Thanks for this Bill

After years of getting rebuffed by the administration of my local hospital when I would bring up the Physicians and Radon program started in Iowa or the Newborn Radon program so popular in Pennsylvania, I was invited to be on the Patient and Family Advisory Council. I told them my agenda to get radon discussed and acted on by the medical community and they were OK with that. So far I have attended a few bi-monthly meetings and they have tolerated a brief display of a local radon map and testing results. They tell me that radon has been brought up at one of the physician meetings but I doubt they would ever let me, a mere lay person, give a teaching session to doctors. So, for now I am grateful to be present at the table and will be working on my two radon projects as I am able.
Jeff Miner
Radon At Tahoe

As a preface, please realize that when I went to college the only thing we were taught about radon is that it interfered with measuring other things, like plutonium, in the air. And natural radiation was considered a nonissue...I mean it's natural, how could it be bad? Well, duh, a rattlesnake bite is natural too.

So, anyway, some years ago I was invited to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN to give a talk on radon measurement methods, same talk I presented at the Health Physics Society meeting years ago, and also at the University of North Carolina. During my talk, I must have said something about the cost of mitigation, and perhaps from the tone of my voice someone deduced that I questioned whether the cost was worth it. This person spoke up, maybe he was a doctor. He asked, "Do you know the cost of treating a single patient with lung cancer?" That sure put me in my place. I responded that No, I did not know but obviously the point being made was that for the cost of treating one lung cancer patient, we could mitigate a large number of homes and perhaps avoid that one lung cancer incidence. Not to mention avoiding the pain and suffering of the victim and the family. This is one example where health care providers were interested in hearing about radon.

And in case you're wondering, as I've come to understand the dose from radon and the associated risk based on epidemiological studies, I firmly believe that we should try to achieve concentrations less than 2 pCi/L when at all possible.