17 ms·
Many lung cancers are now in nonsmokers
- alexcos 1y agoNon-paywall: https://archive.ph/nsMoH https://archive.ph/nsMoH
- jmclnx 1y agoNot being a scientist of any kind, I fully believe it is fossil fuel emissions, mainly from autos. When I was very young, where I lived, a city of 100000, I would say less than 50% of the people there drove plus most worked in the city they lived in. Now, almost every household has at least 2 autos and most drive at least 10+ (16km) miles to work. But, I also wonder if this is tied to the general increase in cancers for people under 50.
- 0points 1y agoModern cars should be equipped with a catalysator, making the majority of pollution to be Co2, worsening the global warming. To some extent heavy metals are being distributed in the air by the wheels in heavily populated areas. This can be greatly improved by limiting traffic in heavily populated areas. Trump removed such a rule from New York City recently for reasons I can not comprehend. Many european cities have improved air quality successfully and hence increased life expectancy by limiting car traffic. The majority of air pollution of particles however, is caused by the industry (the companies making those cars, among others). In fact, you are a worse polluter of the earth today if you buy a new Tesla than if you kept driving your 1980s gasoline car due to the amount of pollution created by producing a single vehicle.
- danielbln 1y agoParticulate matter is still a huge problem, mainly produced by tires and break pads, but also road abrasion. In terms of pure engine exhaust, catalysts don't do much here, you'd need a particulate filter, which not all cars have. So, cars still a problem wrt cancer, as particulate matter is carcinogenic.
- uzj100 1y agoEuropean cities were especially bad because the EU pushed diesels while having significantly less emissions controls than gas vehicles until the mid 2000s. Most of the vehicles impacted by ULEZ are those same diesels.
- codyb 1y agoI know no one's ever going to change their ways cause of the increasingly evident ravages of climate change but I swear I feel like throwing rocks at the big SUVs rolling by with exactly one person in them during the heat domes here in NYC. Just, so, gross. And it truly is the _vast majority_ of cars going by with exactly one person in them. So wasteful, so much pollution, so hot... frustrating.
- RajT88 1y agoI get it. My wife drives a big SUV. She is a small lady, and says the car let's her see the road better and overall feel more safe. Back when SUV's started to get popular, this was a trend they noticed as well. Back then, it was met with a lot of guffaws about yuppie housewives and all that. (This was before the term Karen had been coined)
- QuercusMax 1y agoBut she's making everyone else less safe by driving in her tank-mobile. Those are much more deadly to pedestrians, cyclists, and those in smaller vehicles.
- kccqzy 1y agoSome people are selfish. It's not illegal to be selfish.
- QuercusMax 1y agoIt can be morally wrong, however.
- kccqzy 1y agoThat's a problem of the legislators: identifying which immoral activities should be made illegal.
- 1y ago
- 999900000999 1y agoOhh it's definitely cars. In more ways than one. A lot of "poor" countries have life expectancies comparable to the US. The big difference is they don't have a culture of every single person needing to own a car that spray carcinogens all over the place. Obesity, which is its own massive wrecking ball, is also significantly lower in these "poor" countries. The arrogance of laughing at poor people riding bikes to work when that would create a drastically healthier society. Imagine if you had a 4km x 4km city with no consumer vehicles ( emergency and delivery exempt). Just walking paths and bike lanes. The people living there would be drastically healthier. Or hell, it might just be luck. A lot of smokers live until there 80s enjoying a fat cigar once a day
- SchemaLoad 1y agoIt's honestly such awakening experience to see videos or visit these "poor" low GDP, stagnant economy countries and see their streets are full of happy, healthy people out walking, talking with each other. Kids out playing on the street, old people dancing in the parks. And then see our rich cities where everyone sits in traffic scoffing McDonalds raging out at other people doing the same. Huffing in diesel exhaust and tire microplastics.
- lazide 1y agoEh, visit a big city in India for a third view.
