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Richard E. Toohey, PhD
Argonne (111) National Laboratory

James E. Watson, Jr
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

JAMA. 1988;260(21):3127-3128.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

We have recently, and, we admit, belatedly, discovered some serious errors in the radiation doses reported for exposure to indoor radon and its progeny in the report of the Council on Scientific Affairs¹ on radon in homes. The report states that "exposure of the lungs to a level of 1.3 pCi/L (0.048 Bq/L)... would result in an annual radiation dose of 8.7 mrem," referencing Sorenson.² Sorenson's article, however, shows that a concentration of 1300 pCi/m³ (equivalent to 1.3 pCi/L) results in an annual dose of 8700 mrem, or 8.7 rem! A reader might well wonder what all the fuss was about if, in fact, exposure to an average level of radon resulted in a dose somewhat less than that from a single chest roentgenogram. The offending paragraph was not in the version of the report one of us (R.E.T.) reviewed prior to publication. We were . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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