Radon-Ease, Inc.

Well maybe not so brief, or new. It turns out that the written history and it’s relationship to disease goes back to the 1400s! We didn’t know what cancer was nor did we know what radiation was but people were noticing a correlation between something in the ground and illnesses that were inflicting miners that worked there.

With our current understanding of radon we now know that many homes actually have far more radon in them than what many miners are being exposed to.

Below is a link to a history lesson about radon delivered at a National meeting of State Radiation Protection Professionals. Many of us will find it fascinating, others may choose to use it as a sleep aid.

http://www.crcpd.org/Pubs/Radon/HistoryOfRadon.pdf

Curiously there are some “Health Benefits” described in this history. They are benefits best compared to….let’s say you go to the hospital in extreme pain for a broken leg and the doctors give you morphine for the pain, the pain subsides and in many cases disappears, temporarily of course, did the morphine fix your leg? No! It merely deadened the receptors that let you feel the pain….much the same way that radon is used in mineral springs or radium springs to deaden the pain associated with some types of arthritis. The radioactive decay that enters your bloodstream as radon while it is decaying is deadening the receptors that let you fell the pain caused by some of those types of arthritis. This process may also be compared to radiation therapy to kill cancer. Radiation causes cancer but in a extremely high, very directed fashion for VERY SHORT duration it also kills cancer. Should radon be used as a pain killer??? Consult your physician on this one. I’m guessing the answer is no. Dr Glen Lykken at University Of North Dakota has done some interesting research into this subject.

Wally

It seems that for every week that passes I go to a home that has been previously tested for radon, found to have high radon levels and mitigated (or remediated, same thing). We inspect the system to insure that it was correctly installed and hasn’t incurred any damage from natural or man made causes and appears to be in good working order. They typically tend to be well installed systems but in many cases people assumed the radon had been taken care of because the mitigation system was installed, but never had a post mitigation test.  Well, in many cases the system isn’t working. It appears to be, because the fan is working but somewhere along the line the system either didn’t perform properly from the start or it slowly lost it’s effectiveness because the fan slowly wore out, somewhat akin to a car that slowly lost it’s pep. The problem is that without the post mitigation test we don’t know if the system never worked properly or if it just wore out.

EPA recommends post mitigation testing and that that testing be done by a company that is not the company doing the mitigation, this in order to alleviate the potential conflict of interest that may arise by a company testing for radon then mitigating, or similarly by mitigating a radon problem then performing a clearance test on their own work. This recommendation comes straight from the Consumers Guide to Radon Reduction which may be found at www.epa.gov/pubs/cons-guide.html

Below is an excerpt from that guidance.

Consumer’s Guide to Radon Reduction

In the below link are some highlights from the meeting of the 33 nation members of the World Health Organization (WHO)  recommending that after years of studies the recommended action level for reducing radon be lowered to 2.7 pCi/l or 100 Bq/M ³. This is about 30% lower than the EPA recommended action level of 4 pCi/L. This new action level has not been adopted by the EPA.

The below link is  not particularly light reading so do not drive or operate heavy equipment while reading it. It may well be recommended by some medical professionals as a sleep aid.

http://www.aarst.org/images/US_Highlights_WHO_Rn_Handbook.pdf