Radon Blogger Call
January 25, 2012, 1:30 p.m. ET

Scott Fraser, Communications Director, EPA

Welcome everybody, my name is Scott Fraser. I’m with the EPA Office of Public Engagement; and today we’re going to talk to you about radon and how to take some action against it. First off we have several senior level folks here at EPA that’s going to speak with you as well as our colleagues over at HUD and American Lung Association.
And I just wanted to reiterate a point that the President made in the State of the Union Address last night about he said he’s not going to back down protecting our kids from mercury pollution and making sure that our food is safe and our waters clean. Certainly another dangerous element to indoor air is radon, which we’ll hear about today.
So, we’re hoping that you’ll take this information and share it along with your perspective organizations. Our website to check out more information is epa.gov/radon. And so I’m going to turn the call over to Bill Long, he’s our branch chief for Radon and Air Toxics in EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. Bill?

Bill Long, Branch Chief for Radon and Air Toxics in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Air and Radiation:

Great thanks a lot, Scott. I just wanted to thank everyone for calling in on the phone today, that’s great. This month is January, January is Radon Action month. The goal during Radon Action month is to raise awareness and promote risk reducing action that ultimately save lives from radon induced lung cancer.
We really appreciate anything you all can do to help get the word out. Not enough people know about radon, too many people die from radon exposure. Radon is a radioactive gas a natural element in the earth that you can’t see or smell but it can be deadly and a lot of people don’t realize how dangerous it is and how to protect themselves and their families from those risks.
And while we’ve made good progress on this issue in the United States it’s simply not enough, we need to do more. It’s a really serious public health issue and it’s a risk that we can prevent. It’s not a complicated problem like so many issues that we deal with, there’s an easy solution and it’s a solution that is time tested and proven and it lasts.
So we invited you all on the phone to join a small group of us who represent kind of the world of radon risk reduction. So we could share our efforts with you and ask for your help in raising awareness of radon.
So, today our speakers are going to share with you some of the key messages about radon and it’s risks, what the federal government is doing, its efforts to take action against radon, and then what other groups are doing to raise awareness and help people to test their homes and schools and other buildings for radon and to fix high levels when their found.
And then finally we’re going to wrap it up with some information, some practical information about how you and your constituents can get involved at the local level and save lives in your community. We’re also going to have a brief time for questions and answers at the end.
So, today with us we have a great line up of speakers. We have Gina McCarthy from the EPA, Dave Rowson was going to join us today but he is unfortunately sick so I’m going to fill in for Dave, John Gant from HUD, Janice Nolin from the American Lung Association, and Kristy Miller also from EPA. What I’m going to do is I’m going to introduce briefly each of the speakers and when their done I’ll l introduce the next speaker.

So, first we have Gina McCarthy, she’s the Assistant Administrator here at EPA in the Office of Air and Radiation. Gina has been leading – has been a leading advocate for common sense strategies to protect public health and the environment for many years. And prior to coming here to EPA, Gina served as the Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection.

And in Gina’s 25 year career she’s worked both at the state and local level on a whole range of critical environmental issues and has helped coordinate policies on things like economic growth and energy, transportation and the environment. Gina’s been a strong supporter of the radon program here at EPA and, Gina; can you tell us your perspective on this issue?

Gina McCarthy, Assistant Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Air and Radiation:

Bill, thanks very much for the introduction, thanks everybody for participating on the call and a special shout out to John Gant at HUD and to Janice Nolin, your great colleagues and friends, I appreciate your help, as well as other folks at EPA for participating and help pull this together. Let me just jump into the crux of this issue.

Most of the time in my position I’m dealing with regulatory issues like mercury emissions standards, federal authority to create rules and regulations that minimize risks to human beings, risks to public health. Radon’s a little bit different, unlike mercury standards; our radon program is not based on our authority to issue rules and regulations.

EPA really is limited to our ability to inform the public and to encourage and support actions, actions at the state level and local level, in your individual community and actions of individuals themselves can take to protect the health of their families and themselves. So, it’s our job to continually keep the level of awareness around the issue high. And to seek innovative approaches for addressing what is a very serious public health risk as Bill just explained to everybody.

