Philadelphia, PA (PRWEB) December 29, 2016 -- The XLNT Foundation has designated January as Radon Health Benefits Awareness Month, in order to bring the public’s attention to the beneficial health effects of residential radon.
Though the EPA says that radon is responsible for about 21,000 lung cancer deaths every year in the USA, it is clearly wrong. Examination of the maps of residential radon levels and lung cancers in the USA (http://www.x-lnt.org/radon-and-lung-cancer) and in many countries of the world shows that there are mostly lower rates of lung cancer in areas with higher radon levels. This observation in so many countries suggests that an elevated radon level may actually prevent lung cancer. Please view the presentation at the XLNT Foundation website (http://www.x-lnt.org/radon-health-awareness-month) and learn the many types of evidence and reasons supporting this concept. So why is the EPA making such scary claims?
Many decades ago, when the ventilation in underground mines was inadequate, radon levels were very high in some mines, and the miners had an elevated risk of lung cancer. However, the EPA is wrong to assume that a much lower level of radon in homes also causes a risk of lung cancer, in proportion to the radon level. Can one predict the health effect of a single aspirin by assuming it is proportional to the effect of taking 100 aspirins? Of course not. Since the EPA has used such simplistic logic known as the linear no-threshold (LNT) assumption, its message about radon has no validity.
Hypothetically, living in poorly ventilated buildings with very high levels of radon for a long period of time may be hazardous, but buildings where air circulates routinely would not accumulate very high levels of radon, and living in them would not present a radon hazard.
Fear-mongering about higher residential radon levels is a major problem because the action taken resulting from the fear, radon mitigation, would actually increase lung cancer risk.
The XLNT Foundation (http://www.x-lnt.org/) is a nonprofit, tax-exempt charitable organization whose mission is to inform the public about the observed beneficial health effects of low-dose ionizing radiation, and to campaign for eliminating use of the LNT model in order to enhance public health.
Mohan Doss, XLNT Foundation, http://www.x-lnt.org/, +1 2158379880, [email protected]
SOURCE XLNT Foundation
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