Many lung cancers are now in nonsmokers
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Took me 5 seconds of research. But keep arguing. Opinions are more important than facts.
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.
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-...
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'.
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...
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.
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).
In 1973 fears that heating in Winter would get more expensive, saw an increase in home renovation. IR viewers were employed for the first time and IR images showed windows and attic vents as glowing with heat (as they had all along) and it looked like money escaping. Rubber seals on doors and windows. Double pane windows.
This trapped the radon in basements (and for some rising out of the basement onto the first floor) to be breathed by humans and gain higher concentrations for the first time in US history. Homes were hermetically sealed.
Since smokers bore the penance of sin... the rise of the '2nd leading cause' went unrecognized for years.
Now in a basement in Brittany things would be different, but for most houses in most places, radon is negligible.
There also isn't a notable difference in cancers between radon-rich granitic places like Brittany and the rest of France. I feel like at least in France, the potential dangers of radon are well known.
Same in Denmark where I'm living now, I know nobody whose house has a basement.
I Denmark, Radon accounts for about 9% of lung cancer cases: https://www.sst.dk/da/Borger/Straaling_-miljoe-og-klima/Om-i...
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-08/documents/wa...
Of course this is all moot because vaping will be revealed to be the current #1 cause of lung cancer in the coming decades, by a long shot. No citation necessary.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/lung-cancer/risk-factors/index.html
[2] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/lung-cancer/causes/
[3] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
That isn't obvious or apparent to me at all so I do think a citation would be good to see. Nicotine is definitely a culprit in a lot of cardio-related issues for sure. I think some flavoring agents are the more questionable thing and would be curious to hear about those specifically in relation to lung cancers.
So that being said, I'm mostly going to offer citations for "vaping is not great for your lungs." And that being said, I'm just going to offer citations for "specific parts of vaping are not good for your lungs." But my broader argument is that putting stuff in your lungs is going to be bad for your lungs, and these are just the most obvious ones we've found so far. Unfortunately I won't be able to find a citation for that argument.
So, first, the most recent: a study showing disposable vapes had incredibly high level of toxic metal emissions [1]. The non-disposable Juul et al variously have some concerning levels, but the insane numbers are on disposables, which are largely (entirely?) illegal in the US, at least. Still, they're not illegal everywhere, they were used heavily for several years in the US, and several of the top Google results were redditors complaining about the stupid ban and talking about how to get around it. All of this combines to lung damage down the line, and several of the toxic metals are outright carcinogenic, so lung cancer as well.
A more particular example: popcorn lung is a terrifying name, but pretty restricted risk, given the causing chemical is only in certain flavors, and those have supposedly stopped using it [2]. But again, an example of weird chemicals in your lungs cause weird things, and it'll be decades til we figure out all of them.
And finally, a study showing that vaping plus smoking leads to a four-fold higher risk of lung cancer over smoking alone (yes, they adjusted for age, gender, race, location of residence, prevalent comorbidities, and pack-years of smoking) [3].
[0] I was hoping to make a glib point about even high enough pollen concentration being bad for your lungs, but in fact a recent study suggests that allergies reduce risk of lung cancer! I'm chalking that up to allergies being your body's way of keeping non-air particulates from your lungs, but who knows. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/medicine/articles/10.33...
[1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.5c00641
[2] Not a lot of research on popcorn lung, seemingly. Note that the name is related to its etiology, not its symptoms. https://www.summahealth.org/flourish/entries/2025/03/a-warm-...
https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/lung-ca...
Besides the base rate fallacy there is the fallacy of assuming only the biggest factor is what matters, when other factors are nontrivial weights already. Another fallacy is the fallacy of relativizing a problem framing by insisting on comparison with an obsolete problem --campaigns against smoking have done a lot, so why are we still comparing today's problems against the problems of the 20th century. It smacks of "well, things were even worse back then", which surely the base rate fallacy is not trying to suggest.
I read the article, but I can't tell if there's a real problem or not. Having "nonsmokers accounts for 10% - 25% of lung cancer worldwide" doesn't leave me any wiser or more informed. Maybe I missed it in the article, so the rest of my comment is pointless, but ...
