Quote:
Originally Posted by Ashartus
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  |
I'm not really sure they do make a worst case estimate, I think the EU is lower. Given the prevalence and realities of natural radon, from what I remember reading they set the level aware of the practicalities as well. I think. Someone else can do the research.