- SchemaLoad 1y agoHave to wonder what happened differently between countries like China, Japan, and India. I'm not an expert but yeah there is something more to it. Better managed government perhaps?
- lazide 1y agoIndian society is a non-homogenous mix of thousands of different coherent factions, with different languages, clear ethnic/genetic differences, identities, etc. all vying for control. Many groups have tried to conquer and unify India over the millennia (Mughals, various Hindu kings, the British), but they always lose steam/interest before they can finish the job. It is (in modern times) also an environment where you’re not allowed to murder your neighbor (generally) or the other factions will gang up on you. It’s the perfect environment for backstabbing, corruption, and performative changes without actual changes. No one has ever successfully forced a coherent unifying identity on India - the British just papered over things, and as long as they got paid, rarely attempted to exert more low level control. China, in contrast, had the Qin dynasty/Qin Shi Huang, which not only did unify China into a coherent ethnic-religious state, but also had periods of clear ‘murder anyone who didn’t fit in exactly as the emperor wanted’. This resulted in 90%+ of China being from a single genetic group (Han Chinese), having the same religious background (or lack thereof), and being used to being steered from a single central gov’t control point (the central Court in Beijing). The CCP only temporarily diverged from the same historic pattern. China has a lot of ‘local control’ diversity on the ground (Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin are very different languages for example, and say to day life in Southern China vs Eastern or Northern China is very different), but is very used to the central gov’t coming in and stomping everyone into the ground if anyone messes with things the central gov’t cares about. And everyone is generally going to agree they are all Chinese first, instead of say Shanghainese. Still not a trivial thing to ‘steer’, but China is more steerable. Japan, being a relatively small Island that isn’t in the middle of any major trading routes or the like, has had even more extreme levels of ‘be like how I say or else’ applied over time, also from a central gov’t/emperor/shogun, and has a far more extreme version of ‘be like everyone else’ than China. They’re even more ethnically consistent - 95% ish. To the point they seem to ‘lock in’ to one mindset even at a really extreme level, then ‘flip’ more in lockstep. Either xenophobia, or conquering, or chill, or whatever.
- mrob 1y agoI think people underestimate the impact of air pollution because it's so easy to get desensitized to it. Try wearing a respirator with good seal and filter in an urban area for 10 minutes or so. When you take it off you'll probably smell vehicle exhaust you didn't notice before. Human sense of smell tends to tune out constant low level background odors, but they can still be a sign of something harmful.
- Enginerrrd 1y agoFor sure. I live in an area with superb air quality and going down to LA and trying to take a run feels like smoking a couple of cigarettes.
- potato3732842 1y agoI think you grossly underestimate the degree to which cars (and industry that we had yet to kick out to China) were dirtier decades ago than they are today. We're talking like literal orders, plural, of magnitude when comparing between the generally no cats automotive fleet of the 70s with anything since the advent of both cats and computerized fuel injection. Any old timer can tell you of the smog that used to be frequent in urban areas. These days it's mostly gone, at least when California or Canada (depending on where you live) isn't on fire. (INB4 people who are a net negative to public discourse construe this comment as some sort of endorsement for everyone driving everywhere all the time)
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoCars were dirtier but I think there were fewer.
- asdff 1y agoJust look at old photos of city smog in the 1960s. It is night and day different compared to air today even with larger populations in these same metros in some cases.
- uzj100 1y agoYou emit less driving a new Ford F-150 Raptor from Texas to Alaska than using an old school gas lawnmower for two hours. It's crazy how efficient and low emissions our engines today are, compared to 50 years ago.
- asdff 1y agoPollution was way worse in the past. Old pictures of american cities from 50 years ago look like Beijing. We hadn't yet offshored heavy industry by that point and like you said, a larger percent of the metro was living closer to it. And whatever you saw outside was actually better than your air quality inside where these pollutants would accumulate and mix with Dad's cigarette smoke. This was the air you were breathing back then (1, 2, 3). 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/JXONWOW2JII6TINFCYVYVHE4UI.jpg&w=1600&h=900 https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://... 2. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/SKYSCRAPERS_OF_MANHATTAN_VEILED_IN_SMOG_-_NARA_-_548360_edited.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/SKYSCRAP... 3. https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/wp-content/uploads/satevepost/2020-12-02-FORGOTTEN_banner.jpg https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/wp-content/uploads/satev...