Every day, Americans, whether young, old, rich, or poor you can be breathing high levels of radon that contribute to the development of lung cancer. Radon claims the lives of over 21,000 Americans each year and is the number one environmental cause of cancer mortality in the U.S., which I’m sure Janice will explain in more detail.

But the problem is even worse for the poor. Nearly 13 percent of economically disadvantaged people live in high radon potential areas, that’s more than 6 million individuals. Poor families are less likely to test, they’re less likely to afford to mitigate, and they’re more likely to live in rental housing where there are few laws that actually allow them to successfully protect their families from this type of exposure.

That’s what we at EPA call an environmental justice challenge, they are always difficult to address but it’s not impossible to address this. Why is that the case? Because we know how to reduce radon exposure. Both testing and building houses that are radon resistant are inexpensive and mitigation is well known and not relatively inexpensive.

That where you come in. We need a ramped up level of awareness of voluntary actions if we really hope to significantly cut radon induced lung cancer rates. People are still dying and if we work together we can stop that. That’s why this issue is so important to me, that’s why it’s important to EPA and why EPA has been working for 20 years spreading the word and using our funds to try to (seek?) state and local actions.
And we have made progress and as Bill indicated we’ve made significant progress and in – in that time more than 2.7 million homes have been built or retrofitted with radon reducing features. But as Bill also indicated we’re simply not winning this war, today nearly 1 in 15 homes have elevated radon levels. Unfortunately, the problem is getting worse as there are more homes being built and they’re constructed in areas where we anticipate high radon levels exist.
I firmly believe that the federal government needs to continue to show aggressive leadership on radon. We have to engage people to take action and we have to speak for those populations of American families who are being impacted but don’t know it or they are unable to be able to do anything significant about it. That’s where the federal government needs to use its own ingenuity, its own creativity, and use its voice for those who don’t have one in this debate.
The federal government is both a landlord and a lender. We can and have to find ways to support innovative approaches that engage federal and non federal partners and we are doing just that. One of the things I’m most excited about is the new initiative that’s bringing together the federal government in a collaborative way to address radon and that’s one of the issues in the great steps forward that you’ll hear about next, thank you everybody.

Bill Long, Branch Chief for Radon and Air Toxics in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Air and Radiation:

Great, thank you, Gina, and thank you for your leadership on radon, it has been a great boost to our program. Again, I’m Bill Long and I’m going to be – it’s great to see the additional people who have called in and joined the call. So just to reiterate we’ll be taking questions at the end and I’m introducing several speakers and the next person I was going to introduce is not here, Dave Rowson., unfortunately is sick. So, I’m going to take his slot, it won’t be as good but bear with me, I’ll try to cover the point Dave was making.
What I’d like to give you all is an overview of National Radon Action Month, kind of what we do at EPA and our federal radon action plan initiative that Gina just referred to. I’m going to give you a snapshot of what EPA does here to ramp up awareness about radon and then what the federal government is doing by coming together as is so desperately needed.
So, Nation Radon Action Month, or NRAM, as we call it, we are clearly committed here to protecting the lives of all Americans from the health risks of radon and we have been working for many years to do that at EPA. Its – it’s a great issue because – in some sense because we know how to fix the problem. We know today how to fix homes and we know how to build them so that they don’t expose occupants to harmful radon exposure.
As, I mentioned before the solutions are simple and proven and in fact addressing radon is a really inexpensive way to save a life. Generally about the cost of many common routine home repairs, that’s what it takes to fix the home and only a few hundred dollars to build one that’s radon resistant. And once that house is built it protects the inhabitants for years and years.
Why aren’t people taking more action? And why do we – why – why are we still not winning this battle as Gina mentioned? Unfortunately, the reality is that people just don’t often understand the gravity of the risks and they don’t realize that radon can be fixed. In addition, people often think that it costs too much to fix a house or build a house that is radon resistant. And when it comes to home sales, they often don’t see that mitigating, fixing the problem will help increase the value of their home at the time of resale.
So, over the past 20 years or so we at the EPA have invested a lot of time and effort to inform the public about radon and its risks. We’ve given grants to state radon programs, we’ve run several national media campaigns, and we’ve tried to focus attention, especially during January which we’ve called National Radon Action Month. It’s a great time to get the word out, it’s a great time for people to test their home, their homes are sealed up to the colder outside air. And it’s a great time to focus people’s attention.

