MADISON, Wis. — Nearly half of Dane County homes tested for radon in the past three years had high levels of the gas, according to Public Health Madison & Dane County.
Radon is a radioactive gas that seeps into homes from the ground.
Kirk and Lindsay Mefford have made it their mission to inform and identify radon levels at homes in the area.
“As great as this job is, we meet lots and lots of great people, but in our seven years of testing, we’ve also met about a dozen people or so who only call us after their lung cancer diagnosis,” the couple, who co-own Madison Radon Testing, said.
What exactly is radon? And why should people care?
“Radon is a gas that forms in the soil from the breakdown of natural soil minerals,” said John Hausbeck, an environmental health services supervisor for PHMDC. “The problem is that it is radioactive, and one thing we know about radioactive things is that they don’t do good things to our bodies; in this case, they cause lung cancer because that’s the tissue that comes into contact with it when we inhale it.”
Exposure to radon is the second-leading cause of lung cancer nationally. Around 1,000 Wisconsinites die each year from it.
So why aren’t people doing more about it? Not enough people are aware.
“That’s how Lindsay decided to start this business,” Kirk said. “We bought our first house in 2003 on the east side of Madison, and we didn’t test our house for radon until 2014, and our house was 60 times higher than what you’d breathe outside, and within a year, my mom tested positive for lung cancer.”
Since people can’t see, smell or taste radon, testing is the only way to detect it.
PHMDC offers a $10 do-it-yourself kit, or people can hire professionals like the Meffords. The installation takes about 10 minutes and gauges levels over a period of a few days.
After a few days, the test will show whether a resident needs to take action to get radon out of their home.
Even if a test comes back with acceptable limits of the gas, it’s important to test every two years, Kirk Mefford said.
“This needs to be common knowledge; people need to know it changes. He was really upset, and I don’t blame him, so I went from a skeptic of testing every two years to believing radon levels can and do change,” he said.
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