November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month, and despite Utah’s low smoking rates, lung cancer is more prevalent than many residents are aware of.
“Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer death in the United States for both men and women,” according to the American Association for Cancer Research.
While there are many possible contributing factors to lung cancer, one that still seems to go unknown is radon.
Radon is a naturally forming radioactive gas that has no smell, color or taste, according to the World Health Organization. It is produced from the natural radioactive decay of uranium, which is found in rocks and soil.
Dr. Wallace Akerley, an oncologist at the Huntsman Cancer Institute, said that radon is “everywhere in the U.S,” and that about one in three homes in Utah have elevated levels of radon.
“It percolates up and whoever is standing above it gets exposed to it, but it's a very little bit. And the (radon) diffuses into the atmosphere miles above us,” Akerley said. “So in the real world, we really don't have any exposure to it.”
However, Akerley warned that exposure to radon becomes a problem when it gets trapped inside a home.
“It's just that when you take a house, essentially a radon chamber, … your house prevents it from diffusing into the atmosphere by holding it for a period of time,” Akerley said.
On June 3, 2022, Kerri Robbins, a resident of Lehi, was on her treadmill one morning and found herself struggling to breathe. It was almost as if some water went down the wrong pipe, she said.
“I knew something was going on and I went into the restroom to clean up because I made a mess for myself," Robbins said. "And when I got up to the sink to wash my hands, I looked in the mirror and I didn't know why I was there."
Robbins’s husband took her to the emergency room where she went through a series of tests to determine what was wrong.
After receiving an MRI, Robbins was surprised to find out she had cancer, she said.
“I just thought that they were crazy. I mean, I had been very healthy, just hardly took any time off of work and had no other symptoms,” Robbins said. “So over the course of the summer, we had to do a lot of tests. I had a follow up — the MRI, it showed that I did have a small tumor in my left lung that had spread to my brain,” Robbins said.
Robbins is not a smoker and she said she didn’t understand how she got lung cancer at the time. In November 2022, Robbins contacted Akerley at Huntsman Cancer Institute.
“The first thing he asked me was, was I a smoker. And I told him no. And he said, ‘Well, have you had your home tested for radon?’ And I said, ‘We didn't know that we needed to do that,’” Robbins said. “So we went ahead and tested for radon. The levels in our home were 31.3 pCi/L, which is like I was smoking three packs of cigarettes a day.”
According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the average indoor radon concentration for American homes is about 1.3 pCi/L (picocuries per liter). The Environmental Protection Agency also recommended that “homes be fixed if the radon level is 4 pCi/L or more.”
The levels in Robbins’s home were almost 30 points above that.
Even though they caught the cancer relatively quickly, Robbins's life has completely changed, she said.
“My phone rings every night at 8:15 p.m. to remind me to take my chemo pill… so sometimes I feel like I live by the phone or by the clock,” Robbins said. “If we would have known and had the house tested, I wouldn't be going through all this now.”
Robbins encouraged people to get their homes tested for radon and emphasized how preventable the problem is.
“Radon, when it comes to lung cancer, is preventable,” she said.
Although her life has become significantly more challenging, Robbins said that it gave her perspective and purpose. She has since become an advocate for radon awareness and recently won a national advocacy award from the Indoor Environments Association.
“One in three homes here in Utah have high elevated levels (of radon). It's preventable,” Robbins said. “Yes, it does cost money to mitigate your home if your levels are high, but it is so much cheaper than cancer.”
For more information regarding free radon testing, visit Utah Radon Services’ website here. For more information about radon, visit the Environmental Protection Agency’s “A Citizen’s Guide to Radon” here.
