Studies of uranium miners on the US Colorado Plateau have identified associations between exposure to radon progeny and risk of lung cancer. This study added 15 years of mortality follow-up for the 4,137 miners (primarily white or American Indian) in the Colorado Plateau cohort. The cohort experienced 209 new lung cancer deaths. For white miners, the standardized mortality ratio for lung cancer...

Domestic, low-level exposure to radon gas is considered a major environmental lung-cancer hazard involving DNA damage to bronchial cells by a particles from radon progeny. At domestic exposure levels, the relevant bronchial cells are very rarely traversed by more than one a particle, whereas at higher radon levels—at which epidemiological studies in uranium miners allow lung-cancer risks to be ...

Gioacchino Failla was initially appointed to operate the radon plant at Memorial Hospital in 1916. What to most people would have been a part-time temporary position was to him a career. He was not satisfied to simply fabricate radon seeds, he wanted to understand the physics and biology of the radiation emitted by the progeny of radium. His was not the first medical physics group in the United...