[Greenbuilding] US RADON Health Advisory RE: Air quality in straw bale houses

[Carmine Vasile]

Rob: Do you test indoor air for Radon in Canada?     Here in America, it's the leading "completely preventable" cause of death from lung cancer in non-smokers, yet not one of my four (4) lung doctors ever heard of the January, 2005 SURGEON GENERAL HEALTH ADVISORY ON RADON: "Indoor radon is the second-leading cause of lung cancer in
the United States and breathing it over prolonged periods can present a
significant health risk to families all over the country. It's important to
know that this threat is completely preventable. Radon can be detected with a
simple test and fixed through well-established venting techniques."       In his Radon Advisory, the Surgeon General General failed to point the finger at EPA officials
that specifically excluded Radon from its Radionuclides Rule of 1976
thereby causing thousands of “completely preventable” deaths for 38 years in areas where the major source of Radon is radioactive groundwater from hundreds of nuclear facilities & Superfund sites like Long Island, NY.         The EPA Bar Graph in its Citizen’s Guide to Radon @ www.epa.gov/radon/pubs/citguide.html indicates RADON caused 21,000 deaths per
year in 2005; compared to 17,400
for Drunk Driving --- yet mothers are not MADD about RADON poisoning their children.

How many mothers know a Radon level of
4 .0 pCi/L-Air is equal to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day from the moment they bring their babies home from the hospital?How many even know 4 .0 pCi/L means 8.88 Radon atoms per minute are creating radioactive Polonium while ejecting high energy Alpha particles --- and it takes only one Alpha particle to damage the
DNA in a cell. If damaged cells can't be repaired, they can mutate into cancer
cells and, at a Radon level of 4 .0 pCi/L, 7 out of 1000 non-smokers could get lung cancer. For
people who smoke, the figure would be higher; 62 per 1000. Breathing air containing only 26.7 trillionths of a
microgram per liter of Radon-222 (one of Radon's 39 isotopes) has the same lung cancer risk as
smoking a pack of
cigarettes a day.Radon’s lung-cancer risk from inhaling only 9 Alpha particles a
minute (12,787 a day) is equivalent to smoking 20 cigarettes a day
and could give 1 in 142
non-smokers lung cancer; 1 in 16 smokers.Similarly, inhaling 22 Alpha particles per minute (31,680/day)
from 10 pCi/L of Radon can result in a lung-cancer rate of 1 in 7 smokers and 1 in 55 non-smokers;
comparable to current U.S. Melanoma skin
cancer rates of 1 in 55  -- up from 1 in 1,500 since 1935; yet the Sun still shines as bright.Page 2 of the attachment corresponds to my home town and indicates 10-liter
per minute (LPM) showers have been bombarding thousands of people with between 5,439 to 6,127 Alpha
particles per minute for at least a decade, yet New York has never set a requirement to aerate tap water; unlike Vermont, which mandates aeration if a well has only 5 pCi/L-Water of Radon  -- even after a 1990 Radon study showed thousands of public wells had huge amounts of Radon-222. (http://www.gfxtechnology.com/1990-Rn.pdf)Radon is known to cause skin cancer too.How many people do you know have had both Skin & Lung Cancer? Breast cancer from Gamma Rays emitted by Radon-222's most deadly daughter: Lead-210, which has a half life of 22 years compared to 3.8 days for Radon-222?
Best regards,Dr. Carmine F. VasileTo: greenbuilding at lists.bioenergylists.org
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 13:03:30 -0400
From: ArchiLogic at yahoo.ca
Subject: Re: [Greenbuilding] Air quality in straw bale houses




On Mon, 23 Jun 2014 20:14:49 -0400, Stephen Collette <stephen at yourhealthyhouse.ca> wrote:

I have done some air quality testing on my own accord in a couple of houses for differing reasons. 
Actual studies? Hmm. Not off the top of my head, but more importantly is what she is concerned about. 

------- Forwarded message -------
From: "Barbara Jones" <barbara at strawworks.co.uk>

Does anyone know of any recent tests on this subject in strawbale houses?

[Looking up] Nothing on the top of my head either.

I find that the majority of homeowners usually don't even think about IAQ unless there is something wrong with it and it's gotten to the point that there have been noticeable deleterious effects to occupant health.
I would go so far as to venture that poor IAQ in residential buildings is probably the norm rather than exceptional simply because proper ventilation design /performance verification is the exception rather than the norm.
As such, I would venture that if there are any recent IAQ tests done on SB houses, the results would not likely be flattering and not likely the sort of test results that Ms. Jones was hoping to hear about.
ie It's unlikely that homeowners (SB or toherwise) would be doing IAQ tests on houses that are not experiencing issues.

-- === * ===
Rob Tom
Kanata, Ontario, Canada

A r c h i L o g i c  at  Y a h o o  dot C A
(manually winnow the chaff from my edress if you hit "reply")
_______________________________________________
Greenbuilding mailing list
to Send a Message to the list, use the email address
Greenbuilding at bioenergylists.org

to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page
http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/greenbuilding_lists.bioenergylists.org 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/greenbuilding_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20140626/783caf0f/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Cancer_Risks_A-12.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 310586 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/greenbuilding_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20140626/783caf0f/attachment.pdf>