Radon Campaign
M4.6 Radon Campaign
The first step to developing a national awareness campaign around the dangers of Radon would be to first understand the audience that we are trying to target. If we were trying to target officials or decisions makers to create more restrictive radon exposure policies, we may focus on the fiscal implication of chronic radon exposure. By highlighting personal and state/federal costs from prevention of disease specifically lung cancer costs, we could leverage making smaller reformative changes at a lower cost to prevent larger the cost of health care burden.
If our targeted audience was the general public, then an effective campaign would focus on individual symptoms that could point to chronic radon exposure or easy to understand ways to test and make changes to someones living or working space to reduce their radon exposure. Unfortunately, radon exposure does not cause a lot of immediate and physical symptoms, however its long term chronic exposure can be deadly, being the 1st leading cause of non-smoking lung cancer deaths in the United States. An effective campaign would try and demonstrate the commonality of this fact, that the effects of the radon they are exposed to now may not show up until years later, and in a lethal manner as well. Demonstrating the severity of the health risk and the ease of and cost effective nature of getting a radon test kit would be the best way to push a campaign forward to inform and engender and audience to make changes.
To ensure the effectiveness of the campaign, national supporters like the American Cancer Society, the CDC, the EPA, and the National Radon Safety Board could help develop content and credibility behind the campaign message. Locally, communities department of health and gas and electric company would be an excellent resource to know how to effectively disseminate the radon risk message within their community and talk about local resources to try and effectively mitigate each individuals problem.
The first step to developing a national awareness campaign around the dangers of Radon would be to first understand the audience that we are trying to target. If we were trying to target officials or decisions makers to create more restrictive radon exposure policies, we may focus on the fiscal implication of chronic radon exposure. By highlighting personal and state/federal costs from prevention of disease specifically lung cancer costs, we could leverage making smaller reformative changes at a lower cost to prevent larger the cost of health care burden.
If our targeted audience was the general public, then an effective campaign would focus on individual symptoms that could point to chronic radon exposure or easy to understand ways to test and make changes to someones living or working space to reduce their radon exposure. Unfortunately, radon exposure does not cause a lot of immediate and physical symptoms, however its long term chronic exposure can be deadly, being the 1st leading cause of non-smoking lung cancer deaths in the United States. An effective campaign would try and demonstrate the commonality of this fact, that the effects of the radon they are exposed to now may not show up until years later, and in a lethal manner as well. Demonstrating the severity of the health risk and the ease of and cost effective nature of getting a radon test kit would be the best way to push a campaign forward to inform and engender and audience to make changes.To ensure the effectiveness of the campaign, national supporters like the American Cancer Society, the CDC, the EPA, and the National Radon Safety Board could help develop content and credibility behind the campaign message. Locally, communities department of health and gas and electric company would be an excellent resource to know how to effectively disseminate the radon risk message within their community and talk about local resources to try and effectively mitigate each individuals problem.
I was reading somewhere that it cost the U.S. 2 billion dollars just to fight lung cancer and radon is one of the culprits. Sense it is a naturally occurring radioactive material, you would think it would get as much media attention as UV rays. It doesn't help that the summers are getting hotter due to climate change and this is when it becomes more activated. I agree that a campaign that describes the long term dangers could raise awareness the same as melanoma if someone is exposed to UV rays for a long time. Both are silent and slow killers.
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