Health-Seekers Bathe in the Glow of Radon

Health-Seekers Bathe in the Glow of Radon: "Radon, produced by the decay of radium, is classified as a carcinogen by the World Health Organization. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates radon in indoor air causes about 21,000 deaths each year in the United States alone, and is the leading cause of lung cancer after smoking."

This article from NewsMax.com describes how various hot springs health spas in Japan tout naturally occurring or artificially introduced radon in the air as a general purpose curative and restorative, but goes on to rugurgitate the EPA line as shown in the quote above.

The trouble with the government's radon exposure limit standards and the estimated contribution to lung cancer deaths is that there is no reason to believe those figures are accurate. That radon, inhaled at high concentrations over long periods, is capable of inducing lung cancer is not in dispute. Miners working underground can be subjected to very high exposures and develop lung cancers. But there is a serious problem in trying to extend this experience which is well-understood to low level exposure in residences or other buildings.

EPA uses, in this and other contexts, something called the linear no threshhold hypothesis (LNTH). This assumes that there is no safe dose and extrapolates from data about lifetime exposure and lung cancer incidence from the well-documented experience of underground miners to assume that one-tenth the exposure must result in one-tenth the cancer risk, one-hundredth of the exposure must result in one-hundredth of the cancer risk, and so on until the exposure level is zero.

This flies in the face of a fundamental principle of pharmacology that it is the dose that makes the poison. Many things are safe, even beneficial, in small doses that are damaging or fatal in large doses. It also flies in the face of actual studies which show a hormetic response when low-level radon exposure is compared to actual health effects. Hormesis is the process by which exposures at low levels to some dangerous substances are actually beneficial to health.

So what do the residential radon studies actually show? A Congressionally-mandated review of the relevant peer-reviewed literature by the National Academy of Sciences states: "The ecologic study of Cohen (1995) is the most comprehensive. It encompasses about 300,000 radon measurements in 1,601 counties in the U.S. The trend of county lung cancer mortality with increasing home radon concentration is strikingly negative, even when attempts are made to adjust for smoking prevalence, and 54 socioeconomic factors....This finding contradicts the existing risk estimates at low exposure, and a sound reason for the significant negative trend should be sought.''

In fact, the exposure limits set by the EPA for residences are substantially below the level at which radon exposure has neither benefits nor adverse consequences for acquiring cancer; that is, meeting the EPA standards should make us just a bit less healthy. And the costs of this are not trivial. Annual compliance costs nationally were estimated by EPA at $180 million in 1991. The American Water Works Association (there can be radon gas dissolved in water) made an estimate of $2.5 billions. Given even the EPA's estimate of the number of cancers averted, the cost is $1 to $15 millions per potential victim. There ought to be more effective ways to spend that much money even if the EPA were correct.

If you are interested in this sort of thing, here is a good place to start: http://www.oism.org/cdp/jan2000.htm