Cancer and mobile phones
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Misleading. From the study:
> Rats were exposed to ... whole-body SAR exposures of 0, 1.5, 3, or 6 W/kg
The lowest exposure they tested was equivalent to an average person (80kg in North America, evidently) standing right in front of the antenna of a 120W transmitter 24/7.
Now take my hot beverage example and repeat it a bunch of times. I would bet that cancer incidence would increase in the scalding group. (as you're destroying epithelial cells and forcing them to regenerate... and cancer is really biological lotto).
To top all the above off. With the exception of the migration from GSM to WCDMA technology (GSM pulsed the radio), cell phone radio output power has actually been on the decline due to smaller cells sizes being used in cities. It's nothing like using an analog cellphone in the 80's was in terms of output.
https://www.cancer.org/latest-news/world-health-organization...
As to whether that causes cancer, I’m not an expert... I guess the ultimate measure will be actual cancer incidence rates but by that point, isn’t it arguably too late for many of us?
I’d love to see a study about background EM exposure in the various EM spectrum bands that are now in continuous use in urban environments. But it would be very hard to run such a study!
While that study would be tricky, I can think of devising a study in which rural cellphone users are compared to urban ones. You'd have to control for things like wifi calling and outliers with a tower next to their house but in theory background EM from base towers will be lower in the rural area, while at the same time output power from the mobile will be higher (because further from base station).
Honestly though, nothing is going to compare to the EM radiation of the Sun. It's like asking if hearing whispering will cause hearing damage while someone is screaming next to you. So, yeah I guess... hard to control. (this is why I only bring up user equipment exposure since it's placed inches from the skin, I think it's silly to worry about cancer from base stations)
Certainly by first principals of what we know, cell phone radiation should be harmless. But there's always the possibility we don't know something important yet, and given cellular radio's omnipresence, I figure it's worth humoring that possibility.
As for power output, I'm not a modem engineer but it sounds like GSM -> 3G -> 4G has progressively reduced power requirements by improving SNR & playing other tricks. Whereas with 5G, on the surface it sounds like the plan to increase bandwidth & performance is "take 4G and jack the frequency & power", so it's kind of the other direction and then makes sense why so many people are asking questions compared to the rollout of 3G or 4G.
There can be plenty of “hidden” effects for non-ionizing radiation for example we don’t know how the extra energy affects the molecular processes in cells you don’t have to ionize something to fuck things up a microwave would cook an egg without ever ionizing it’s molecules.
And if the mechanism is mocrowave heating, then power density driven heating rate is the first order effect.
Which 'if' is it? Perhaps neither of the above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model
Then check out the idea of Radiation Hormesis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
It's an interesting idea.
> Forty (68%) studies reported one or more statistically significant results (p < 0.05) indicating an effect of the exposure (Table 2). Studies funded exclusively by industry reported on the largest number of outcomes but were less likely to report statistically significant results [...]
> Our findings add to the existing evidence that single-source sponsorship is associated with outcomes that favor the sponsors’ products
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1797826/
This may be a fact that scientist are well aware of, but I would say it's not something that the general population knows; for most people there is this fantasy where the "scientific community" reaches consensus almost spontaneously and that's the end of the story, we got a new universal law.
If only the media said "some new analysis indicates that there could be a relation between this and that" instead of the usual "Science says"...
I remember an study of a few year ago where they had
* rats and mice -> x2 * male/female/both -> x2 (or x3) * three level of radiation -> x3 * two or three types of cancer -> x2 (or x3)
So the report has at least 2x2x3x2=24 results. There is a high probability that by chance one of them gets a p<0.05.
Also, studies with a positive result have a higher chance of been published, because the researchers are not interested in publishing boring studies without a positive result so they don't write it, and the journals are not interested in publishing boring studies without a positive result so they don't approve it. (And I'm ignoring intentional fraud and p hacking ...)
Anyway, perhaps the researchers sponsored by the telephone companies/manufacters just publish all their studies and the independent researches publish only the interesting studies. This is why in certain areas it is mandatory to register the experiments before they start, to ensure (reduce) there is no publication bias.
In particle physics it's too easy to do experiments, filtering and analysis, so they use a criteria of 5 sigmas to call it a discovery. This is roughly p<0.0000003, because if they use p<0.05 you would get every month a announcement of a new particle and a few month later the retraction.
For experiments with mice/rats it's impossible to ask for p<0.0000003 because you will need trillions of rats, but remember that p<0.05 is just an arbitrary threshold.
I'm curious about the possibility that mobile phone radiation does not cause cancer, but its presence can increase the effectiveness of other things the can cause cancer.
There are some researchers who think that the mechanism cells use to detect and repair damage to DNA finds the damage by looking for places along the DNA where there are unexpected changes in electrical conductivity such as due to broken bonds. There has been speculation that passing non-ionization electromagnetic radiation could interfere with that mechanism, causing it to overlook damaged DNA that it would have otherwise found and repaired.
