The Environmental Protection Agency has paraded out new statistical hobgoblins claiming that 20,000 Americans die every year because of cancer-causing radon in homes, schools and workplaces.

In the second annual radon horror show, EPA Administrator William Reilly renewed the alarms, citing radon gas as "one of the most serious environmental health problems today." He again acted as a bureaucratic shill for hucksters peddling radon-detecting kits and more expensive home services.No household should be without a radon test, said Reilly, solemnly warning that radon "is the second leading cause of lung cancer in this country," right behind cigarette smoking.

In fact, the EPA - as it couldn't last year - still can't name a single American who died from cancer caused by naturally occurring radon in the home. The 20,000 figure is pure guess - what the agency calls a statistical "extrapolation."

And the EPA still can't show any significant link between lung cancer deaths and the high-reading radon areas that EPA test results have identified throughout the nation.

Summing up the EPA scare tactics and the pseudo-science employed to portray a virtual radon-caused cancer epidemic, one American physicist, Ralph Lapp, said the agency's contrived assessments of danger approached "panic proportions."

"I think the EPA is sitting on a first-class scandal," said Lapp in a critique following the agency's latest radon warning. "They are not telling the American people the truth about the radon risk."

The newest EPA radon test results were concentrated on five states; among them, Iowa was said to have such high readings that even the environmental alarmists were alarmed. An EPA spokeswoman, Martha Casey, said ominously, "Iowa is just saturated."

Alarming as the EPA's radon "saturation" of Iowa may be, the hyped-up report for 1989 arrives at the same dead end as the EPA radon report of 1988:

As elsewhere in the nation where the EPA has "extrapolated" radon readings to produce an imaginary death count, there are no reports in Iowa of radon cancer victims.

There are none suffering in hospitals, none delivered to morgues, and no connection whatever between the EPA's high radon readings in Iowa and known cancer deaths.

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To the contrary, the accumulated data on lung cancer deaths, as reported by state health officials, show no higher incidence of lung cancer in Iowa than the average for all the states in the nation.

The point raised by Lapp and others is that the EPA, with flimsy extrapolations and speculative data, continues to sound warnings of 20,000 radon-caused cancer deaths when there is no proof of such an enormous health threat.

The exaggerated death toll and shrill radon alarms from the EPA don't speak of measured judgments after careful study. They reflect more of the cultist outcries of that breed of professional environmentalists who earn their keep with constant warnings of a falling sky.

The EPA's claim of 20,000 radon deaths is taking on the same phony ring as those anguished, unfounded reports of the last snail darter.

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