What's the percentage of lung cancer in nonsmokers? 10% of the pop? 1%? 0.00001%? Whatever the answer is, why isn't it in the article? Then we can see what "10% - 25% of $BASE_RATE" actually is. If we're seeing "10%-25% of 0.0001%", then that sorta tracks as fine, TBH.
The article seems almost designed to mislead: What's the base rate of lung cancer in nonsmokers? What's the base rate of lung cancer in smokers?
For example, if the base rate of lung cancer in smokers is 25% and the base rate of lung cancer in nonsmokers is 0.1%, then I don't see a problem here; funds directed to eliminating the remaining causes of lung cancer will be better spent on other research.
OTOH, if the base rate of lung cancer in smokers is 25% and the base rate of lung cancer in nonsmokers is %15, then I see a real problem here: maybe we need to direct more research funds towards lung cancer[1].
My expectation is that, with smoking so rare, lung cancer in the combined population must be very low, compared with the time when smoking was not rare.
-----------------------------------
[1] Actually the problem is worse than that: if there was a singular cause for that 15% in my example, then we it would have been cheaper to target that cause instead of spending dollars reducing smoking.
Very few Chinese American women smoke (~2%), so if smokers and non-smokers have the same chance of getting lung cancer not caused by smoking, then the number of non-smokers with lung cancer will be a larger proportion.
If 100% of some group would be non-smokers, then obviously 100% of lung cancer cases in that group will be in non-smokers.
It's similar to misinterpreting the fact that most people that were hospitalized from Covid-19 were vaccinated.
Whats the correct interpretation of this?
Why? Because driving a car you get more chance to get to your destination safely than falling from a building. ChatGPT estimates 0.01% chance to die in car accident per year, when driving every day, and 90-99% to die when falling from a building, once.
However, since there are many millions of people who drive a car every day, multiplying very little chance to die in car crash by millions of people, we get thousands of traffic-related death per day. Compare that to single-digit number of people falling from buildings, even if all of them die from it.
Back to Covid, let's imagine a village with simple numbers like this:
10 people were NOT vaccinated, 100 people WERE vaccinated.
Of 10 people who were NOT vaccinated, all 10 got hospitalized.
Of 100 people who WERE vaccinated, 20 got hospitalized.
_Correct_ way to look at this village would be:
ALL people who were NOT vaccinated, got hospitalized - 100% hospitalization rate.
But among those who WERE vaccinated, only 20% got hospitalized.
Hence, it's better to be vaccinated - this way you'll get 80% chance of not being hospitalized :)
I'm not a real statistician, and don't have actual numbers on hand, but situation with real world numbers is similar: among people who were vaccinated, less percent were hospitalized than among those who were not. It's just that we had so many many vaccinated people, that their small hospitalization rate, when multiplied by total number of vaccinated people, outweighs number of not-vaccinated and hospitalized people.
Honestly what a shit vaccine. Measles and Tetanus vax did better.
Honestly, what a shit comment.
For example, every person hospitalised from COVID-19 had consumed water at some point in preceding months. It’s not evidence that water causes severe complications from COVID-19.
Sibling comment is thoughtful and helpful but adds information not present in OP’s statement (base rate).
Edit: ah, you are OP. Just swap “OP” for “you” :)
This is an overly literal, pedantic, and ungenerous interpretation of what I said.
Clearly the actual numbers as well as the base rates for the relevant groups are necessary to meaningfully interpret the statistic, but I was hinting at a similar case after describing the logic for the original case, not exhaustively describing the similar case.
Incidence rates have been steadily dropping, in many areas by over 50% from 1990. Mortality rates have fallen faster still.
So yes, it isn't that other things picked up, but that as smoking has become a fringe other causes proportion naturally increases.
So we have all these irritants in the air, and we have the most airtight homes in human history by orders of magnitude… what did we think was going to happen? That you could slap a laughably undersized carbon filter on an air purifier and call it good? Or that a limited number of too-small ERV systems would help? At some point we will need a radical rethinking of our approach to health and safety of new technology.
There is an entire article linked here, saying that they, Scientists, don't know what the causes are, even though they're actively trying to search for a cause.
Imagine if there was an environmental science forum that sat around pontificating with mistrust about software performance. Chances are people would mock it and marvel at their ignorance.
