Lung cancer rates by state, 2017
lung-cancer.com
lung-cancer.com
> Variations in medical care among states may also result in differences in cancer rates. In states where higher percentages of people participate in cancer screenings, more cancers are diagnosed early when the prognosis is often better.
It seems like this data could be impacted such that better healthcare would result in worse cancer rate, since this study naturally counts know cancer rates. That is, it would not necessarily result in literally more incidents of cancer, just the rate as measured.
Would people who die from metastasized lung cancer not be recorded as having had lung cancer?
I don't know the answer but my guess is that the majority of deaths do not have an autopsy performed, especially in 65+ age range.
Edit -- I looked it up, sounds like ~7% of US deaths have an autopsy currently, so I'd guess that the data is influenced by healthcare quality (I didn't read it, perhaps they try to control for that?).
There are also a lot of morms in Idaho, I was surprised to see how much higher the rates are.
Provo lies in the middle of a basin, surrounded by huge mountains that create a trap for smog inversion layers.
You'd need data to know, not my anecdata :)
https://aqicn.org/city/utah/salt-lake-city/
So… something like 5-10 µg/m³ PM 2.5 for most of the year, with rare spikes up to 30 µg/m³ for short periods of time.
If that's your definition of air pollution, then sure. One cigarette a year will probably do more damage to you than that.
I live in a really polluted place, with yearly PM 2.5 average of ~100 µg/m³ (daily mean of hundreds of micrograms per m³ in winter, and short spikes up to 1500 µg/m³ for hours at a time), and high levels of toxic gases (SO₂, NO₂, H₂S, HCl, HF, and a few others).
Literally everyone here suffers from chronic bronchitis, including myself. (Never smoked.) Deaths from lung cancer and COPD among non-smokers are commonplace. I don't have the exact statistics (the government doesn't publish absolute numbers), but incidence of lung cancer is claimed to be around 3× the national average (which is already bad compared to developed countries).
I believe it's also pretty bad in industrial Chinese cities, although they have so much smoking population it's difficult to differentiate.
Other interesting tidbit – his health insurance company (and I expect all others) took a substantial hit 2019-2020 from the initial phase of the pandemic. Come 2021-2022, large proportions of the unhealthiest segments of the population had passed away; covid + comorbidities puts you at a much greater risk of dying than covid alone. They integrated this fact into their modeling and, given that these people would no longer require care (e.g. dialysis, ER visits), predicted that utilization would go down substantially and, now providing for an overall healthier population, the company would be more profitable that year relative to pre-pandemic years. This turned out to be an accurate prediction.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1658387621000297
Well put, these things are always complex.
I installed some a month or two ago, and they caught alarmingly high radon levels in my basement that I’m now working to address. But also they catch more mundane things, like “oh, I tend to get headaches in the afternoon, which happens to be when the co2 levels are super high in my office”.
Given that lung cancer is driven by a) smoking, then b) radon, one would expect some level of correlation here.
So, no, don't believe your map.
Then the map doesn't show risk of radon. It's worthless for that purpose.
"Different political institutions have different standards for what is a radon risk."
It's a map of different political institutions then. That's fine. Just don't try to sell a map of political institutions as a map of radon risk when that is obvious bullshit. I mean it's completely obvious from the boundary.
100% obvious bullshit.