Rain and radon

I had to be stuck in town today when the oasis got over an inch of rain. But it was an all-day soaking rain so I know there was no runoff. It would have been fun to watch rain run off the new tank roof though, and see how well the parking area drainage engineering works. I'll be able to tell the latter when I do get down there. If not tomorrow, then the next day. Wish I has scattered some flower seeds around the tank. Flowers are going to be awesome in the spring.

I heard on the radio today that smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer deaths in our country and radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer deaths. I've always been somewhat concerned about radon since my earth-sheltered house is built into a rhyolite mountain that has decaying uranium underground. So I decided to do a little research.

What really got me when I delved into the subject was this statement. "About 10% of radon-related cancer deaths involve people who don't smoke!" So 90% of radon-related cancer deaths involve people who do smoke? Nowhere can I discover how they determine that the smoking didn't cause the death. 

To clarify, about 154,000 Americans will die of lung cancer in 2018. The EPA claims that about 21,000 people a year die of radon-related lung cancer, and about 2,900 of those radon-related cases are of people who never smoked.  So at most, less than 3,000 people per year who die of lung cancer never smoked. What about all the other risk factors such as family history of lung cancer, asbestos, work related carcinogens, pollution, etc.? Surely, many of those 3,000 deaths a year were related to those causes. How can they blame them all on radon?

The American Lung Association estimates that 90% of lung cancer deaths are attributable to current smokers. Ten percent to radon (per the EPA). That's 15,400 people versus the 21,000 the EPA claims. But that's a minor discrepancy. We can let that slide.

The CDC says over 7,000 deaths to lung cancer each year are caused by second-hand smoke. And somewhere I read that about 60-65% of new lung cancer diagnoses are to people that have never smoked or are former smokers who quit a long time ago. What the heck? You can obviously see, without me boring and confusing your further, that, like everything else health and medical related, it's all a bunch of gobblety-gook! Every different organization has its own statistics.

I've never heard of anyone in the Big Bend dying of radon-related lung cancer, but radon detectors are cheap so just to satisfy my curiosity I'm going to get one.

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UPDATE: I wrote the above blog late last night, at a time I usually find something to worry about to keep me from sleeping. Today I got an email from a dear friend who set me straight and told me to find some other carcinogen to worry about. He also said, 

" I spent 15 years of my life exploring for uranium. During that time I was exposed to radon gas, many times, more than you have been or ever will be exposed to, around uranium mines, uranium-rich outcrops, mine waste piles and granite rocks that have a very low amount of decaying uranium – I do not worry about dying of lung cancer. None of my fellow uranium hunters have died of radon exposed gas and we are all getting old."

So I'm not going to bother to buy a detector.