But here we have a forum of (largely) software developers looking at the experts on environmental health and going, "Why are they so stupid? It's obviously <radon> <modern junk> <etc>".
It's not limited to environmental health, it affects all kinds of articles on social sciences. Commentary full of people who aren't domain experts wondering why the domain experts are all so clueless because Mr Software Engineer has it all figured out.
More to your point, I think the modern idea that people must stay confined to their specialty is ridiculous. Not long ago it was common to have intelligent discussions - or do serious work - on topics where you had no formal education or experience. All of that occurred without the internet. Look at the early days of, for example, the Manhattan Project. Not a trivial undertaking, and yet many of the men did countless tasks where they had zero training or experience. Look at the history of any scientific field or large engineering project. For all of human history that is how it was: and now if you want to replace a toilet valve, or a lightswitch, or comment about a scientific topic, you must hire someone with the appropriate credentials.
Back to my point - as a matter of fact I do have a professional perspective on the question of indoor air pollutants. Perhaps not the credentials you seek, nevertheless: I develop consumer products for the home, and levels of indoor air pollutants are now high enough - due to precisely the causes I originally mentioned - that they are beginning to cause nasty interactions that destroy the products of my industry via fouling and corrosion. In fact, the professional associations for my industry have written extensively about the scale of the problem and several companies have invested significantly in R&D to identity solutions. In other words, the air we breathe is damaging the things around us; could it not damage our lungs as well? I do not make any absolute statements, but I think a serious discussion should be had and I see no reason that it shouldn’t also happen on HN.
Secondly my point I'm trying to make, is that these aren't "intelligent discussions" nor "serious discussion".
Shunning swathes of social science, often treating their conclusions as either illegitimate ( if they go counter to their preferred narrative ), or as obvious ( if they aren't ).
It's demeaning to "just ask questions" as if they hadn't been considered by the experts of the field.
Secondly: “Scientists” are not some monolithic group. On any subject you can imagine there are scientists claiming they know all, some claiming we know nothing, some with hypothesis A and some with B and some with Z.
Finally… I outlined a reasonable mechanism in my comment (indoor air pollutants increasing by orders of magnitude; home air tightness increasing by orders of magnitude; many of these pollutants are known to increase the risk of lung cancer.) Why not debate the argument itself, instead of making appeals to authority?
I wonder if that's really true.
Radon is a big deal where I live. Most homes have a radon mitigation system which is a 20-watt fan that goes over your sump pump hole, and runs continuously to a vent on the roof.
Barometric pressure, temperature, and HVAC all seem to have some bearing - tightening the house for air leaks actually did a lot of good in keeping levels low. Also, sump pump failures or ground water levels can "push" radon into the house. I dug a deeper sump pit and also put a secondary radon fan to pull air out of my sub-foundation drain pipes to ensure the air below the house is cycled.
Still, in Boulder County, my house will fail its radon test after a 2 hour power outage.
I am an evangelist for continuous radon monitoring, alerts and tests.
Wait, really? Intuitively I would expect the opposite, that a draftier house is better for radon levels indoors
Drafts form either from temperature differential and wind outside pushing in.
Radon coming up from the ground is still heavier than air, so it won't mix in very well if it can't displace anything.
It's not a perfect solution, as air movement from circulation will help it mix in, but a good envelope will help a mitigation system out quite a bit.
With it more sealed so you can get a decent static pressure it is like flushing a clean fluid through a pipe and only really needs a little more than the pipe's volume of fluid to clear it, with it poorly sealed it is more like scooping one cup of water out of a contaminated bucket, then pouring a clean cup of water back in and letting it mix before repeating the process, with the hopeful goal of eventually having an uncontaminated bucket of clean water. It would eventually be clean enough sure, but you might have to go through 1000x the fluid volume to get to a clean enough point.
Technically you could just increase your exhaust fan's power until it creates decent static pressure in even a leaky home, but you would also be exhausting a lot of the energy you put into your climate control system.
I've never seen above 0.7pC/L which is pretty good, although I don't know what proportion of the activity that is there is natural, or how much more it would be without the fan. I'm not sure what the natural radon levels even are in my area, I think the radon fan is just part of code here.
