That map makes it looks like the borders of Missouri were decided based on radon risk. Which is not what I think actually happened when they drew those borders.
The granularity of the map seems to be at the county level, so I will guess that the EPA did not gather this data by itself, but rather, rely on self-reported data from each county from each state. A county is a political boundary, so the state of Missouri probably had different testing regulations and methodologies than its neighbors like Iowa and Illinois.
>> so the state of Missouri probably had different testing regulations and methodologies than its neighbors like Iowa and Illinois
Then the map doesn't show risk of radon. It's worthless for that purpose.
"Different political institutions have different standards for what is a radon risk."
It's a map of different political institutions then. That's fine. Just don't try to sell a map of political institutions as a map of radon risk when that is obvious bullshit. I mean it's completely obvious from the boundary.
Radon Risk is well established. If it’s higher than a specific limit you need to mitigate. This map just indicates where it is likely to be higher on average based on geology.
Living in a country that has a lot of natural radon in some places, very definitely yes. New houses over here must be built in a way that mitigates radon exposure, unless that particular region is low-risk.
At risk of going wildly off topic from the post, I’d suggest that for anybody with disposable income, the value proposition of buying some air quality sensors is amazing.
I installed some a month or two ago, and they caught alarmingly high radon levels in my basement that I’m now working to address. But also they catch more mundane things, like “oh, I tend to get headaches in the afternoon, which happens to be when the co2 levels are super high in my office”.
I’ve been happy so far with Airthings. They have a variety of sensors with different price points / features (seems like most except the Mini will do radon), the mobile app is decent, and there’s a HomeAssistant integration for it.
Given that lung cancer is driven by a) smoking, then b) radon, one would expect some level of correlation here.