- pfortuny 1y ago> The thinking used to be that smoking was “almost the only cause of lung cancer,” said Dr. Maria Teresa Landi, a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. Well, that tells a lot: overfocusing on a single cause because it is obvious and major. Well, let us hope the medical science learns this lesson. ETA: not that I blame them, it is a reasonable attitude but not so good in science.
- SoftTalker 1y agoNot jumping the paywall but I'd guess that because relatively nobody smokes cigarettes anymore, cases of lung cancer with other causes are now more of what doctors are seeing.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoDid jump the paywall — and FTA, regardless, the question remains what causes these non-smoker lung cancers. Issues of environment and heredity are discussed.
- mgh2 1y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466838
- bell-cot 1y ago> Leah Phillips, of Pewee Valley, Ky. Doctors first mistakenly diagnosed her with asthma and then anxiety. Later, they said she had pneumonia. When an oncologist finally told her in 2019 that she had metastatic lung cancer, he gave her six to 12 months to live. “Go home and get your affairs in order,” Ms. Phillips remembered him saying. She was 43, and her children were 9, 13 and 14. (One of many cases mentioned in the article.) Before you head for the lab, to start researching "why" - maybe you should tighten up the standards for diagnosis and testing? That could enormously improve the qualities & quantities of life for a huge number of patients.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Apreche 1y agoIt happens more in women, especially in countries with traditional gender roles. They are doing more cooking in the kitchen where there is fire.
- drdrey 1y agonot in the US: https://www.cdc.gov/united-states-cancer-statistics/publications/lung-cancer-stat-bite.html https://www.cdc.gov/united-states-cancer-statistics/publicat...
- cogman10 1y agoThe US fairly typically has electric stoves. Natural gas stoves are going to be the second most common form of cooking. In the countries the OP is talking about, people cook over literal fires and fire pits (sometimes enclosed). Even when that happens in the US, unless you are talking about camping, you are likely talking about something like a well vented wood stove or wood stove oven like my grandma had. An example of what I'm talking about: https://unfccc.int/climate-action/momentum-for-change/financing-for-climate-friendly/darfur-low-smoke-stoves-project-sudan https://unfccc.int/climate-action/momentum-for-change/financ... And here's what wood fired stoves look like in the US even 100 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XcuznPQjLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XcuznPQjLs
- iancmceachern 1y agoIts pollution, I door and outdoor, chemical and combustion.
- nancyminusone 1y agoEvery time you look up something related to Radon, it's always cited as "the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking" I wonder if that's really true. Radon is a big deal where I live. Most homes have a radon mitigation system which is a 20-watt fan that goes over your sump pump hole, and runs continuously to a vent on the roof.
- abakker 1y agoI bought an Airthings radon monitor because of that stat, and one thing that I have learned is that those mitigation systems do not necessarily work. I have a system that works, but initially, even though my house had a system, it did not reliably keep the radon levels below the federal action level. Barometric pressure, temperature, and HVAC all seem to have some bearing - tightening the house for air leaks actually did a lot of good in keeping levels low. Also, sump pump failures or ground water levels can "push" radon into the house. I dug a deeper sump pit and also put a secondary radon fan to pull air out of my sub-foundation drain pipes to ensure the air below the house is cycled. Still, in Boulder County, my house will fail its radon test after a 2 hour power outage. I am an evangelist for continuous radon monitoring, alerts and tests.
- nancyminusone 1y agoI bought one of those because I have a couple radium clocks and a nice sample of uraninite, which is a tiny collection compared to the real enthusiasts but probably more radioactive stuff than the average person has. Radon is in the decay chain. I've never seen above 0.7pC/L which is pretty good, although I don't know what proportion of the activity that is there is natural, or how much more it would be without the fan. I'm not sure what the natural radon levels even are in my area, I think the radon fan is just part of code here.
