John Dunn, MD, JD: The United States Environmental Protection Agency is charged with identifying and mitigating environmental risks. This article discusses US EPA’s misguided decision to use the Linear-No-Threshold (LNT) cancer risk model as a basis for regulating exposure of the public to ionizing radiation such as is associated with residential radon.
The Health Physics Society has stated that reliance on the LNT model “…tends to foment the public’s fear of all types of radiation . . . reliance on the LNT model, especially at very low doses and dose rates, is inappropriate and can exaggerate the risk.” The HPS also condemns “collective” (cumulative) dose as a measure of radiation health risk.
