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Radiation link in flight attendant's breast cancer, French court finds
- Tade0 23d ago> Smoking was authorised on Air France flights until 2000. I'm sorry, what? The first flight I took which I recall in detail was in 1995 and even back then the "no smoking sign" seemed redundant. Guess it wasn't.
- gwbas1c 23d agoA couple of things: From what I remember as a kid in the 1990s in the US, smoking was allowed on international flights. It was one of those grey areas that happen when traveling between countries with different laws. I've also seen a lot of jokes about French culture being waaay more "pro smoking" than US culture. Thus smoking beling allowed on Air France until 2000 doesn't surprise me.
- azepoi 23d agoUp until 2004 you had to book a non-smoking rail-car in France. I remember having to book a seat in the smoking section because the non-smoking cars were full. Smoking was only being phased-out in high-school yards (for 15-18 yo highschoolers not only the staff)
- gwbas1c 22d agoYikes! I always thought the jokes about French kids smoking were just jokes and exgaggerations!
- CGMthrowaway 22d agoSmoking on flights is less dangerous than lithium batteries. At least a cigarette fire can be seen and put out. A lithium battery in thermal runaway can explode and is not possible to extinguish as it is self-perpetuating.
- infecto 23d agoLots of Europe especially France is packed with smokers. One of those things you take for granted living in the US and once you travel abroad you realize how much of the world still burns tobacco and it’s everywhere.
- Tade0 23d agoI'm not American though and while smokers are everywhere here, I don't recall ever being on a flight where smoking was allowed, even though the one mentioned was a connecting flight through Paris.
- dralley 23d agoThey've mostly switched to vapes now. It's still annoying, but at least it doesn't leave trash all over the streets. Seeing the sidewalks / parks outside of the main train station in Prague covered in cigarette butts as an American tourist in 2019 was certainly something.
- 1-more 23d agoI smoked less in Prague than in the US. I was addicted to nicotine, sure, but I was also addicted to taking a little vacation outside whatever venue, and in Prague (in 2008) you could smoke just about anywhere.
- happyopossum 23d ago> but at least it doesn't leave trash all over the streets Last time I was in London I saw enough disposable vapes on the sidewalk to build a home-sized backup battery...
- dgellow 23d agoI really believe disposable vapes should be banned
- globular-toast 23d ago
- Pompidou 23d ago"loi Évin", from 1991, do not allow people to smoke in transportation. I used to travel air France and air Inter plane from 1990 to 2000. I never see anybody smoking in a plane.
- Marsymars 23d agoBy some weird overlap of times/policies, as far as I can tell, Air France never flew a Concorde flight where smoking wasn't allowed. (British Airways banned smoking on their Concorde flights in 1997.)
- imglorp 23d agoThere's no doubt cumulative exposure is a risk factor as a population. https://hms.harvard.edu/news/pilots-flight-attendants-have-greater-risk-radiation-related-cancer-death-other-professions https://hms.harvard.edu/news/pilots-flight-attendants-have-g... But how can they point to one individual and say it's causal? Maybe they caught some radon. Maybe something else?
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- Tabular-Iceberg 23d agoThat seems like it would be the most important part of the whole article, and it was left out. It’s possible that the standards of evidence in a civil case is low enough that they don’t have to demonstrate a causal link. Only that there is radiation in the air and that radiation causes cancer.
- goodcanadian 23d agoThe article acknowledged that you cannot say for certain what caused her cancer. The court determined, however, that the increased radiation exposure qualified as a workplace hazard that increased her risk of cancer and was therefore a contributing factor. At least, that's the way I understood it.
- webdoodle 23d agoSpeculation: Most forms of breast cancer occur because of bad protein production from a specific gene. My guess is this flight attendants breast cancer isn't from any known breast cancer gene.
- aeternum 23d agoThis seems like pretty strong evidence that the Linear No-Threshold Model for radiation exposure is the correct model. Not great for the many companies attempting to revive the nuclear power industry.
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- ChrisArchitect 23d agoRelated: Cancer-related mortality among US pilots and flight attendants https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49389524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49389524
- redsocksfan45 23d ago[dead]
- mistermann 23d ago[dead]
- fastaguy88 23d agoThe idea that "courts" are equipped to address scientific questions is ridiculous. Perhaps French courts are better -- in the US, it is very much about decisions based on a confrontational presentation of "evidence", something like "debates" about evolution or vaccine injuries. Debates are about persuasion, not reality. And, in some contexts (like whether you should go to jail), there is a process argument that there needs to be a debate-like process. Science deals in facts and statistics that have associated uncertainty. For scientific questions, there should be better decision making processes than courts.
- gib444 23d agoIs your comment based on the body of the article, or the title? The article explains right near the top that it was ruling on it being classed as an occupational disease: > Sophie Lainault...sought to have her cancer recognised as an occupational disease, brought on by conditions at work. > This has now been confirmed in a landmark court ruling...which said that cosmic radiation was one of three carcinogenic hazards arising from her profession. The other two were passive smoking and prolonged night work.
- dmwood 23d agoC'mon, man. The use of the 'attributable fraction' (AF) in legal cases about toxin exposure is well established, if not uniformly legally applied. Careful epidemiology routinely produces the `excess relative risk' of an exposed population to a specific exposure. From this the AF can be computed as ERR/(1+ERR). For example, for uranium miners in the early days of the nuclear program the AF for lung cancer (via radon in mines) was 60% or more. Large scale epidemiology for U.S. cabin crews is already past the planning phases. Naturally not much can be said about one individual's case (except via intrusive genetic testing for predisposing factors), but the AF permits at least a rational way of proceeding.
- dgellow 23d agoIs that used in France too? It’s not clear to me what part of the article you’re reacting to