January is Radon Awareness Month

Abstract

Welcome to Public Health Moment from the University of Minnesota. January is Radon awareness month. Radon is a colorless, tasteless, and odorless radioactive gas that can cause lung cancer. In fact, Radon kills more than 21,000 Americans each year. Peter Raynor, an associate professor of environmental health at the University of Minnesota, says high levels of radon are most commonly found in basements. He recommends that homeowners test for radon. <Raynor: “Probably the best thing to do is to purchase a short-term test kit that you can get from a city or county or at most home improvement stores. And these are kits that usually allow you to make a test over the course of maybe three days and send the sample to a company that will analyze the result – all for mostly less than $10 in most cases. “> Raynor said the winter is a good time to do the testing. If radon levels exceed certain levels, he said the EPA recommends that mitigation be performed. <Raynor: “And there are contractors who do that work that are certified by the National Environmental Health Association and work with the Minnesota Department of Health. “My own home required mitigation back in the early 2000s when I tested it and I had kind of a complicated system I needed to put in and the costs were somewhere a little less than $1,500 to be done. But my system was a little more complicated than most.”> For Public Health Moment, I’m Mark Engebretson.