- colordrops 1y agoMy house is a raised foundation and they covered all the ground underneath with plastic and put perforated pipes underneath that pull the air out. Radon went down 10x. The company has a 5 year guarantee.
- phkahler 1y agoAre lung cancer rates up? Obviously eliminating or reducing the primary cause will lead to larger percentages of the other causes among cases.
- _mlbt 1y agoOn the surface, the data from the American Lung Association appears to support that hypothesis... https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/lung-cancer-trends-brief/lung-cancer-prevalence-and-incidence-(1) https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/lung-ca...
- bamboozled 1y agoThe graph seems to shoe me it's peaked and is back on the way down ?
- dinfinity 1y agoYes, also, the base rate of smoking in different groups is important to take into consideration to prevent the base rate fallacy. Very few Chinese American women smoke (~2%), so if smokers and non-smokers have the same chance of getting lung cancer not caused by smoking, then the number of non-smokers with lung cancer will be a larger proportion. If 100% of some group would be non-smokers, then obviously 100% of lung cancer cases in that group will be in non-smokers. It's similar to misinterpreting the fact that most people that were hospitalized from Covid-19 were vaccinated.
- blueflow 1y ago> It's similar to misinterpreting the fact that most people that were hospitalized from Covid-19 were vaccinated. Whats the correct interpretation of this?
- d1sxeyes 1y agoIt’s difficult to give any accurate interpretation of, because it’s not a meaningful statistic. For example, every person hospitalised from COVID-19 had consumed water at some point in preceding months. It’s not evidence that water causes severe complications from COVID-19.
- hansonkd 1y agoI used to live by a busy street in a semi-dense part of town. Cars would be going around 45mph. When I moved from that apartment after 4 years. I was shocked by the amount of black dust covering everything. from the walls to the shelves and floors. I think it was all tire pollution so switching to 100% electric won't mitigate. It was pretty shocking and I wondered how much i increased my risk for lung cancer or other cancers.
- tmountain 1y agoI was just talking to my wife about playgrounds using shredded tires as the "mulch". I don't know where the rubber comes from, if and how it is cleaned, or what particulate material it carries, but it seems dubious at best.
- nartho 1y agoThose are known to be particularly awful and dangerous, particularly on hot days, and have been banned in a lot of places.
- nancyminusone 1y agoMy (wealthy) high school had a "turf" field which uses little rubber pellets as the "dirt". Those were probably shredded tires too. During football season you would see them tracked around the school, and if you were a football player or in the band they would show up at your house. also, they would periodocially dump "more dirt" onto the field, once every year or so. Not sure if they vacuumed the old stuff up or just dumped more on top, but sometimes you would go out there and there would be a huge pile of rubber in the middle, which I guess got spread out later
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoRelated from last year, similar asian women angle for whatever reason: Asian American women are getting lung cancer despite never smoking https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40161811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40161811
- John23832 1y agoWok cooking is done at really high temp, which releases gases that are not present in moderate/low temp cooking. Woks trends asian, cooking trends towards women.
- blindriver 1y agoI don’t think you know young Asian American women if you think they are cooking with woks or even cooking in general.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- resoluteteeth 1y agoI don't think most people are actually doing really high temp wok cooking at home regardless of ethnic background. My impression is that, while woks are more common for home cooking in china (not chinese americans, mind you), even there home cooking is usually not done at the high temperatures that restaurants use.
- mschuster91 1y agoIt's easy, incredibly easy, to overheat cookingware unintentionally. Add oil to a pan/wok that's overheated and it decomposes. Additionally, if the cookingware is coated with Teflon, above 300 °C this degrades into toxic compounds and can lead to "teflon flu" [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_fume_fever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_fume_fever
- hulitu 1y ago> Many Lung Cancers Are Now in Nonsmokers. Scientists Want to Know Why Because hypocrisy does not live long. They blamed cigarettes for lung cancer, ignoring all other causes. "Oh, you have cancer but didn't smoke ? You surely were inhaling cigarettes smoke from somebody else.". We can polute further with no repercursions.