What's the process, usually, adding some special ventilation system to the house?
1. The ventilation isn’t really “in the house” - the fan pulls from below the slab (and exhausts outside) to prevent radon seeping through. 2. Based on the best guess about my home age/area and radon patterns in my house, the slab was probably poured around the furnace, so the mitigation will include disassembling/reassembling my furnace to seal underneath.
> I wonder if that's really true.
That claim is in fact based on extremely poor research methodology. It is made by combining the linear no-threshold model of radiation damage (which contradicts everything we know about cellular repair and hormesis) with evidence from "case-control studies", a kind of retroactive hand-waving that has nothing whatsoever to do with a "controlled trial", despite the name.
[0] https://www.arpansa.gov.au/understanding-radiation/radiation... [1] https://www.arpansa.gov.au/understanding-radiation/radiation...
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2408084121
If I recall correctly it can accumulate more readily in basements, so that's another factor. The house I grew up in had an exhaust system installed due to elevated radon levels.
https://www.arpansa.gov.au/understanding-radiation/radiation...
>In 1990, ARPANSA conducted a nationwide survey of more than 3300 Australian homes to determine the radiation dose to the Australian population from exposure to natural background radiation, including radon. Based on this survey, the average concentration of radon in Australian homes is about 10 Bq m⁻³. This is less than in many other countries and compares to a global average indoor value of 40 Bq m⁻³. Average radon levels in Australian homes are only a little larger than the radon levels in outside air and are of minimal concern to health.
We tested for radon when we bought our house and found the levels to be very high.
Fortunately the builders had installed a passive mitigation system so all we had to do was install a fan.
(One of many cases mentioned in the article.)
Before you head for the lab, to start researching "why" - maybe you should tighten up the standards for diagnosis and testing? That could enormously improve the qualities & quantities of life for a huge number of patients.
Natural gas burning inside with poor ventilation (solve by pushing electric everything, paid for by carbon tax paid by big oil)
ICE car exhaust (solve with EVs, subsidised by carbon tax paid by big oil)
Second hand smoke (ban smoking in public and within XX distance of a child, and make support for parents to quit free from cigarette taxes)
Microplastics in the water and the air including tyre dust (start regulating this/coming up with a long term plan to reduce it and filter it out, and put a government subsidy on certified and professionally installed under sink microplastic water filter products… paid for by those who put the plastic there in the first place)
Poor indoor air quality/high VOX (mandate air flow minimum levels for all new builds and make extraction fans for offices a normal requirement, and give tenants something to lobby against their body corporate to improve airflow in uselessly designed buildings since “sick building syndrome” is real but often impossible to know before you sign the papers)
This is a professional medical opinion from scientists that was aired on the news recently in Australia.
Cancers in the 30s, all types, are waaay up.
When I was very young, where I lived, a city of 100000, I would say less than 50% of the people there drove plus most worked in the city they lived in. Now, almost every household has at least 2 autos and most drive at least 10+ (16km) miles to work.
But, I also wonder if this is tied to the general increase in cancers for people under 50.
This was the air you were breathing back then (1, 2, 3).
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...
2. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/SKYSCRAP...
3. https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/wp-content/uploads/satev...
Just, so, gross.
And it truly is the _vast majority_ of cars going by with exactly one person in them. So wasteful, so much pollution, so hot... frustrating.
It's fuel efficient. It's not big. It's a decent people mover. It has more cargo space than many SUVs that are larger. Is low enough the roof racks are easily accessible. Added a hitch, mostly for more cargo space.
I'm starting to wonder if I've done more "truck things" than many of the people with trucks in the neighbourhood at this point. If I ever need to haul more, I'll just rent a truck/van for that moment in time. I'm not going to buy one to drive to the office.
You don't need a gigantic beast. A kei truck is more than adequate for the vast majority of what people use pickup trucks for.
A kei truck is a supplementary vehicle at best... so you'd still want a car, and then you have two vehicles. Lots of people don't want two vehicles when a single vehicle that covers both use cases exists.
Sure, nobody needs a gigantic beast, but for people in lots of parts of the country, the downsides to owning a larger vehicle aren't that big. Why buy a smaller pickup truck when a full size truck is just a few thousand dollars more (in a country where the average new vehicle sells for $50k), gets similar fuel economy figures, and has more room in general?
