Warning: Gullibility Can Be Costly
Throw away those testing kits, and stop worrying about radon. It looks like the scare about radiation in the home has been a huge, costly, government-bred hoax.
An article published in the Dec. 21, 1994, issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute unmasks the fraud with the help of some wicked facts.
The authors - Michael Alvanja, Jay Lubin and J.D. Boice of the National Cancer Institute, Ross Brownson and Jian Chang of the Missouri Department of Health and Eric Berger of Information Management Services - begin by surveying existing scientific data about radon. They note that reputable reports prove nothing about residential radon, while other investigations were plagued by sloppy research.
Early studies, for instance, focused on men who worked for years in unventilated uranium mines. Generally speaking, the men smoked, had atrocious eating habits and constantly breathed in stuff like dirt, arsenic, silicates, diesel fuel and blasting fumes.
It was almost impossible for these folks not to develop lung cancer, and although radon indisputably contributed to their conditions, the miners in their workplaces absorbed radon doses hundreds of times higher than what people encounter in their homes. As a result, the uranium harvesters’ experience is irrelevant to everyone who doesn’t live in a radioactive grotto or nuclear reactor.
Later studies committed different blunders. Some failed to take into account the impact of horrible habits or exposure to potent carcinogens. Others fell victim to poor measurement techniques. “The limitations of these studies are so severe,” the authors sigh, “that they are essentially non-informative for estimating radon risks.”
This is a crucial charge because the government used these shabby studies to justify its intrusive and annoying radon policy - the one that encourages people to test their homes, undertake costly renovations and so on.
Even under the cheeriest estimates, the average homeowner spends $1,200 to clear away radon, while businesses and institutions pay a heavier price. Environmental Protection Agency officials told representatives of the National School Boards Association that remediation expenses for schools could run anywhere from $5,000 to $200,000 per building.
The EPA claims that the expense is worth it because radon kills people quietly. A television commercial commissioned by the agency features skeletons dancing through a home, while guides to homeowners contain breathless warnings: Spooky rays threaten “one out of every five homes,” and “no level of radon is considered absolutely safe.”
No serious research - including the agency’s own statistics - lends credence to these alarms. Furthermore, the numbers don’t support the agency’s recommendation that homeowners take action whenever radon concentrations exceed four picocuries per liter. That figure was plucked out of 30-year-old research, which itself was distorted by rule-happy regulators.
Judging from laws elsewhere in the world, our guidelines make no sense at all. Canada suggests action at 10 picocuries per liter, and some European nations flash the danger signal only when density hits 20 picocuries per liter, five times the U.S. standard.
Yet despite the low threshold, radon reaches the “action level” in only about 6 percent of the nation’s homes - not the 20 percent figure contained in EPA’s fright sheets.
So the crucial question arises: Should anyone worry? The National Cancer Institute researchers tried to solve the mystery by producing sensible data about the relationship between radon and lung cancer.
The scientists started by avoiding the mistakes committed by their predecessors. They looked at women who lived close to one another and took into account background factors, such as cigarette smoking and dietary habits. They measured radon in the subjects’ homes “near the time of the diagnosis of cancer.” They picked folks who had been in one place for at least five years, which is the latency period for radon-induced cancers. Finally, the women spent an average of 84 percent of each day in their homes, which meant that their conditions accurately reflected the effects of radon.
The scientists studied the data and concluded that “there was no evidence of increasing risk of lung cancer over increasing levels of radon concentrations.”
Radon regulations cost the economy at least $16 billion a year but produce negligible benefits.
This provides a perfect target for Republicans, who have vowed to banish enviro-voodoo with Title III of their Contract With America, which declares that regulations must incorporate good science and produce more benefits than burdens. Under those conditions, the radon industry would vanish overnight - enabling Americans to spend their money to fight villains that really do threaten homes and lives.
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