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]]]]]]] Beware of EPA's Flawed Radon-Cancer Connection [[[[[[[[[[[
By Warren T. Brookes (8/11/1989)
[From Human Events, 12 August 1989, p. 13]
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]
Recently, the FBI arrested radical environmentalists in Phoenix
for conspiring to sabotage two nuclear power plants.
Unfortunately, the FBI can't arrest the Environmental
Protection Agency's (EPA) official terrorists who are scaring
down the property values of innocent homeowners with warnings
about radon.
The United States has adopted the lowest risk standard on
earth, five times as low as Canada's, even though there is not
the slightest epidemiological evidence that radon poses any
significant health hazard in America, unless you happen to be a
uranium miner who smokes heavily.
Unfortunately, the radon risk standard is typical of the
zero-risk thinking underlying the Bush clean air program, as well.
In late June, in Albuquerque, N.M., Dr. Ralph Lapp, one of the
nation's leading radiation experts, presented a paper to the
prestigious Health Physics Society that blew away EPA's radon
risk standard. His findings were supported by Dr. William Mills,
the man who wrote the original EPA standard!
In it, Lapp took EPA's measurements of radon in New Jersey
homes and particularly in Morris County, which is the heart of
what geologists call ``the Reading Prong,'' a high radon area.
In that area, EPA shows average radon screening measurements
of 8.2 picocuries per liter (pcl). That is double what EPA has
set as the ``remedial action'' level of 4 pcl. Using EPA's own
risk calculation, this exposure alone should produce 377 lung
cancer deaths (LCDs) per year, over and above smoking-caused
LCDs.
However, in Xel of Morris County, there were only 190 LCDs in
1986. So, as Dr. Lapp observes, ``There is no way that the radon
concentration levels EPA shows could be true. This is
undoubtedly because EPA readings are screening measurements which
are worst-case, wintertime, no ventilation, and in the
basement.''
So Dr. Lapp adjusted these measurements to get average likely
exposure. This still produced numbers that, using EPA risk
assumptions, would suggest 152 LCDs a year from radon alone in
Morris County. But there were only a grand total of 190 LCDs, and
it is agreed that smoking accounts for over 80 per cent of them.
``Something is wrong here,'' says Dr. Lapp. ``It must be the
risk factor developed by the EPA.'' To test that hypothesis, he
then looks at EPA's measurements of pcl concentrations throughout
other New Jersey counties, particularly the coastal plain
counties, where the radon readings are a very low 1.8 pcl.
If the EPA were right, those counties should show a
demonstrably lower rate of lung cancer deaths -- after adjusting
for age. But when Lapp looked at the age-adjusted LCD rates of
the coastal plain low-radon counties (average of 69), they were
all significantly higher than the Reading Prong counties, which
had an LCD rate of about 62 (see table).
In short, there was an 11 percent higher lung cancer death
rate in the area where homes had only 20 per cent of the radon
exposure in the Reading Prong! Not only is there no demonstrated
radon risk, there is at least a hint that up to a point radon
might be therapeutic!
Before you laugh, that is precisely the implication of the
seminal work of Dr. Bernard Cohen of the University of
Pittsburgh, who, in a scholarly 1987 paper in Health Physics
Journal, showed that ``all geographic areas that had been found
to have high radon levels had relatively low lung cancer rates.''
Dr. Cohen's exhaustive 1985 research covered Sweden, Finland,
England and China, as well as the Reading Prong area of New
Jersey and Pennsylvania, using published radon measurements and
health data.
Because this 1985 data so destroyed EPA's radon-risk theory,
Dr. Cohen ``started on a vigorous new program of measuring radon
levels in homes, accompanying each measurement with a
questionnaire to provide additional information.'' Using 68,000
purchased radon measurements and random free measurements in 411
U.S. counties, Dr. Cohen's new study, soon to be published in
Health Physics, finds:
``Lung cancer rates in counties tend to strongly decrease as
average radon levels increase and vice versa. The effect seems
to be statistically unquestionable. This is in sharp contrast to
the (EPA) prediction that lung cancer rates should increase
substantially as average radon levels increase.''
How can this be? The answer is that EPA's whole radon
hypothesis depends on one very badly flawed 1968 study of uranium
miners whose high LCD rates from very high radon exposure were
then ``extrapolated'' for low exposure levels.
But in the first place, most of the miners were heavy smokers,
so it was impossible to tell how much radon was the culprit. In
the second place, it took 2,500 ``working level months'' (WLM) of
this high exposure to radon gas to produce a single lung cancer
death. Even accepting EPA's overstated measurements of
residential exposure, its present risk level of 4 pcl would
produce only a lifetime exposure of 14 WLMs.
Dr. Cohen says this translates into a six-tenths per cent risk
of dying from lung cancer from residential radon, or slightly
less than the risk from drinking tap water in normal quantities.
[The following table appeared on p. 13, columns 2 and 3.])
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Radon and Lung Cancer
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Counties Average EPA Radon Level 1986 Lung Cancer Deaths
(picocuries/liter) per 1,000
New Jersey ....... 5.4 64
Reading Prong .... 8.2 62
Morris County .... 8.2 64
Coastal Plain .... 1.8 69
Ocean County ..... 1.6 74
Other States
Pennsylvania .. 6.2 64
Alabama ....... 1.8 63
Kentucky ...... 2.7 65
Missouri ...... 2.6 68
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Sources: EPA and American Cancer Society.
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[The following is not part of the original article.]
More
Bodansky, D., Robkin, M. A. and Stadler, D. R., Eds. 1987,
Indoor Radon and its Hazards. Seattle, WA: University of
Washington Press.
Luckey, Thomas D. 1980, Hormesis With Ionizing Radiation. Boca
Raton, FL: CRC Press.
* * *
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