Back when SUV's started to get popular, this was a trend they noticed as well. Back then, it was met with a lot of guffaws about yuppie housewives and all that. (This was before the term Karen had been coined)
The root cause is plain and simple - your wife just needs to learn to drive better, then she wouldn't be scared regardless of her seating position. No amount of high position can compensate for overall crappy driving style and corresponding fear of driving and thus the 'need' for high SUVs. To keep her distance from car in front of her (which is basically why she feels the need to be sitting so high so she can anticipate braking earlier), and quick reflexes on the brake while 100% focusing on situation around her (which she should have anyway since there are other bad situations where higher positions doesn't give any advantage, in contrary).
I went the other way - very low-positioned bmws, with correspondingly much better and quicker handling, of course much lower consumption and much more rolling resistance. Its wagon so trunk space is massive and if not enough I can put on biggest Thule roof rack and still fit in our garage and low entry points like store garages (1.9m is the limit with it, never saw entry limiter lower than that). My wife learned to drive properly over time and has exactly same opinion, aka suv never ever because why.
Suvs and variants, at least those who don't go offroad (so most of them) should be reserved for physically challenged people due to easier entry/exit to/from vehicle. And that's about it for real objective advantages, the rest are just emotions which adults should manage to their advantage, not the opposite.
Am I fixing the problem by driving an SUV myself? No, but I totally understand why people feel safer in them.
Correct, but unfortunately such arguments are like shouting into the wind. Bike helmets are the same. People just cannot be convinced that improving one's safety is 99% down to one's riding style and not a thin piece of padding on their head.
So, yet another case of cars not being designed for women (for those that don't get what I'm going on about - crash test dummies are modeled after men, leading to significantly worse crash outcomes for women [1])... it's infuriating.
Even a "small" BMW i3, a car one might think to be suitable for people of lower height - my wife tried out one at carsharing, and even despite the seat being all up front, she was barely able to drive the thing. The Mercedes Sprinter we rented for our last moves? Once she understood how the dimensions of that thing worked, absolutely easy going.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/nhtsa-female-crash-dummies-vehicl...
My mini-suv seems to be getting about double the gas milage my old normal car did.
We're talking like literal orders, plural, of magnitude when comparing between the generally no cats automotive fleet of the 70s with anything since the advent of both cats and computerized fuel injection. Any old timer can tell you of the smog that used to be frequent in urban areas. These days it's mostly gone, at least when California or Canada (depending on where you live) isn't on fire.
(INB4 people who are a net negative to public discourse construe this comment as some sort of endorsement for everyone driving everywhere all the time)
It's crazy how efficient and low emissions our engines today are, compared to 50 years ago.
In more ways than one. A lot of "poor" countries have life expectancies comparable to the US. The big difference is they don't have a culture of every single person needing to own a car that spray carcinogens all over the place.
Obesity, which is its own massive wrecking ball, is also significantly lower in these "poor" countries.
The arrogance of laughing at poor people riding bikes to work when that would create a drastically healthier society.
Imagine if you had a 4km x 4km city with no consumer vehicles ( emergency and delivery exempt). Just walking paths and bike lanes. The people living there would be drastically healthier.
Or hell, it might just be luck. A lot of smokers live until there 80s enjoying a fat cigar once a day
Many groups have tried to conquer and unify India over the millennia (Mughals, various Hindu kings, the British), but they always lose steam/interest before they can finish the job.
It is (in modern times) also an environment where you’re not allowed to murder your neighbor (generally) or the other factions will gang up on you.
It’s the perfect environment for backstabbing, corruption, and performative changes without actual changes.
No one has ever successfully forced a coherent unifying identity on India - the British just papered over things, and as long as they got paid, rarely attempted to exert more low level control.
China, in contrast, had the Qin dynasty/Qin Shi Huang, which not only did unify China into a coherent ethnic-religious state, but also had periods of clear ‘murder anyone who didn’t fit in exactly as the emperor wanted’.
This resulted in 90%+ of China being from a single genetic group (Han Chinese), having the same religious background (or lack thereof), and being used to being steered from a single central gov’t control point (the central Court in Beijing). The CCP only temporarily diverged from the same historic pattern.