So, every January throughout National Radon Action Month and frankly throughout the year, we collaborate with our federal, state, and local government colleagues, our non-profit partners, and radon industry professionals to conduct a variety of activities to raise awareness. We try to encourage people to test and (fix) for radon, we promote radon resistant new construction for homes and schools. And at the end of this call they mentioned Kristi Miller is going to tell you more about simple things anyone can do to protect themselves and the people they love.

So, I encourage you people on the phone today to share this information as broadly as you can. It really is the key to changing action. Now I want to mention a little bit about the federal Radon Action plan, as Gina mentioned earlier we really think that the federal government plays a special role and has a special responsibility. We need to show leadership.

So, in addition to the outreach effort, I mentioned earlier from EPA, the federal government is in a unique position to promote radon risk reduction in homes, schools, and day care facilities that it owns or influences. Because we influence and own a lot, about, we think 7.5 million buildings the federal government owns, manages, or funds in some way or another.

So, after about seven months of focused effort this past June at the National Health and Homes conference in Denver, nine federal agencies came together; EPA, General Services Administration, and the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, and Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development, and Interior, and finally Veterans Affairs and announced the release of the Federal Radon Action plan.

The plan outlines the steps the federal government can and will take as part of their everyday work to protect people from risk associated with exposure to Radon in the buildings that the federal government owns or influences. We’re real excited about this plan, it takes advantage of collaboration opportunities between agencies, seeks to build on the coordinated work of all the agencies to bring more attention to radon, it’s using existing programs.

It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money there’s things we can put – all put into place right now to help drive more radon action. And I think one of the best parts about the collaboration was to learn more about what already is going on, it was more than we thought, but we need to do more.

A great place to learn about the plan is on our website. I encourage everyone to go visit it, its http://www.epa.gov/radon. And one of the exciting things I think about that site is our new score card that’s up. So even though we’re just about six months into the implementation plan we’ve made some significant progress.

For example, the Department of Interior has written contracts that are in place now to test 9,000 homes or schools on national park service and Bureau of (Veterans?) Affairs property. And EPA and DOD are coordinating to spread the word about radon risk and how to fix it to their defense network of service members and their families, literally millions of people in their network.

To keep everyone aware of what we’re doing, I mentioned we have a score card you can view it online. We’ll continue to update this over the next six months and are building up to our one year anniversary in June.
All right, so with the federal plan as a catalyst our industry and non-profit allies are planning a non-government campaign to build on and increase the impact of the federal plan. Janice Nolin from the ALA will talk a little bit about that later, but right now I’d like to transition this to John Gant at HUD.
John is the director of Healthy Homes and Lead Hazard Control. John has an amazing resume and I have to say when I looked it up, so this is severally shortened, John. So you are director of an office that’s really comprised of scientists and environmental policy analysts, public health professionals working to ensure that America’s children grow up in healthy and safe homes free from hazardous substances that cause preventable diseases.
Your office manages about $700 million in grants for research and under your leadership, and I know this for a fact because EPA is very involved, you have issued a healthy home strategy that’s in conjunction with the Surgeon General’s call to action to promote healthy homes, we’re all very excited about that. John could you give us your perspective on radon from Housing and Urban development?

Jon Gant, Director of Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Healthy Homes and Lead Hazard Control:

I’d be glad to, good afternoon everybody, and thank you for that introduction Bill. And first off let me just commend EPA, Gina it has been a real pleasure to have worked alongside you on this very important issue. And you have been a real leader along with your entire staff on getting the federal government to focus on this critical and important issue.
And I have to laugh sometimes because I appreciate, probably more than most, your persistence and your commitment and your assistance as we move – move forward. And, you know, those – for many of you on the line when Bill was talking about that score card, you ought to take a look at that because EPA, in their role as the leader of this federal action group, has kept our feet to the fire. So I’m – you know we have two greens and several yellows and I hope to get some of those yellows to green on some of the action items that we promised to do.
But, you know, it’s important that those on the line understand that HUD is very, very committed to helping achieve some of the goals that are outlined in that federal action plan. And last summer, as Bill indicated, when we held – when EPA and HUD cosponsored the Healthy Homes National Conference, the Deputy Administrator for EPA, Bob Perciasepe actually released the federal action plan there. There were about 1500 attendees there and it was certainly a highlight of the conference as we looked at how health and housing and energy could all come together around this critical issue.
Now how has HUD played a role? Many of you asking OK what – what is HUD’s role in this? And – and I think, you know, as Gina indicated earlier that the federal government serves often times as both a landlord and a lender and HUD does exactly that. We have, we have – have input into many of the mortgages that fund many of the home purchases throughout this country, we’ve got a lot of public housing, we provide vouchers to many low income people so they can live in a – live in homes and protect their families.
And what we did when the federal action plan was proposed was to take a look at what we are doing and EPA encouraged us to the extent that we could integrate radon into all of our programs. Our Deputy Secretary was very engaged and continues – that a – the Deputy Secretary we have has moved on, our new acting Deputy Secretary continues to be engaged in this and has directed that all HUD programs take a look at how we can be more proactive on a variety of fronts, whether it’s requiring testing, whether its identifying where the radon is impacting some of the house that we do provide, whether it’s outreach and education, and we have taken – we have had some victories – short term.
And then we’ve got actual milestones looking ahead on how we can be better in the future. Some of those might take half a year to achieve, others might take a little longer than that but in the short-term, you know, we’re excited about the fact that HUD had a program where homeowner’s could get a low interest small loan, if you’re in certain categories, to improve their homes.
The initial focus was on making them more energy efficient. That was the initial focus; we took a look at and said while their making their home energy efficient why not make them safe from possible radon exposure? We changed the rules and said radon can be a qualified or an eligible expense under what we call HUD’s power saver loan program.
Under our Healthy Homes production grant program and Bill alluded to this my – my office is – is a small part of HUD but we have a lot of impact in the sense that our secretary has made housing and health critical components of our strategic plan. And so I – my office is tasked with working with the larger offices in HUD such as public housing and housing and seeing if there are ways to improve the health of all of those that HUD serves.
It’s part of our strategic plan, it’s one of our annual performance goals there are only eight and this is one of them. And radon is part of that effort. So we’re – at least in our healthy homes production program, we have encouraged all of our grantees to test for radon. Usually their focus is on reducing lead hazards in homes, but we’ve expanded that and said we need to take a look at other mold and mildew, asthma, and radon is certainly there.
We’ve come up with a single assessment tool that we’ve mandated our program, our grantees to use it includes testing for radon. That only impacts right now my small – about 300 grantees, although last year we produced about 40,000 units – homes, we made them safe. So it’s not small but we’re growing. I know I’ve spoken a little bit and I want to leave room for questions, but where are we headed? That’s probably what you’re asking now.
After much internal debate and direction from the Deputy Secretary all of our programs as I indicated are looking at ways to be more proactive. So we’re looking at our inventory and those are homes that we insure through FHA and others and we’re over the next nine months – its in Clarence now but we’re moving towards insuring that all of these homes are tested for radon and in the event that there is radon take steps to remediate it.
We’ve got, we’ve reached out to philanthropic community we’ve got what we call the great and healthy homes where we can engage philanthropies to come up and come in and partner with us. Well they have provided a number of resources and radon is one of the areas that they’ve been very engaged in to try and help us reduce.
We’re looking at ways to continue our outreach efforts EPA has provided over the years, as many of you know, very, very good information. We take that information, repackage it, plagiarize it, and make sure it gets to all of our constituent groups; advocacy groups those who are on the housing side as opposed to the health side. So that we are all focused on the same or at least disseminating the same message.
And finally we have what we call the real state assessment center which goes out and actually tests our public housing those multi-family units and single family units that are providing vouchers for our – our residents. And they are now looking at the testing protocol that they follow to ensure that radon is going to be placed in there. That takes a little while to get into the protocol. So that is one of those that’s going to take probably over a year to get in there, but never the less they have started that process.
They’ve started looking at how to change the protocol, what the training ought to be what the certification ought to be by the owners, what the reporting requirements ought to be. And then we’ve cross trained a lot of our partners at the Department of Energy. Many of you know that the Department of Energy got a lot of money under the stimulus bill to do weatherization training.
EPA and HUD have been right there at the table with them when we trained a lot of their weatherization experts. We brought in our healthy homes experts just to train them up on radon so when they’re in a home and they’re doing an energy assessment they can also do the radon assessment.
I look forward to answering any of your questions and once again I can’t thank EPA enough for their leadership in this very important issue. Thank you.

