What slice of my mortality pie was radon before and after spending $5000? Could I spend $5000 to cut a bigger slice out of it in another way, like eating better or hiring a grizzly bear to make me exercise more often?
I think action is better than decision paralysis, but I wish I could make much more informed decisions.
Edit: E.g. the numbers from this site suggest, for 15 out of the 16 listed fan models, the lifetime electricity cost is likely to be significantly larger than the install cost unless you are already much older at the time you start using the system or you have extremely cheap electricity (or both) https://www.radonaway.com/radon-fan-operating-cost-calculato...
For the cost, preventing cancer seems like it's a wise investment. I say this as a cancer survivor.
I think it's a mistake to conflate an infinite number of hypothetical risks with a definite and known risk. It leads to analysis paralysis and FUD. It is not possible to know what, among all of the infinite hypothetical options, is the best to reduce your mortality. So let's focus on the concrete steps we can take and that we do know are effective.
For most people, that is not radon mitigation, because most people don't have a radon problem. If you find out that it is a problem for you, and you have the cash to solve it - just solve it. It's that simple.
If in 20 years I find out I got ripped off, I won't really be upset about it.
Enjoy one free beer a month, dude. Chances are you won’t develop a vicious cancer.
Literally, the CDC only mentions two primary sources of lung cancer: smoking and radon. Unless you have an unusual, alternative risk factor, it's practically correct to say eliminating smoking and radon prevent lung cancer.
We pay to live further from the toxic waste dump, the motorway or the pylons. We want filtered water. We want clean air. We pay to have nicer, less risky things.
If you own a home in such a locale, you might as well do any mitigation while living in the house. Otherwise you're not getting any cancer risk reduction for your dollars but you'll still pay those same dollars for the mitigation when you sell the house.
Of course that's median, most people on HN... probably should just get the system if the Radon levels are high.
For the other 7% that then need to really do a cost-benefit the data is out there but you do need to go through your specific circumstances to get a meaningful number. The risk levels vary vastly (orders of magnitudes) between both the radon level and your life choices/situation, so it's relatively meaningless to share individual cost-benefit analyses.
Spend $15 or $100 for one or two measurements, *then* worry about cost to mitigate.
- high base humidity of the place (e.g. the city where I live has a yearly avg. humidity of 70%, but specific to my apartment and ignoring the dry seasons over 80% is the norm (also for context not tropical but central EU, it's stuff like 20C+85% humidity). So airing out your room might increase air humidity...
- in small apartments it's the quite often norm that the side effect of taking a show can temporary rise humidity quite a bit, even if you ventilate properly. Most bathrooms in small appartments are just not well designed wrt. this (context I'm not speaking about long hot showers, but short normal warm showers).
- in small bed rooms night sweat can rise humidity by quite a lot, mostly if you are slightly sick but anyway
- just basic flowers can raise humidity, too
excluding dry areas IMHO for most no large apartments the landlord has forsaken any right to claim it's your fault if they don't provide reasonable measurements against humidity (even if it's just a half way decent (noise wise) air humidifier. Reason: Just standard normal expected usage will cause to high humidity level even if you do air out the apartment twice a day (which depending on weather conditions you might not even be able to do)
Sadly that isn't necessary the local laws/regulations POV.
https://www.epa.gov/radon/what-epas-action-level-radon-and-w...
The EPA doesn’t make such creative claims. But the sites that do will also conveniently sell you stuff.
https://radonbegone.com/what-does-your-radon-number-mean/
https://www.nationalradondefense.com/radon-information/radon...
These websites will try to tell you that the average indoor radon level is equivalent to 2.5 cigarettes per day or 66 chest X-rays per year. The EPA doesn’t make that claim though.
Here in Maine about 36.5% of radon test results equal or exceed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) action level of 4 pCi/L, according to the Lung Association’s “State of Lung Cancer” report.
If you own a basement in Maine, you should probably test it!