China has a lot of ‘local control’ diversity on the ground (Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin are very different languages for example, and say to day life in Southern China vs Eastern or Northern China is very different), but is very used to the central gov’t coming in and stomping everyone into the ground if anyone messes with things the central gov’t cares about. And everyone is generally going to agree they are all Chinese first, instead of say Shanghainese.
Still not a trivial thing to ‘steer’, but China is more steerable.
Japan, being a relatively small Island that isn’t in the middle of any major trading routes or the like, has had even more extreme levels of ‘be like how I say or else’ applied over time, also from a central gov’t/emperor/shogun, and has a far more extreme version of ‘be like everyone else’ than China. They’re even more ethnically consistent - 95% ish.
To the point they seem to ‘lock in’ to one mindset even at a really extreme level, then ‘flip’ more in lockstep.
To some extent heavy metals are being distributed in the air by the wheels in heavily populated areas.
This can be greatly improved by limiting traffic in heavily populated areas. Trump removed such a rule from New York City recently for reasons I can not comprehend.
Many european cities have improved air quality successfully and hence increased life expectancy by limiting car traffic.
The majority of air pollution of particles however, is caused by the industry (the companies making those cars, among others).
In fact, you are a worse polluter of the earth today if you buy a new Tesla than if you kept driving your 1980s gasoline car due to the amount of pollution created by producing a single vehicle.
Once a large enough portion of the population were no longer smokers, it was inevitable that many lung cancers would be in smokers. What is important in all of this is not "large sounding numbers" of people, but the percentage of the population, as a whole, who suffer from lung cancer. And a further confounding factor life expectancy today vs even 30 years ago (the longer one lives, the more likely it is for cancer of any kind to develop).
When I moved from that apartment after 4 years. I was shocked by the amount of black dust covering everything. from the walls to the shelves and floors. I think it was all tire pollution so switching to 100% electric won't mitigate.
It was pretty shocking and I wondered how much i increased my risk for lung cancer or other cancers.
I only realized later that all the black dust everywhere must have been tire particles, when I realized other places DON'T have the black dust. Given the toxicity of tire pollution, it doesn't seem like my reaction was irrational after all. Sucks for all the people that still live there, who may not even realize what's going on.
[1] https://www.hna.de/lokales/kreis-kassel/kreis-kassel-eu-verb...
[2] https://playground-landscape.com/de/article/2033-gesundheits...
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that inhaled microplastics were causing an increase in lung cancers. We know they end up deep in the lungs.
Both of this is compounded by the fact that people living next to major roads tend to be poorer, so there is a socio-economic issue present as well.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/25/living-n...
[2] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/presse/pressemitteilungen/ver...
Not really unless the car comes with HEPA filters [1], which most don't.
[1] https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/resources/documents/car-bus-exposure-...
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2. Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) •Purpose: Byproducts from extender oils and carbon black. •Danger: Known carcinogens, mutagens, and endocrine disruptors. Persist in the environment and can leach from tire wear particles. •Status: Regulated in the EU; linked to air and soil contamination.
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3. Benzothiazoles (e.g., 2-mercaptobenzothiazole) •Purpose: Vulcanization accelerators. •Danger: Toxic to aquatic organisms, possibly carcinogenic, and bioaccumulative. •Status: Found in tire leachate and considered a contaminant of emerging concern.
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Nothing definitive about harm to human welfare yet, as far as I know.
https://theconversation.com/one-of-the-biggest-microplastic-...
And it links to this further article on 'tire toxicity':
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/toxic-tires-6ppdq-auto-pollutio...
"When tires wear on pavement, 6PPD is released. It reacts with ozone to become a different chemical, 6PPD-q, which can be extremely toxic — so much so that it has been linked to repeated fish kills in Washington state.... Testing by a British company, Emissions Analytics, found that a car's tires emit 1 trillion ultrafine particles per kilometer driven — from 5 to 9 pounds of rubber per internal combustion car per year....
a team of researchers, led by scientists at Washington State University and the University of Washington, who were trying to determine why coho salmon returning to Seattle-area creeks to spawn were dying in large numbers.... in 2020 they announced they'd found the culprit: 6PPD....