Bill Long, Branch Chief for Radon and Air Toxics in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Air and Radiation:

OK, great thanks so much, John, and you always thank us, but we thank you because you are a true advocate for healthy housing over at HUD and that is such a great leadership role you’ve played and we certainly salute you. And, you know, I think we are trying to figure out a way to get Gina to come over and meet your new acting deputy secretary and continue the conversation because you mentioned her predecessor was such an advocate for healthy housing and we want to make sure that she hears from us, from our advocates so we’ll work with you to set that up.
We are going to be taking questions at the end so let me turn to our next speaker. And we are delighted to have Janice Nolin on the line. Janice is going to give a perspective from kind of the other side of the fence sort of the nongovernmental view about this issue and what their trying to do to get traction and how they are paying attention to what the federal government is doing which is good we need people to keep our feet to the fire.
And Janice you are good at keeping EPA’s feet to the fire we know that and for every one Janice is – supervises the development of policy positions of lung disease, indoor and outdoor air quality and tobacco control for the nationwide organization, the ALA. She’s also an appointee to our EPA clean air act advisory committee and there represents (inaudible???, around 29:30) the lung association with all of its partners across the country including other public health and environmental organizations.
Part of what Janice does is produce a document, probably some of you have heard about called state of the air, which is a real fantastic annual report card on air pollution in the United States. Janice also directs the lung association’s actions on the regulatory side. And she hails from the great state of Tennessee where she ran the lung association there. So with that Janice would you be able to tell us your perspective the (NGO) perspective of the radon initiative.

Janice Nolen, Director of National Policy for the American Lung Association

Thanks so much Bill, I appreciate the opportunity to share our perspective on this. And I always appreciate the great leadership that EPA shows in these areas especially as you all have been the champion for so long in radon issues; Lung Association has worked with you a long time.
And I would just like to start out with saying – just saying that if I told you as the public that your home might have something in it that causes lung cancer, that we know causes lung cancer you would think that people would really reach out and say golly we need to find out what that is. We need to find out whether our home has that.
You might think that would be a really easy thing to get people to do unfortunately it’s not. And I talk to reporters all the time who are interested in indoor air and they’ll call me about one issue or another and I always have to say oh and do you know about radon. Radon is a carcinogen, radon causes lung cancer.
We first learned about radon years ago when we were looking at the health of miners and the studies that miners were some well done studies that found that people who were breathing radon, because they were as part of their work, being exposed to this naturally occurring substance were getting lung cancer. And it was an alert that went out in the mid 80s and we found out that this was a serious health problem; the research has shown even more now that this is a problem indoors in homes in homes across the country.

And we’ve divided the parts of the country into different zones but the reality is any home, anywhere could have high levels of radon. And we’re so concerned about it at the lung association because lung cancer is so deadly. Lung cancer kills more people each year than any other cancer period.

During 2011 estimates are that we’re going to – that we had 221,000 cases of lung cancer, 221,000 new cases of lung cancer last year. The diagnosis of lung cancer is devastating because unlike many other cancers lung cancer remains overwhelmingly deadly. The five year survival rate is only fifteen percent I know what that means personally my first husband died from lung cancer at the age of 46. It can hit, it hits hard, and there is very little opportunity to recover from it.

As you’ve heard today radon is responsible for about 21,000 lung cancer deaths a year. Numbers are really hard to grasp let me put this into some comparison. Just the fraction of lung cancer caused by radon kills almost as many people as leukemia or lymphoma and more people than ovarian cancer, brain cancer or stomach cancer.

Now we at the lung association have been fighting lung diseases across the nation since 1904. Our mission is to save lives by preventing lung disease and promoting lung health. The good news is that with radon we know how to prevent lung cancer. The two biggest steps in preventing lung cancer in fact don’t smoke and reduce your exposure to radon. That’s why the lung association believes so strongly in its fight to prevent lung cancer from radon.

We must reduce the wide spread exposure to this number two cause of lung cancer and the leading cause of lung cancer in nonsmokers. Radon greatly increases the risk that someone who smokes will develop lung cancer. It’s an equal opportunity threat. Still about 2,900 of the deaths from lung cancer each from radon caused lung cancer occur among people who have never smoked. Studies are warning us that women may actually be a little higher risk, but smokers are especially at risk.

