A foundation dedicated to spreading the view that some radiation can be good for you has declared January as “Radon Health Benefits Awareness Month.” Through a public relations release online at prweb.com, the XLNT Foundation disputes Environmental Protection Agency claims that residential radon can cause lung cancer.
“Considerable amount of evidence indicates higher residential radon levels prevent lung cancer,” says the PR release. “Though the EPA says that radon is responsible for about 21,000 lung cancer deaths every year in the USA, it is clearly wrong,” claims the release.
The issue is important in Jefferson County because several area mines operate as health mines, claiming the low dose radiation found in the mine is beneficial. Visitors are invited to sit in the mines and breathe the air as a means of addressing health issues. And some visitors travel great distances and return year after year to do just that.
Calling the EPA logic behind the idea that low dose radiation can be harmful “simplistic,” the release asks, “Can one predict the health effect of a single aspirin by assuming it is proportional to the effect of taking 100 aspirins? Of course not.” Expert debates over the issue, however, make it clear that the jury is still out.
In a “Point-Counterpoint” published in the US National Library of Medicine by the National Institutes of Health, viewpoints diverge. Mohan Doss, with a Ph. D. in Physics from Carnegie-Mellon University and years of research positions, argues that low dose radiation boosts the immune system.
“We can conclude confidently that low-dose radiation is beneficial, not harmful, from both mechanistic and epidemiological considerations,” he maintains. Doss is associated with the XLNT Foundation behind the PR release. On the other hand, Mark P. Little, with experience as Senior Investigator at the Radiation Epidemiology Branch of the National Cancer Institute, says cancer is not the only risk from radiation.
“Excess risks of circulatory disease and cataracts have also been observed in a number of groups exposed to low or moderate doses,” he states. Whether people should be mitigating low levels of radiation in residences as the EPA recommends or are actually raising the risk of lung cancer by doing that, as the PR release claims, is far from settled.
To read the National Institutes of Health Point-Counterpoint on the issue of low dose radiation, visit ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4109571/. The entire PR release is available online at prweb. com/releases/2016/12/prweb13949438.htm