The biggest risk of smoking one cigarette a day is not that it will give you cancer, it's that it will give you nicotine addiction which will lead to smoking twenty a day and getting cancer. Radon exposure doesn't have that effect.
there are quite many things made much more likely with smoking which would end very deadly but modern medicine has learned to to move into the non deadly if treated in time area, which doesn't mean it it doesn't leaves you with long lasting side effects...
like most cases in my environment of smokers having "likely smoking caused" issues fall under that category (so far, aging/time tends to let you see more death in your environment and I'm not yet that old)
to some degree that is exactly the thing
by smoking you add a risk
and the more ways you add risk through your live the more likely you will die an early death
it's just basic statistics
and for the same reason you will find someone who does add all the risks but somehow still dies with 90+, if your sample size is large enough and factors complicated enough you are pretty much guaranteed to find some pretty big outliers
but realistically speaking it a pretty bad idea to assume you are such an outlier, but many people tend to ("basically") do exactly that (due to an combination of subconsciously avoiding reality and simply not thinking things through)
Smoking for 40 years that would be 5 months at 1 a day or 17 years at 40 a day.
I think that's all consistent with what you said: 2 packs a day and you usually, but by no means always, don't make it to retirement at ~66. Five months is enough that I'd take some care to avoid it, though.
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1117323/
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/dec/30/single-cigar...
yes
1. it's very affordable to fix
2. long term exposure always adds a non negligible risk
so just fix it
I'm confused why people get hung up on a cost-benefit analysis which is pretty much always guaranteed to be a net positive. Either slightly or majorly.
And if it's a rented apartment in many countries you can force your land lord to fix it with a wide arsenal of funny things you can do if they try to refuse :shrug:
The reason they will not all say it's worth it is because there is nothing "magical" that happens at 4.0 pCi/L. Whether that is the sensible threshold vs doing something else with your money is a very different answer for a non smoker who makes 35k/y vs a smoker who makes 250k/y.
You'll never know. The same way people in the exclusion zone will never know if their thyroid cancer was always destined to be or if it really was related to the Chernobyl meltdown.
But spending (closer to $1000) to mitigate some risk from a known threat vector does seem thrifty.
No, there are a lot of known threat vectors.
https://www.epa.gov/radon/health-risk-radon
Scroll down to "Radon Risk If You Have Never Smoked". Looks pretty worthwhile to take it from "very high" to "almost nil". If "very high" was in the range of the 2nd highest level listed here, that's 2% chance. That's for lifetime exposure but there's also multiple people living in the house.
If you DO smoke, the numbers look VERY good for spending some cash to get rid of radon. (Of course you should also stop smoking.)
But if your results come back much closer to normal background levels, there’s not much you can do. Even the EPA says it’s difficult to get it below 2.
Meanwhile, lots of websites out there try to scare you into buying remediation for low values (see comment below).
It’s the perfect bogeyman. Radon. Cancer. Invisible silent killer. And I think it’s demonstrated by the vibe-based “seems like a good idea” conclusions in these comments.
A perspective perhaps different from yours: Avoidable cancer risk isn't great, and smart people* properly weighing the facts have repeatedly judged the value of radon mitigation to exceed the costs.
* - Probabilistically speaking, this includes many who are smarter than you and me
Since around 2000, it's been part of building regulations that you gotta build air-gapped foundations in family homes. Those who can measure radon gas are adviced to buy things to fight it, and you can reduce it to basically 0% for little money.
I never really considered it from an advertisement perspective as it's adviced by our government and non-profit NGO's. So there is that, if that helps you.
which is why I'm confused by people second questioning how bad it actually is in context of _fixing_ it (not in context of a national health scope)
if there is something which is known to be quite unhealthy in a non small degree, and there is a cheap fix why wouldn't you just fix it. In the end if it's very bad, or slightly less bad or the 10th leading cause instead or whatever doesn't matter, fixing it is affordable and it's guaranteed dangerous on long term exposure so you do it.
I'm not saying it's not worth it -- that's the point, I don't know -- but I agree with people upthread that it would be nice to have better information with which to make decisions.
In my state, the state forces some of these tests (e.g., smoke detector) as part of the sales process so at least there is some hook for testing.
Question: Where does radon related mortality rank versus other mortality factors in the United States?
<AI "reasons" a bit>
...
Summary: Radon in perspective
Category / Cause Approx. Deaths per Year (U.S.) Rank / Context
Heart disease ~680,000 #1 overall cause of death
Cancer (all causes) ~613,000 #2 overall cause
Chronic lower respiratory disease ~145,000 #5 overall (includes COPD, etc.)