Tests by Emissions Analytics have found that tires produce up to 2,000 times as much particle pollution by mass as tailpipes."
also, they would periodocially dump "more dirt" onto the field, once every year or so. Not sure if they vacuumed the old stuff up or just dumped more on top, but sometimes you would go out there and there would be a huge pile of rubber in the middle, which I guess got spread out later
A number of schools, and public facilities, near me have switched to plastic pitches for this reason. I'm not advocating for them but there is a rationale.
BTW it's not just that being very muddy makes it difficult to play on but that using the pitch in that state trashes the grass.
The null hypothesis is "it's something in the air", but with the increase in non-lung cancers in young people[1] noted over the past decade, it's entirely possible it's something else, and lung tissue is one of the susceptible ones to whatever it is.
[1] https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2025...
> Resuspension of dust already on the road’s surface is the most significant contributor to non-exhaust PM by far, however these particles are difficult to characterize and manage because they could come from anywhere before landing on the road. Brakes are the next most significant source, and may also be particularly hazardous because of their small size and high metal content. Tires contribute the least, but they release large amounts of particles which act as microplastics in ecosystems.
But they do have no tailpipe emissions, so they're still kicking out a lot less air pollution than a combustion-fuelled vehicle with not just the carbon dioxide but the myriad of pollutants which lower urban air quality so much.
Ultimately, a less dusty tyre would be a good thing, but the significant impact we can make now is to continue the EV transition knowing that like all solutions it's imperfect and we also need to use fewer vehicles and keep looking for better options.
I wish I was joking. But I'm not. I'm seeing 12 year olds with vapes quite regularly. They're so addicted, taking sneaky hits on the bus or on the train. Even when smoking was cool back when I was a kid, I didn't know of anyone that young who was that addicted.
Wikipedia does raise some concerning points about nicotine:
> Although nicotine is classified as a non-carcinogenic substance, it can still promote tumor growth and metastasis. It induces several processes that contribute to cancer progression, including cell cycle progression, epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition, migration, invasion, angiogenesis, and evasion of apoptosis.
Asian American women are getting lung cancer despite never smoking
I have no idea if nonstick pans are associated with higher lung cancer rates but even if they are I have no reason to think that asian americans are more likely to use nonstick pans, so the fact that it is easy to overheat nonstick pans in general might not explain asian americans having higher lung cancer rates.
https://pfasproject.com/2023/08/25/asian-americans-have-much...
We can catch things early, it shouldn’t be limited to only for smokers.
Couldn't this be secondhand smoke?
In the countries the OP is talking about, people cook over literal fires and fire pits (sometimes enclosed). Even when that happens in the US, unless you are talking about camping, you are likely talking about something like a well vented wood stove or wood stove oven like my grandma had.
An example of what I'm talking about: https://unfccc.int/climate-action/momentum-for-change/financ...
And here's what wood fired stoves look like in the US even 100 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XcuznPQjLs
This is the EPA map for radon risks (zones) in the US:
https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2024-05/radon-zon...
So while before, most lung cancer victims were smokers, we’re at the point where overall risk in the general population causes higher numbers than specific risk in smokers.
Because while most lung cancer victims were smokers, most smokers never got lung cancer.
Fairly typical fate for heavier smokers around.
Well, that tells a lot: overfocusing on a single cause because it is obvious and major. Well, let us hope the medical science learns this lesson.
ETA: not that I blame them, it is a reasonable attitude but not so good in science.
Site is flagged as it hosts pedop. material.
I suspect certain perfumes may be causing it.
Another potential explanation is cleaning products.
I think these are both far more likely than perfume, as there is a much stronger link between AQI and lung cancer than perfume and lung cancer (if there is any at all).
Cleaning products is a possibility.
Incense is another one --- those who burn incense may not consider it smoking, but any burning plant matter is going to emit similar products of combustion.
Because hypocrisy does not live long. They blamed cigarettes for lung cancer, ignoring all other causes. "Oh, you have cancer but didn't smoke ? You surely were inhaling cigarettes smoke from somebody else.". We can polute further with no repercursions.
But like half of smokers ultimately end up with COPD, which can be like taking years to drown to death.