Mateo Olmos, a student at Oregon State University, worked with the American Lung Association and the Northwest Radon Coalition to make this educational video to educate about the health risks of radon.
January is Radon Action Month. So what is radon? Radon is a naturally occurring radioactive gas that exists in soil and rock under many of the homes in which we live. You can’t see, smell or taste it. Though some areas have higher levels of radon naturally, just knowing what the average in your area is doesn’t help you know whether your individual home has high levels of radon. The radon gas can become trapped in buildings and increase to unhealthy levels. When we inhale radon gas, small radioactive particles are trapped in our lungs and release alpha particles, which are tiny bursts of energy that can damage our DNA and increase our risk of lung cancer. Radon is a significant public health problem in the United States, since it causes about 15,000-20,000 lung cancer deaths per year based on EPA and National Cancer Institute estimates. The WHO estimates that around 15% of lung cancers worldwide are caused by radon.
As a lung doctor who cares for patients with lung cancer, I have definitely seen that we do not ask enough about radon exposure in homes. By the time someone is meeting me in the clinic with a lung cancer, we are missing the intervention that should have taken place years before. How do we increase awareness about radon and reduce the risks in the population? This is exactly where the field of public health is so important. Many of us have become more aware of our local and national public health agencies with the COVID19 pandemic, but public health is important for so many things. Its successes are often invisibile- who notices the prevented lung cancer? The prevented heart attack? The hospitalization or death from COVID that didn’t happen? Public health is a vital part of the upstream focus I do here on Air Health Our Health, so for this Radon Action Month, I wanted to highlight two individuals in the public health pipeline- a teacher and student of public health. You can listen to the January 10th podcast episode to hear their enthusiasm for public health in general and in particular, how to use public health to save lives with radon.
For this podcast episode, I was joined by Dr. Karen Elliott of Oregon State University as well as Mateo Olmos, one of her students.
I often get a great deal of joy out of teaching medical students, residents and fellows who are learning about the fields of medicine or pulmonary and critical care. It was lovely to hear Dr. Elliot’s enthusiasm for her field and Mateo’s developing passion for the profession of public health. I also appreciate how Mateo shared how he ended up almost accidentally in public health- so many long and important careers start in a similar fashion. I couldn’t choose what I liked in med school because I loved almost everything, and internal medicine seemed to offer me a broad array of options. I also couldn’t choose between caring for patients in the clinic or the hospital, and ended up in pulmonary and critical care, which is now the career of my dreams, though the last few years in particular have been extraordinarily difficult. The COVID19 pandemic has not only challenged those of us in critical care, it has demonstrated the vital importance of our public health officers and departments valiantly working to keep people from needing our last line of defense in the ICU. They have helped save many lives, though we have still lost too many. We need more people in public health to tackle important issues we discuss on this podcast, from pandemics to air pollution to tobacco to radon.
To Do:
- Ensure your home is tested for radon– test every 2 years if you have not mitigated radon and after home upgrades. More information here
- Watch and share Mateo’s video educating about the importance of radon testing and action.
- The EPA estimates around 1 in 5 schools may have elevated radon levels in at least one frequently-occupied room. Find out if your child’s school has been tested for radon and whether it has been mitigated, particularly if close to or over the EPA action level of 4.0 pCi/L
- If you are a health professional, learn more about patient outreach with this guide to radon.
- For more on the science of radon and how we know it causes cancer, listen to last year’s January podcast with Professor Bill Fields.
- To hear a personal story about someone affected by radon, listen to the podcast with the home inspector Will Graff on Season 1 episode 22.
- Learn more about the Northwest Radon Coalition here, and consider a donation to the American Lung Association here.
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