Lung cancer due to radon ~20,000–21,000
Subset of cancer deaths; about 3–4%
Toxic agents (inc. radon, pollutants) ~55,000 ~2.3% of all deaths (includes radon part)
So AI says it's a bit less than 1% of preventable deaths (or something) annually. Probably puts it in the top 150 causes or so. What you want to do with that hypothesis, or whether you want to spend time sanity checking it, is up to you. Hitting the gym to avoid heart disease is like 35 times more important. A radon home testing kit to eliminate uncertainty about this particular <1% risk is a one time cheap thing though.
I wish more people thought like this. Every time I go to the GP I want to get a printout of my mortality pie based on everything they know about me.
Meanwhile, my father’s second wife’s family have pretty much all had or succumbed to lung cancer. None of them smoke, and unless they all coincidentally chose radon-riddled homes in different corners of the U.S., there’s no correlative environmental cause - which leaves genetics.
It’s not just lungs - things like FAP make your chance of getting colon cancer in your lifetime near to 100%, regardless of how many ginseng enemas you have or whatever the hell else you do.
Variants like TP53 (Li-Fraumeni) or EGFR mutations have measurable, population-level impacts on cancer risk.
Genetics loads the gun. Being alive then pulls the trigger.
But didn't you just say that it is the genetics and not the radon and/or smoking? Can you give some examples of those "plenty of known variants" for lung cancer?
TP53, as also mentioned - gives you a >90% chance of cancer of any variety in a lifetime. 50% by age 30.
Smoking presents about a 20% lifetime risk - and that’s without adjusting for genetic predispositions like CHRNA3/5 which increase nicotine addictiveness and promote tumorigenisis, or BRCA2, or CHEK2, which diminish DNA repair capabilities.
Took me 5 seconds of research. But keep arguing. Opinions are more important than facts.
Perhaps. I smoked for 30 years and I lived on and off in Devon for at least 15 years.
There is a bloody great pluton underneath Dartmoor in Devon and Bodmin in Cornwall and so on. Hence lots of lovely granite and radon and stuff.
This is the SW of England (UK). Radon emanates out of the earth and pools in cellars and the like and is a major health hazard. Ideally you know about the hazard and dissipate it. A simple fan will do the job.
I'm not sure it is the second leading cause of lung cancer. There are plenty of other pollutants to worry about.
https://www.alpentherme.com/en/therapy-health/therapy/radon-...
Just because you have a tradition of something doesn't mean it's effective. Or safe. Or wise.
I agree that the mechanism of "radiation hormesis" is kind of weak, but it has not been disproved as quackery either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
A lot of the US has radon exposure. I don’t how people come out saying things like you do but at the end of the day it’s exposure to radiation. I have seen it all, people will say it only impacts children or the elderly. Or that it’s an overblown conspiracy. Radon is radioactive, I am sure there are discussions on safe exposure levels but mitigation is so inexpensive and normalized why risk it.
I agree that there are no big prospective studies and probably will never anymore be, because there is really no interest or gain from big pharma. The big time of physical therapies was last century and all studies, at least in Germany, stop by the 90s.
An interesting article to read about the different approaches in Europe and America is this: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2203/dose-response.06-00...
I told you many times, unfortunately, no one will do studies on these things anymore because there is no money it and it cannot be patented. That spas generally are beneficial, though, for general wellbeing and especially if combined with known thermal stimuli (such as sauna) is well known and there are several Finnish studies to prove it.
Last but not least, I have come across to many Americans who are generally doutbful of the medical indication of spas because there is little to no tradition overseas.
This is not an American vs European thing please don’t make it. I am simply saying no governing body has accepted it beyond a study. Your view of the world is skewed if you think studies are not happening.
People have been questioning LNT, which is the accepted policy by most of the world including Europe. There is nuance and suggestive evidence that low dose is ok, after all humans evolved with background radiation. What is unclear is how beneficial it is and at what doses it becomes harmful. There is no clear study that shows benefit hence LNT being the adopted approach.
Pratzel et al (1933) Wirksamkeitsnachweis von Radonbädern im Rahmen einer kurortmedizinischen Behandlung des cervicalen Schmerzsyndroms. Phys Rehab Kur Med 3: 76-82
And I found many more particularly from a certain Gunther R who has published a lot in Germany between the 70s and 90s with minor studies referenced. As said before, this is a dying tradition and no one cares to redo the experiments with better conditions, unfortunately. But until proven otherwise, it's all we have.
Unfortunately, we are stuck with the little evidence there is from the last century when it was the heyday of balneological applications. However, these little studies we have, even with few patients is better than nothing and certainly there is also not enough proof that these patients have been harmed, if doing radon therapy according to modern standards of exposure.
