Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
When I was looking into my radon issue, I did find some legitimate discussions around stuff like the protective radon dose, such as this one:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0325122807.htm
The mechanisms describe do seam to make sense and have validity, but having monitored my radon I also know it varies wildly and even if your goal was to somehow have its protective dose in your home, there is no way to do it predictably. And the evidence it is harmful at higher doses seems pretty strong, so the current recommendations make sense, even if there are some "ya, but's" around. |
When agencies like Health Canada are setting limits/guidelines they follow the precautionary principle. There is a lot of noise in the data, e.g. your probability of getting cancer from radon exposure would be influenced by how much time you spend in the basement, genetic susceptibility, health/lifestyle, etc., and you also have other potential causes of lung cancer. So you don't exactly get a nice clean data set giving you a straight line on a graph relating radon concentration to cancer risk. They make a near-worst case estimate based on the best interpretation they can do from the data. So really the interpretation of these limits should be "if I am below the limit, there is no indication in current science I am at risk; if I am above the limit we don't know for sure."
Guidelines like this are also updated infrequently so they don't always reflect the absolute latest science. I haven't kept up with radon research enough myself to know whether emerging science merits a re-evaluation, digging into the research in that much detail is more work than I want to do when I'm not getting paid to do it
