
Same in Denmark where I'm living now, I know nobody whose house has a basement.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-08/documents/wa...
Deleted Comment
https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/lung-ca...
Besides the base rate fallacy there is the fallacy of assuming only the biggest factor is what matters, when other factors are nontrivial weights already. Another fallacy is the fallacy of relativizing a problem framing by insisting on comparison with an obsolete problem --campaigns against smoking have done a lot, so why are we still comparing today's problems against the problems of the 20th century. It smacks of "well, things were even worse back then", which surely the base rate fallacy is not trying to suggest.
I read the article, but I can't tell if there's a real problem or not. Having "nonsmokers accounts for 10% - 25% of lung cancer worldwide" doesn't leave me any wiser or more informed. Maybe I missed it in the article, so the rest of my comment is pointless, but ...
What's the percentage of lung cancer in nonsmokers? 10% of the pop? 1%? 0.00001%? Whatever the answer is, why isn't it in the article? Then we can see what "10% - 25% of $BASE_RATE" actually is. If we're seeing "10%-25% of 0.0001%", then that sorta tracks as fine, TBH.
The article seems almost designed to mislead: What's the base rate of lung cancer in nonsmokers? What's the base rate of lung cancer in smokers?
For example, if the base rate of lung cancer in smokers is 25% and the base rate of lung cancer in nonsmokers is 0.1%, then I don't see a problem here; funds directed to eliminating the remaining causes of lung cancer will be better spent on other research.
OTOH, if the base rate of lung cancer in smokers is 25% and the base rate of lung cancer in nonsmokers is %15, then I see a real problem here: maybe we need to direct more research funds towards lung cancer[1].
My expectation is that, with smoking so rare, lung cancer in the combined population must be very low, compared with the time when smoking was not rare.
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[1] Actually the problem is worse than that: if there was a singular cause for that 15% in my example, then we it would have been cheaper to target that cause instead of spending dollars reducing smoking.
Very few Chinese American women smoke (~2%), so if smokers and non-smokers have the same chance of getting lung cancer not caused by smoking, then the number of non-smokers with lung cancer will be a larger proportion.
If 100% of some group would be non-smokers, then obviously 100% of lung cancer cases in that group will be in non-smokers.
It's similar to misinterpreting the fact that most people that were hospitalized from Covid-19 were vaccinated.
Whats the correct interpretation of this?
Incidence rates have been steadily dropping, in many areas by over 50% from 1990. Mortality rates have fallen faster still.
So yes, it isn't that other things picked up, but that as smoking has become a fringe other causes proportion naturally increases.
So we have all these irritants in the air, and we have the most airtight homes in human history by orders of magnitude… what did we think was going to happen? That you could slap a laughably undersized carbon filter on an air purifier and call it good? Or that a limited number of too-small ERV systems would help? At some point we will need a radical rethinking of our approach to health and safety of new technology.
There is an entire article linked here, saying that they, Scientists, don't know what the causes are, even though they're actively trying to search for a cause.
Imagine if there was an environmental science forum that sat around pontificating with mistrust about software performance. Chances are people would mock it and marvel at their ignorance.
But here we have a forum of (largely) software developers looking at the experts on environmental health and going, "Why are they so stupid? It's obviously <radon> <modern junk> <etc>".
It's not limited to environmental health, it affects all kinds of articles on social sciences. Commentary full of people who aren't domain experts wondering why the domain experts are all so clueless because Mr Software Engineer has it all figured out.
Secondly: “Scientists” are not some monolithic group. On any subject you can imagine there are scientists claiming they know all, some claiming we know nothing, some with hypothesis A and some with B and some with Z.
Finally… I outlined a reasonable mechanism in my comment (indoor air pollutants increasing by orders of magnitude; home air tightness increasing by orders of magnitude; many of these pollutants are known to increase the risk of lung cancer.) Why not debate the argument itself, instead of making appeals to authority?
I wonder if that's really true.
Radon is a big deal where I live. Most homes have a radon mitigation system which is a 20-watt fan that goes over your sump pump hole, and runs continuously to a vent on the roof.
Barometric pressure, temperature, and HVAC all seem to have some bearing - tightening the house for air leaks actually did a lot of good in keeping levels low. Also, sump pump failures or ground water levels can "push" radon into the house. I dug a deeper sump pit and also put a secondary radon fan to pull air out of my sub-foundation drain pipes to ensure the air below the house is cycled.
Still, in Boulder County, my house will fail its radon test after a 2 hour power outage.
I am an evangelist for continuous radon monitoring, alerts and tests.
Wait, really? Intuitively I would expect the opposite, that a draftier house is better for radon levels indoors
I've never seen above 0.7pC/L which is pretty good, although I don't know what proportion of the activity that is there is natural, or how much more it would be without the fan. I'm not sure what the natural radon levels even are in my area, I think the radon fan is just part of code here.
http://www.publichealth.lacounty.gov/eh/safety/radon.htm
What's the process, usually, adding some special ventilation system to the house?
> I wonder if that's really true.
That claim is in fact based on extremely poor research methodology. It is made by combining the linear no-threshold model of radiation damage (which contradicts everything we know about cellular repair and hormesis) with evidence from "case-control studies", a kind of retroactive hand-waving that has nothing whatsoever to do with a "controlled trial", despite the name.
[0] https://www.arpansa.gov.au/understanding-radiation/radiation... [1] https://www.arpansa.gov.au/understanding-radiation/radiation...
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2408084121
If I recall correctly it can accumulate more readily in basements, so that's another factor. The house I grew up in had an exhaust system installed due to elevated radon levels.
We tested for radon when we bought our house and found the levels to be very high.
Fortunately the builders had installed a passive mitigation system so all we had to do was install a fan.
(One of many cases mentioned in the article.)
Before you head for the lab, to start researching "why" - maybe you should tighten up the standards for diagnosis and testing? That could enormously improve the qualities & quantities of life for a huge number of patients.