Smokers who live in areas where radon levels are high face a compounded risk. The most recent assessment of the harm that radon can do is pretty devastating. I want to read just a couple of sentences from this major review. There is good evidence that a single alpha particle and that is the part the radon part that we are really talking about. That a single alpha particle can cause major genomic changes in a cell, including mutation and transformation. Even allowing for substantial degree of repair the passage of a single alpha particle has the potential to cause irreparable damage in cells that are not killed.

This means that we can have with a little bit of radon damage that can then lead to cancer that is why getting rid of radon is such a critical critical health risk – health threat. The risk also adds up, one of the things we know is that the radon that you inhale today and tomorrow in your home adds to the harm of the radon you might have inhaled as a child living in the house with high levels. There is no threshold that we know is safe, there’s no level that we say shows no exposure.

So what we try to do is cut the risk and we know how to do that, we know how to do that very well now. We know that if we can test homes and get them fixed we can reduce the risk significantly. And we know fortunately that we can build homes that have preventative systems already in them.
As mentioned today, unfortunately we are falling behind most U.S. homes currently exist with high radon levels more U.S. homes currently exist with high level radon levels then when we first identified the problem in the 1980’s. Why? Well we’re not keeping up. We fix radon problems in about 80,000 homes a year, but we build about 150,000 homes a year. They have high levels of radon throughout the systems that prevent the problem.
So the American lung association has been mentioned as one of a group of organizations that are gathering to try and take steps to support efforts to reduce radon. We’ve been working on this for a long time and challenged by this continuous opportunity and the continuous need that is there.
These organizations include housing advocates, include architects, include radon prevention –professionals sorry and lung cancer survivors and others. All of which working towards saying we need to build in systems to help reduce radon. So we at the lung association and our colleagues and friends were very pleased to hear and to support the federal action plan that’s been talked about earlier.
As the plan outlines their existing programs, opportunities that can be used now to help reduce exposure, opportunities like the things that John mentioned that HUD will be doing to help protect families from this carcinogen. We think there’s obviously more that can be done because we think there are systems that can be strengthened so that as housing transfers or as we’re building or working on housing for everybody in the country we can have systems built in place that will reduce radon exposure. We want to make sure that we take every opportunity available to the federal agencies to identify and prevent radon exposure for everyone across the nation.
As – as Gina mentioned the federal government is both a landlord and a lender and that gives us an opportunity in existing systems, not newly created things, but existing systems so that we can make sure that radon is addressed. And that’s a critical thing that we think can happen.
We also know that the federal role is only part of the solution. Education alone is not enough we have to change some things that we already have in place. And a key one that we’re working on, that our groups are working on are local building codes. Making sure that building codes have included the guidelines that have been developed so that when new building are built they are built radon resistant. So that this naturally occurring problem can be addressed across the country. Kind of like making sure that your health makes – doesn’t have leaks in it we want to make sure your health doesn’t have radon in it.
Assistance adds very little cost to a home, but fixing them can cost a lot more. So adding it to the beginning to the building, to the codes requirement, to the systems that we have in place, and make sure that the houses are built with radon resistant construction can help prevent the problem the most cost effective way.
We want to make sure that when people buy a house they find out about the radon levels in their home. That those houses you get radon information just like you get a termite letter and that real estate transaction so that it becomes a normal part of your information that you get when you buy a house.
And in addition we still do urge people – we encourage people to test their home for radon. We need to take steps to prevent this problem to prevent it from concentrating indoors, to prevent people from having to breathe a known carcinogen. We can test homes easily, we can easily repair and install the equipment that is useful to keep families safe, we can build homes that don’t have this problem.
What does that mean? It means fewer people will have lung cancer. It will save lives so we urge you, it’s been said already, please let people know about this. The information needs to be out there far more wide spread so that we can all take steps to protect our health and to protect the health of our families, thank you.

Bill Long, Branch Chief for Radon and Air Toxics in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Air and Radiation:

All right, thank you Janice, that was fantastic and thank you for everything you’re doing, from your organization and from the larger NGO World to promote radon action. You have been a special friend to radon for many, many years and the American Lung Association has been a long-time partner. So we deeply, deeply appreciate everything your doing.

