Carolyn Allen, the president of AccuStar, in Medway, Mass., said her company's kit measures radon levels over 3 to 12 months.
Jeffrey C. May, an indoor-air quality consultant in Tyngsborough, Mass., and the author of "Jeff May's Healthy Home Tips" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), said that there are two types of kits for homeowners: a long-term test, measuring radon levels over 3 to 12 months; and a short-term one, 2 to 4 days.
Another valuable article, in The Economist, notes how some of the reassuring statements made by the risk commission in the days preceding the earthquake came in the face of panicked public reactions to unofficial earthquake predictions from Giampaolo Giuliani, a technician at a national physics institute measuring radon levels.
Cohen tested the LNT theory by measuring radon levels in counties throughout the United States and correlating them with the lung cancer mortality in each of the counties.
The distribution of measured radon levels can impact both the burden of illness estimates and the theoretical number of radon-attributable lung cancer deaths that could be prevented with testing and remediation.
The measured radon levels from the Cross-Canada Survey of Radon Concentrations in Homes followed a lognormal distribution in Ontario with a provincial geometric mean of 43 Bq/m and a geometric standard deviation of 3.1 assuming all non-detects are assigned a value of 7.5 Bq/m.
Little publicity has been given to the studies that actually measured home radon levels in the range from ∼50 to 1500 Bq/m, examined the lung cancer incidence of the residents, and observed a significant decrease below the natural incidence of lung cancer.
Consistent associations were not observed between nonrespiratory cancer mortality and ecologic measures of residential radon levels in the large prospective American Cancer Society cohort, which includes > 1 million participants (Turner et al. 2012).
13 14 15 We constructed a model to estimate lifetime risk of fatal lung cancer before and after preventive measures to reduce radon levels, using the estimated risks of lung cancer.
The poor cost effectiveness occurs because basic preventive measures will already have halved radon levels, thereby reducing the number of homes with measurements above any particular action level and so increasing the cost of detecting them.
