Radiation link in flight attendant's breast cancer, French court finds

Tade0

> 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.

imglorp

There's no doubt cumulative exposure is a risk factor as a population. 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?

ChrisArchitect

Related: Cancer-related mortality among US pilots and flight attendants https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49389524

fastaguy88

The 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.

dmwood

C'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.