OK, so we have one more speaker and I’m happy to introduce to you Kristy Miller, she’s also from the EPA. Kristy is a fantastic public health communicator, social marketer. She is our communications director in the indoor air program.

Kristy’s been working on radon for many years and in fact is the architect of an award winning EPA media campaign on radon. So you’re the – probably the best person in the world for this, so, Kristy, why don’t you take it away and tell people how they can advance the issue of radon.

Kristy Miller, Media Campaign Director, EPA

Thank you, Bill, I appreciate it and I really appreciate all of our speakers today and Janice you really set me up for a great kind of wrap up here. We have a lot of resources available for free for all of you to use out in the field and to touch the people in your communities.

As Bill said we’ve been at this for a long time, we know how challenging it is and how daunting it can be, but yet we know how easy it is at the same time. It is so easy to go buy the test and/or build radon resistant – in fact it can be – if your going to build a new home, it can be cheaper than some of the appliances that your putting into that new home in today’s world.

So, the message that we want to take forward here, and I think we can all work together to make this happen is we really need to change social norms in America, we need to change expectations and it is easy to do for this carcinogen. It’s probably the easiest thing to take out of our lives, take exposure of radon out of our lives just by building, testing and fixing.

We all know about the radiation risk that the sun poses in our lives we take prevention to do that to put on sun blocks, wear sun glasses and hats. We just need to take that same type of message and apply it to our homes and let people understand that this invisible and tangible risk truly is a carcinogen that we can prevent. And no one wants cancer, I think we all agree with that and we understand how many cases of lung cancer and how terrible and devastating it truly is. 

And in fact, Dr. Oz, did a wonderful set up for us last year. He did a one hour television show focusing strictly on radon; we never had that before folks. I’m going to ask you to go out on the web, we’re going o make it available for you, you can look at it read it, we have an article there by our Dr. Susan Conrad here at EPA that tells the whole story. Use this in your public communications out in the field; it is a wonderful, valuable tool. Dr. Oz realizes that this is probably one of the easiest carcinogens again that we can remove our exposure to in our daily lives.

Some of the products we have available for you are television PSA’s, radio PSA’s, we have ecards available for you, we’ve had a partnership with the National Association of Broadcasters spreading the message about living healthy and green and how easy it is changing expectations is really what this is about. You can make it happen.
We have a partnership with a lot of different colleges and universities across the country it’s called our Eco Ambassadors all this is available on our website. So go to http://www.epa.gov/radon where I would like you to go for the radon media products that are all free if you would write this down please, http://www.epapsa.com.
That is our contractor they make all these different products available for you to download to view. Dr. Oz is there you can look at the links you can get the ecard and use it. And ask the media in your local areas to please run these public service announcements for free. It’s all free and all you have to do is go out there and ask and they will help and they will support us.
We do know that the touch stone here for people to ask is their loved ones, their family and their children. They may not take that test for themselves but they will do it to protect their family. So that’s the ask, we can make it happen and it’s really easy it’s just about spreading the word and making that ask happen.
Facebook is another great opportunity, that’s out there right now; we know there are thousands if not millions of (lung cancer advocates) out there on Facebook talking about eliminating the risks of lung cancer. And this is the easiest one to eliminate obviously, along with of course just stop smoking. But we’ve been at that one for a number of years we know how tough that is, but this one’s easy.
So, I thank you for your time. We have frequently asked questions if you want to learn more about radon on our website and we’ll be happy to entertain questions, thank you so much for your help and support on this one.

Gina McCarthy, Assistant Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Air and Radiation:

This is Gina McCarthy, again let me just wrap up and let me thank the speakers for both your eloquence, your passion, and your commitment to this issue. John, I think my take home is that I’m pleasantly annoying and I appreciate that and thank you tremendously for the response from HUD.
Janice, you’re always so passionate and I really appreciate the way in which ALA goes about its business and sticks with the science and focuses the energy it’s – its just wonderful. So, Bill thank you and Kristy for all the work you do here at EPA. Again if you have questions I think you know now where to turn. We’ll keep hopefully doing our best to keep a focus on this issue and to try to get people to understand that there are some things that they can control in their lives and radon happens to be one of them. So thank you all for joining and hopefully we’ll do this again and have a good evening.