As mentioned before: the linear extrapolation of the risk from high doses of radiation to low doses assumed by the LNT model greatly overestimates the risk of harm, and ignores the potential benefits. Low doses of radiation have been found to stimulate growth (Stebbing 1982), DNA repair (Kondo 1998a and 1998b), antioxidant action (Feinendegen 1987; Pollycove 1998), and immune response (Liu et al. 1987). Other studies have shown that cancer rates actually decrease in populations exposed to low levels of radiation beyond normal background radiation (Bogan 1998; Cohen 1995; Dissanayake 2005; Hattori 1997; Kondo 1993; Mifune 1992). The overestimation of risk by the LNT model is considered important by hormesis advocates, because its cautious perspective prevents patients from receiving low-level ionizing radiation treatments, such as radon, which might help them. Moreover, if radon levels were held to the standards mandated by the EPA and other agencies following the LNT model, the costs of residential radon abatement would be extraordinarily high (Macklis and Beresford 1991; Thomas and Goldsmith 1995).
I have no stance on radon, but rejection studies solely because they're 30years old is dumb.
Again: unfortunately there will never be studies with thousands of patients to prove this or disprove this, because there is no money to be made. So we stay with the little proof have 20th century studies in Europe with the limited patients evaluated.
You keep sharing anecdotes but again none of them have been proven by science. I understand Germans have a love for homeopathy and some of it may work, similar to TCM but a lot of it does not.
Yikes! Not only are free radicals increased, because you're being bombarded with ionizing radiation, but any cellular repair stimulated is because of the cellular damage done!*
I have to assume "the number of free radicals is reduced" is intentionally written awkwardly and in a passive voice, to avoid adding "...after the "radon therapy" stops.
* - And it's not gonna be a net positive!
I could, but then I'd be arguing something I don't believe, and have no evidence to support!
I don't know that it would be worth it to entertain a hypothesis that, as far as I can tell, nobody here believes and has evidence to support.
Here is how Schwanzhammertherapie works: 'cellular repair in the body is stimulated, the number of dick hammerings is reduced'.
There's a big difference here between you, acting like a clown, and the scientists or clinicians of yesteryear that formulated the hormesis hypothesis.
Thanks for asking! I explained this above: "cellular repair in the body is stimulated, the number of dick hammerings is reduced". To elaborate:
1. After being pummeled with [hammer|radiation], the body naturally tries to heal. The body is made of cells. Therefore: "cellular repair in the body is stimulated" in both therapies.
2. The number of [schwanzhammerings|free-radicals] during the therapy is N, and after the therapy is <N. Therefore: "the number of [schwanzhammerings|free-radicals] is reduced" in both therapies.
I think we can agree that both schwanzhammerings and free-radicals are bad, therefore reducing them is good. These two very similar therapies achieve that goal.
Over the last couple years I've had some AirThings sensors collecting data. Last month:
- The one-day average radon concentration detected by the basement sensor crossed over 3 pCi/L once... for a very brief period. Around 80% of the time, the one-day average radon concentration detected by the basement sensor was below 2 pCi/L.
- The one-day average radon concentration detected by the main floor sensor never reached 3 pCi/L and was rarely above 2 pCi/L.
In fact, since January, the main floor sensor has still never reached 3 pCi/L even once, or really gotten all that close. The basement sensor, on the other hand, has reached 4 pCi/L three times this year, with a peak at 5.1 pCi/L for a brief period in May.
I hardly ever check this data, but it is nice to have it. I guess it would probably be wise to double check some other way to make sure that the AirThings sensors are outputting good information, but I have little reason to doubt it.
As long as I'm interpreting the data right, though, it suggests that despite having some of the worst case scenarios for my house, actually it's fine. So I guess it really does depend mostly on the land you're built on. (That, and, you should probably just check instead of guessing.)
I think on the contrary if you have a tendency to worry too much things like continuous monitoring systems might not be the best thing for your mental health. I actually was pretty worried since I'm a mild hypochondriac and a friend told me that they got obsessed with CO2 monitoring after getting one. Thankfully for me it has mostly been an occasional curiosity since there's nothing too concerning.
I've always been under the impression that there was radon in basements since it settles down there ... maybe the correlation is people who spend long periods of time in the basement with radon exposure (thats a guess fwiw).