| Despite a generally acknowledged public health risk from indoor exposure to airborne radon progeny, measurement techniques in current use do not provide sufficient information to assess risk from exposures in the home. By contrast, a simple, direct, measurement (the working level month) is a reliable starting point for the evaluation of miners' risks from radon progeny exposure. Ultrafine particles (0.5 to 50 nm in diameter) are frequently present in room air, especially during high occupancy times when activities like cooking and cleaning are taking place; but they are virtually absent from mine air. Measurement techniques used to evaluate mine and indoor air exposures do not supply any size-based data. Few studies of ultrafine aerosol deposition in humans have been undertaken, and none of these has specifically examined ultrafine particle deposition in the radiosensitive bronchial region of the respiratory tract.;In this research, the effect of ultrafine aerosol on radon progeny deposition in the bronchial airways was studied using: (1) a unique human exposure data base involving 8 men and 4 women volunteers, (2) a mathematical model describing the attachment behavior of radon progeny in the presence of aerosol developed as part of this work, and (3) a human respiratory-tract deposition model.;The addition of ultrafine aerosol to the air breathed by human subjects more than doubled the amount of radon progeny activity deposited in the bronchial region of the subjects' lungs, although radon gas concentration was held constant during all exposure experiments. The gamma activity measured in vivo remained higher at all times after exposure to ultrafine aerosol, while the rate of gamma activity clearance from the region was, on average, about 40 percent faster following ultrafine aerosol exposure. The human exposure data demonstrated that some aerosol size information is crucial to the determination of regional lung deposition and, consequently, the calculation of dose. The level of aerosol size detail that is necessary in order to support the development of dosimetrically defined measurements was evaluated. Three critical ultrafine size ranges were defined using these techniques--0.5 to 4 nm, 4 to 30 nm, and 30 to 250 nm. |
