Downloaded by 80.82.77.83 on June 3, 2018 | https://pubs.acs.org Publication Date: February 5, 1987 | doi: 10.1021/bk-1987-0331.pr001
Preface
R A D O N AND ITS DECAY PRODUCTS have been studied for a long time; now the results of these studies are visible and important to a wide audience. The discovery in the past two years of very high concentrations of radon in houses in the eastern United States has increased the public's awareness of the radon problem. Radon is no longer a hazard only to uranium miners and to people living in houses built with or on contaminated materials. The health risks of radon are substantial compared with other natural radio activity. The realization of the potential for widespread effects of radon and its decay products on lung cancer rates has been growing in the radon research community for almost a decade. Indoor air surveys in Canada and Sweden in the late 1970s as well as other, more limited, sampling efforts showed that higher radon levels existed in indoor air than had been expected. Radon and its decay products were a major focus of meetings held in Capri, Italy, in 1983 and in Maastricht, the Netherlands, in 1985. These meetings reported on ongoing national surveys in European countries, on laboratory and field studies on the properties of radon decay products, and on the models for relating the airborne radioactivity concentrations to the human lung. A major meeting in the United States was developed to bring together researchers from around the world to review the current state of knowledge and to discuss problems that still needed to be addressed. This book, based on that symposium, presents new and important results of the work of researchers active in the field. As organizer of that symposium and editor of this volume, I would like to thank the authors who agreed to present their work in this forum and the reviewers who helped to improve the quality of the presentations. In particular, I wish to thank Victoria Corkery, without whose invaluable assistance this volume would not have been possible. PHILIP K. HOPKE
University of Illinois Urbana, IL 61801 October 17, 1986
xi Hopke; Radon and Its Decay Products ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 1987.