- polotics 1y agosmokers thirds FYI: - one third dies a direct smoking related death - one third suffers from smoking related diseases then dies - one third dies of something else, younger than the other two
- pessimizer 1y agoThey used to exaggerate the risks of cancer to smokers. Not many people get lung cancer at all, so 80% of them being smokers still doesn't represent that much risk for an individual smoker. But like half of smokers ultimately end up with COPD, which can be like taking years to drown to death.
- m2f2 1y agoNon-paywall: https://archive.ph/nsMoH https://archive.ph/nsMoH Site is flagged as it hosts pedop. material.
- andai 1y agoThe archive does what now?
- irrational 1y agoThe second leading cause of lung cancer is radon. My high schooler came home and said her science teacher said everyone should do a radon test. I scoffed, but humored her by getting a kit from Home Depot and sending it away to a lab. The results came back very high. So I purchased an electronic radon monitor and it showed almost the exact same results. Well, crap. I installed a radon mitigation system and now the numbers are almost nil.
- Waterluvian 1y agoThe difficult thing for me is that while I believe radon can cause lung cancer, I think products are often sold based on fear. “Second leading cause” doesn’t really mean anything in isolation, does it? What slice of my mortality pie was radon before and after spending $5000? Could I spend $5000 to cut a bigger slice out of it in another way, like eating better or hiring a grizzly bear to make me exercise more often? I think action is better than decision paralysis, but I wish I could make much more informed decisions.
- irrational 1y ago$5000? I got a bunch of quotes and none came anywhere near that high and I live in a home that made it difficult to install the system (finished basement, large footprint, three stories tall, concrete outer walls (ICF), etc. I think the highest was $3,000 and the lowest $1,600. I ended up installing it myself for about $500 in materials.
- Waterluvian 1y agoIt’ll vary considerably. But I just picked a random round number that doesn’t affect the point I’m sharing.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zamadatix 1y ago
- therealdkz 1y ago[dead]
- dontreact 1y agoLung cancer screening should be used more broadly and improved over time in a data driven fashion! We can catch things early, it shouldn’t be limited to only for smokers.
- userbinator 1y agoAmong certain groups of Asian and Asian American women, that share is estimated to be 50 percent or more. I suspect certain perfumes may be causing it.
- diziet_sma 1y agoOr perhaps cooking? Cooking can really spike AQI if ventilation is suboptimal. Another potential explanation is cleaning products. I think these are both far more likely than perfume, as there is a much stronger link between AQI and lung cancer than perfume and lung cancer (if there is any at all).
- userbinator 1y agoProfessional chefs are largely not Asian women, and cook a lot more. Has there been a similar trend in them? Cleaning products is a possibility. Incense is another one --- those who burn incense may not consider it smoking, but any burning plant matter is going to emit similar products of combustion.
- omcnoe 1y agoCommercial kitchens generally are better equipped for proper ventilation.
- EverydayBalloon 1y ago[dead]
- Huxley1 1y agoThis challenges our previous understanding of lung cancer risks, since we’ve always thought it mostly affected smokers. I’m curious how much is due to environmental pollution or other exposures, and how much is genetic. Hopefully, this will push for more research and better screening methods for everyone.
- bena 1y agoNot necessarily. Smoking has become less prevalent. So while before, most lung cancer victims were smokers, we’re at the point where overall risk in the general population causes higher numbers than specific risk in smokers. Because while most lung cancer victims were smokers, most smokers never got lung cancer.
- jajko 1y agoIts not only lung cancer you can get, but others also have elevated risks. My uncle who smoked a pack a day never had any lung issues, but developed lymphatic node cancer in the groin area (and died from heart attack in his 50s, while both his parents lived till 80s in pretty good health but those never smoked). Fairly typical fate for heavier smokers around.
