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Radon exposure is rising steadily within the modern North American residential environment, and is increasingly uniform across seasons.

ABSTRACT: Human-made buildings can artificially concentrate radioactive radon gas of geologic origin, exposing occupants to harmful alpha particle radiation emissions that damage DNA and increase lung cancer risk. We examined how North American residential radon exposure varies by modern environmental design, occupant behaviour and season. 11,727 residential buildings were radon-tested using multiple approaches coupled to geologic, geographic, architectural, seasonal and behavioural data with quality controls. Regional residences contained 108?Bq/m³ geometric mean radon (min?3; max 7,199?Bq/m³), with 17.8%???200?Bq/m³. Pairwise analysis reveals that short term radon tests, despite wide usage, display limited value for establishing dosimetry, with precision being strongly influenced by time of year. Regression analyses indicates that the modern North American Prairie residential environment displays exceptionally high and worsening radon exposure, with more recent construction year, greater square footage, fewer storeys, greater ceiling height, and reduced window opening behaviour all associated with increased radon. Remarkably, multiple test approaches reveal minimal winter-to-summer radon variation in almost half of properties, with the remainder having either higher winter or higher summer radon. This challenges the utility of seasonal correction values for establishing dosimetry in risk estimations, and suggests that radon-attributable cancers are being underestimated.

SUBMITTER: Stanley FKT

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6890734 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Radon exposure is rising steadily within the modern North American residential environment, and is increasingly uniform across seasons.

Stanley Fintan K T FKT Irvine Jesse L JL Jacques Weston R WR Salgia Shilpa R SR Innes Daniel G DG Winquist Brandy D BD Torr David D Brenner Darren R DR Goodarzi Aaron A AA

Scientific reports 20191203 1

Human-made buildings can artificially concentrate radioactive radon gas of geologic origin, exposing occupants to harmful alpha particle radiation emissions that damage DNA and increase lung cancer risk. We examined how North American residential radon exposure varies by modern environmental design, occupant behaviour and season. 11,727 residential buildings were radon-tested using multiple approaches coupled to geologic, geographic, architectural, seasonal and behavioural data with quality cont ...[more]

PMID: 31796862

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Project description:During the late nineteenth century North American bison underwent a significant population bottleneck resulting in a reduction in population size of over 99% and a species-level near-extinction event. Factors responsible for this destruction included indiscriminate killing, loss of access to suitable habitat, and diseases. At the nadir of this population crash, very few wild plains bison survived and were restricted to Yellowstone National Park, USA and a small number of wild wood bison remained in Wood Buffalo National Park, Canada. However, most surviving bison in the late 1800's were maintained by cattle ranchers in private herds where hybridization between bison with various breeds of domestic cattle was often encouraged. Over the last 20 years, the legacy of this introgression has been identified using mitochondrial DNA and limited nuclear microsatellite analyses. However, no genome-wide assessment has been performed, and some herds were believed to be free of introgression based on current genetic testing strategies. Herein, we report detailed analyses using whole genome sequencing from nineteen modern and six historical bison, chosen to represent the major lineages of bison, to identify and quantitate signatures of nuclear introgression in their recent (within 200 years) history. Both low and high coverage genomes provided evidence for recent introgression, including animals from Yellowstone, Wind Cave, and Elk Island National Parks which were previously thought to be free from hybridization with domestic cattle. We employed multiple approaches, including one developed for this work, to identify putative cattle haplotypes in each bison genome. These regions vary greatly in size and frequency by sample and herd, though we detected domestic cattle introgression in all bison genomes tested. Since our sampling strategy spanned across the diversity of modern bison populations, these finding are best explained by multiple historical hybridization events between these two species with significant genetic recombination over the last 200 years. Our results demonstrate that whole genome sequencing approaches are required to accurately quantitate cattle introgression in bison.

Dataset Information

Radon exposure is rising steadily within the modern North American residential environment, and is increasingly uniform across seasons.

Publications

Radon exposure is rising steadily within the modern North American residential environment, and is increasingly uniform across seasons.

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