If you have high levels of radon in your home, you are certainly not alone. After all, having radon in your home is far from uncommon all throughout the United States, a country where up to one home out of every 15 is likely to have a level of radon so high that it meets (or, in some cases, even exceeds) the action level that has been set by the EPA (the Environmental Protection Agency). In some parts of the country, the concentration of radon is actually even higher. This is true in up to seven states, where around one home out of every three will test positive for this high level of radon concentration. And up to three Native American reservations have reported similar findings.

But even though the chances of having high levels of radon in your home are quite a bit more common than you might have realized, radon in your home will not be easily detected in the day to day pattern of your life. This is due to the fact that radon in your home is not only totally odorless but tasteless and invisible (at least to the naked eye) as well. Radon in your home can all too easily go unnoticed, something that can have incredibly damaging results on your life and health – and the health of your family, as well.

But why is radon in your home so dangerous? For one thing, high levels of radon in your home are incredibly dangerous for the high levels of radiation that they expose you to. Simply living with high levels of radon in your home actually exposes you to as much as 35 times the radon that you would have been exposed to if you and your family were standing so close to a radioactive waste site as to be right next to its fence.

And this radon in your home can lead to diseases like lung cancer as a result. As a matter of fact, radon in your home is known to lead to lung cancer, actually causing as many as 20,000 lung cancer related deaths over the course of just one single year. As a result of this, the Surgeon General of the United States has designated radon as the second leading cause of lung cancer cases in the entirety of the country, with only smoking and tobacco usage leading to more cases of this terrible – and all too often deadly – illness. Radon in your home, therefore, is something that should be taken very seriously indeed.

The first step to eradicating radon in your home is, of course, finding out if there is radon in your home in the first place. Fortunately, radon in your home can be detected by a residential radon testing service. These residential radon testing services are typically acquired through radon testing companies and often are performed in a number of different ways. For instance, radon in your home will likely be detected through the use of a short term radon test. Short term radon tests come in a number of varieties, some which can be used for only around two days in total but others that can track the levels of radon in your home for as many as a full 90 days. If radon in your home must be monitored past this 90 day mark (a period of nearly three months), a long term radon test is likely to be utilized.

If radon in your home is found to exist in high levels, a radon mitigation and abatement service can be brought in, a service that can lower levels of radon drastically. After all, lowering radon can be accomplished even just through passive levels of mitigation and abatement. Just taking these measures has been found to cut down on radon levels by as much as a full 50%. And when tools like a radon ventilation fan are brought into play, radon levels for any given home will be lowered even more, hopefully bringing said radon levels back down to a safe place – or at least under the EPA action level, something that could save up to 5,000 lives in the course of a single year.