- jader201 1y agoDropping at the root since some threads are talking about radon and whether it’s based on region. This is the EPA map for radon risks (zones) in the US: https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2024-05/radon-zones-map_text_link.pdf https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2024-05/radon-zon...
- ezekiel68 1y agoI'm not sure why this isn't recognized as a great success. Once a large enough portion of the population were no longer smokers, it was inevitable that many lung cancers would be in smokers. What is important in all of this is not "large sounding numbers" of people, but the percentage of the population, as a whole, who suffer from lung cancer. And a further confounding factor life expectancy today vs even 30 years ago (the longer one lives, the more likely it is for cancer of any kind to develop).
- aetherspawn 1y agoI can think of a few hypothesis, but I’d hit all the reasons we already know that people in their 30s are getting cancer first, like: Natural gas burning inside with poor ventilation (solve by pushing electric everything, paid for by carbon tax paid by big oil) ICE car exhaust (solve with EVs, subsidised by carbon tax paid by big oil) Second hand smoke (ban smoking in public and within XX distance of a child, and make support for parents to quit free from cigarette taxes) Microplastics in the water and the air including tyre dust (start regulating this/coming up with a long term plan to reduce it and filter it out, and put a government subsidy on certified and professionally installed under sink microplastic water filter products… paid for by those who put the plastic there in the first place) Poor indoor air quality/high VOX (mandate air flow minimum levels for all new builds and make extraction fans for offices a normal requirement, and give tenants something to lobby against their body corporate to improve airflow in uselessly designed buildings since “sick building syndrome” is real but often impossible to know before you sign the papers)
- lordofgibbons 1y agoBut all of these factors have been around for many decades, why is it showing up now?
- ojosilva 1y agoBecause smoking is down, and with it, smoking-related lung cancer. Nonsmoker lung cancer numbers OTOH remain steady and its percentage is therefore higher.
- aetherspawn 1y agoThese cause cancer after many decades so for example people who were 10 when this started becoming a big issue are now getting cancer in their 30s and 40s. This is a professional medical opinion from scientists that was aired on the news recently in Australia. Cancers in the 30s, all types, are waaay up.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago>Studies have also shown that people who don’t smoke but have a family history of lung cancer, such as Ms. Chen and Ms. Liu — both of Ms. Liu’s grandfathers had the disease — are at increased risk. This could be because of shared genetics, a common environment or both, said Dr. Jae Kim, chief of thoracic surgery at City of Hope in Duarte, Calif. Couldn't this be secondhand smoke?
- owenversteeg 1y agoI think a large contributor is poor indoor air quality - of all types, not just one specific pollutant - causing inflammation and thus cancer. Homes have gotten far tighter in recent years, and people buy ever more cheap furniture and inexpensive consumer products. So you have formaldehyde and other VOCs off-gassing, you have plasticizer vapors, nanoplastics in the air from synthetic furniture and cloth, you have refrigerants leaking from appliances and from insulation foam… I don’t think nearly anyone understands just how many unique poorly-studied chemicals are emitted into your indoor air by your average set of household products. That’s all to say nothing of common and better-understood air quality issues from gas cooking, radon, mold, etc. So we have all these irritants in the air, and we have the most airtight homes in human history by orders of magnitude… what did we think was going to happen? That you could slap a laughably undersized carbon filter on an air purifier and call it good? Or that a limited number of too-small ERV systems would help? At some point we will need a radical rethinking of our approach to health and safety of new technology.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoHouses weren’t so much better, but people are living in those houses longer (well, that’s true about all cancers). Perhaps one reason California life expectancy is better than other states is that they can mostly keep their windows open year round.
- Quarrel 1y agoWhy do you think this? There is an entire article linked here, saying that they, Scientists, don't know what the causes are, even though they're actively trying to search for a cause.
