I’ve got to admit that when I get an email that says:
***PRESS RELEASE: 20,000 Americans Killed in Their Own Homes by the Radon Killer!!!***
my most likely response is: whatever, click, delete.
At the risk of being flippant, I will go on.
I’m so saturated by environmental and health threats that reading my email anymore is like reading a list of next year’s doomsday blockbuster movies. So I have no idea why I opened this latest email about radon, but it turns out that January is National Radon Action Month, or NRAM as the EPA has dubbed it and has assigned an acronym to support NRAM and raise awareness. The WHO (World Health Organization) is supporting the EPA by initiating the International Radon Project (or IRP, pronounced urrrp), which, despite what the name implies, is a worldwide effort to reduce radon-related lung cancer.
All kidding aside, the threat from radon does read like a horror movie in the making. Radon is odorless, tasteless, and invisible, and it can creep into your house through the basement or your granite countertop or even the steam in your shower.
So I encourage everyone who reads this post to think twice about taking your next vacation to a radon health spa .
Wearing a gas mask while you watch TV sounds ridiculous, but getting your home tested for radon is probably a good idea, especially as we all rush to make our homes more energy efficient by sealing all the passive airflow pathways.
However, to safeguard yourself against warrantless panic the next time you open your email, consider this fact that I picked up on the EPA’s Web site: Of the people who died of radon-related lung cancer last year, only 2900 were nonsmokers.
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This another of the overblown scare stories that we are bombarded with daily. Ill bet you that not one of 20K deaths can be traced exclusively to RADON. Like asbestos, lead pipe, dog poop and whatever else can be morphed into a disaster someone will make a crisis out of it. Follow the money if you are interested enough to get the true picture. The bottom line is "the toxidity is in the dosage". We all get a little bad stuff now and then, few of us get a lot all the time.
If I'm correct the mask that the person is wearing represents a common misconception about radon as does the text. I believe that radon cannot be filtered because it's an inert gas; however, some of its decay products can be filtered out. If you have a radon problem, the best thing to do is eliminate it from your structure using proper methods. (If you don't know, hire an expert.) Incidentally, one of the best collectors of radon decay products are artificially made fabrics such as double knit or acrylic. That's why one doesn't wear that type of clothing into an area where a checkout with a beta/gamma detector is required. My acrylic sweater was returned the following day after the decay products had, in turn, decayed to non-radioctive products, and the sweater checked out clean. I probably brought the sweater into the area with the decay products on it.
I sat down with my fellow physicist to map out the isotopes that were the problem with Radon. What we found was that most have such short half-lives that they are non-issues...EXCEPT Polonium-210. You may remember that was used to poison a spy who died a week or so later. By the way, according to a Science News tidbit, tobacco likes to extract Polonium 210 from the soil to the point that a pack a day smoker gives the legal whole-body annual limit, focused just on his lungs.
Anyway, if a risk can be reasonably avoided . . . (I wouldn't forgo getting smoke detectors to pay for radon abatement, but have put some radon control features in my addition.)
Visiting the Idaho National Lab we had to go through whole-body counters in order to leave. On each occasion one in our group set off the alarm- with synthetic clothes. After a tech came by with a survey monitor, checked them, waited a few minutes, and checked them again. Finally passing them he used the same joke,"Your clothes are not my size anyway."