- xnorswap 1y agoHN can be infuriating sometimes. Imagine if there was an environmental science forum that sat around pontificating with mistrust about software performance. Chances are people would mock it and marvel at their ignorance. But here we have a forum of (largely) software developers looking at the experts on environmental health and going, "Why are they so stupid? It's obviously <radon> <modern junk> <etc>". It's not limited to environmental health, it affects all kinds of articles on social sciences. Commentary full of people who aren't domain experts wondering why the domain experts are all so clueless because Mr Software Engineer has it all figured out.
- HocusLocus 1y agoIt was Jimmy Carter days and the OPEC Oil crisis. Prior to 1973... electricity and heating oil was cheap, there were many single pane windows that didn't seal completely. So the default condition was houses as originally built, cooler temps in Winter and more natural ventilation in houses with corresponding higher energy costs. In 1973 fears that heating in Winter would get more expensive, saw an increase in home renovation. IR viewers were employed for the first time and IR images showed windows and attic vents as glowing with heat (as they had all along) and it looked like money escaping. Rubber seals on doors and windows. Double pane windows. This trapped the radon in basements (and for some rising out of the basement onto the first floor) to be breathed by humans and gain higher concentrations for the first time in US history. Homes were hermetically sealed. Since smokers bore the penance of sin... the rise of the '2nd leading cause' went unrecognized for years.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- seszett 1y agoRadon is measurable, my CO2 detector also mesures radon. There is none in my well-insulated house. Now in a basement in Brittany things would be different, but for most houses in most places, radon is negligible. There also isn't a notable difference in cancers between radon-rich granitic places like Brittany and the rest of France. I feel like at least in France, the potential dangers of radon are well known.
- pmezard 1y agoAnd well communicated, I was surprised to have a full section about this when I changed home last year in Brest.
- SubiculumCode 1y agoWhen I finally got to buy a home, we chose one built in the fourties because we really didn't like the feel of newer homes. Love it, but yeah, plenty drafty..erm I mean, fresh air. I do have to worry about lead paint though, which I found out with a cabinet remake.
- floppiplopp 1y agoWhatever the causes, be it cars, industry, certain classes of chemicals and particles, there will be a vicious fight about regulating them, since the ideological divisions are now drawn along the lines of anti-cancer and pro-cancer politics.
- elric 1y agoGive it a few more years, vapes will boost those numbers again. I wish I was joking. But I'm not. I'm seeing 12 year olds with vapes quite regularly. They're so addicted, taking sneaky hits on the bus or on the train. Even when smoking was cool back when I was a kid, I didn't know of anyone that young who was that addicted.
- simmerup 1y agoVapes are ridiculous, theyre marketed in the UK as being incredibly safe. But they mess with my body so much whenever I’ve used them I just don’t believe it.
- skeezyboy 1y agooverlooked fact i point out is that the carbon monoxide in cigarette smoke makes you nauseas and puts an upper bound on your possible hourly intake of nicotine, whereas vapes dont contain the CO, and actually taste good enough to drink... you end up taking magnitudes more nicotine than the traditional route
- piombisallow 1y agoNicotine by itself doesn't cause cancer.
- elric 1y agoNo one said it did. It is however very addictive, causing addicts to smoke/vape more, thus increasing the load of the other toxic and carcinogenic substances. Wikipedia does raise some concerning points about nicotine: > Although nicotine is classified as a non-carcinogenic substance, it can still promote tumor growth and metastasis. It induces several processes that contribute to cancer progression, including cell cycle progression, epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition, migration, invasion, angiogenesis, and evasion of apoptosis.
- jcattle 1y agoI love that the article mainly points out that it is unknown why asian women have an unusually high rate of lung cancer but the entire HN comment section (except for 1 thread) is just going on about radon.
- marsven_422 1y ago[dead]
- storus 1y agoCould this come from the hypothesis that covid could be oncogenic? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10202899/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10202899/
- uwagar 1y agoguess the anti-vaxxers had a point.
- Elizabe 1y ago[dead]
- Elizabe 1y ago[dead]