Note that if it does indeed have some kind of "suppress preventing cancer" effect, then the intensity of the radiation might not matter much as long as it is above some threshold. What might matter most is the length of continuous exposure, and the time between intervals of exposure. As long as the times of little or no exposure are frequent enough and long enough that the cells will be able to do their find and repair operations before a cell on its way to cancer has time to start reproducing, you should be fine.
This would differ quite a bit from the usual radiation testing situation, where all that matters is total exposure, so you can simulate long term low level exposure by short term, higher level exposure.
It could turn out, say, that 100 short calls spread throughout the day are almost completely safe, even on an old high power phone, but a couple of long conversations greatly increase the risks that if something else tries to give you cancer during that time it will succeed.
This would probably be pretty hard to conduct a study on.
Could you link to the research because this makes very little sense to me. DNA doesn’t conduct electricity in any meaningful way (base resistance >= Teraohms).
Maybe charge distribution or something?
How about a large scale human study performed over 30 years? http://sci-hub.mu/10.1016/j.canep.2016.04.010
I've always said this, and I know it's putting the cart before the horse in terms of scientific investigation, and I know that in the worst case, I sound like a tin foil hat. And I use a mobile phone regularly myself. But I've always always wondered. The article doesn't say anything definitive in either direction, so I still am left to wonder.
They say this like it's somehow unique to cell phones. Really, how does this differ from any technological advancement? Didn't the invention of cars, wired phones, the printing press, the transistor, etc. also start distributing without any scientific analysis of the possible dangers to health?
Again using asbestos and lead in various products as examples, there are real dangers to public health in new products/technologies, and while I don't want to see the technological progress we've made stopped I do want to see more effort made to anticipate, mitigate, and lessen the potential harm caused by new technologies (and the irresponsible behavior of many of the companies pushing them).
The point is that we don't know the health consequences beforehand, and anticipating them is not easy. You say you want more of an effort made in this regard, but do you actually know how much effort is currently made towards this end?
> Our findings add to the existing evidence that single-source sponsorship is associated with outcomes that favor the sponsors’ products
Compared to other everyday safety hazards (cars, sunlight, pathogen exposure, bath mats...) this one is laughable even if you take extremely cynical confidence bounds.
Assuming we're discussing RF "radiation", how did they do this? By cranking up the RF output power? I'm sure if someone exposed me to a few thousand watts of 1ghz RF pointed directly at me, the tissue heating effect alone would cause a huge range of issues. That is how a microwave heats food.
Seems a bit like saying that baths are deadly because scalding hot water will kill you.
“We exposed broiler chickens (whose biological properties make them useful treatments of human hunger) to doses of heat and infrared radiation equivalent to an average human’s lifetime exposure.”
“They turned out crispy and delicious.”
Another thought: my phone and provider (Pixel 2, Google Fi) will automatically use WiFi for calls when available. I wonder if that mode is significantly lower radiation for the same reason (shorter distance to cover, so the signal doesn't need to be as strong).
No. Industry probably casts doubt even when it's undeserved, but there is no reason to believe claims that mobile phone radiation causes cancer.
Even if the evidence provided would prove true, it would not matter. Reported effect sizes are so small it would not be reason to change behavior.
Microwave radiation has multiple potential ways it can change biological function, not just thermal effects. But things like EM radiation as calcium-channel antagonist works only with cells in vitro. If you are Multicellular organism with skin, there is no evidence that you are in any danger.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/3575652/
Probably not significant if you have a good immune system, which is constantly cleaning out mutated cells. Sunlight, which is good for you, absolutely does cause cancer, but you don’t see conspiratorial articles about UV radiation.
The part about 5G was interesting though. I wonder if it could be weaponised, say by compromising a base station and beam forming a signal at full power (plus harmonics) at a target in possession of a cellphone.
The main problem with these studies is that they are “rats in a microwave oven”, so they are subject to the same amount of RF as if you were sleeping in a pile of cellphones transmitting constantly (not recommended). They never bother exposing some of the rats to 1 cellphones worth of power.
There have been large multiple decade studies done of cellphone users that indicate cancer is not an issue (see elsewhere in this thread for a link).
I wonder if in 30 years we'll all be suing the industry over this (when it's too late for many of us).
Anecdotally you heard of 1980s stock brokers getting brain cancer but were there any statistically valid studies done on this?
I'm not sure what to make of this. I thought there wasn't any good evidence of radiation from mobile phones being harfmul.
> There is a catch, though: the Internet of Things will require augmenting today’s 4G technology with 5G technology, thus “massively increasing” the general population’s exposure to radiation, according to a petition signed by 236 scientists worldwide who have published more than 2,000 peer-reviewed studies and represent “a significant portion of the credentialled scientists in the radiation research field”, according to Joel Moskowitz, the director of the Center for Family and Community Health at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped circulate the petition. Nevertheless, like mobiles, 5G technology is on the verge of being introduced without pre-market safety testing.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B14R6QNkmaXuelFrNWRQcThNV0U...
Just out of curiosity, how would one go about locating the direction of 5G antennas? At the very least, I'd gleefully shit-talk anyone involved I come across. Just out of principle. It doesn't even matter how safe it turns out to be -- just how needy and dumb people are adopting anything thrown into their through, how reckless not just with their own lives, but with their effects on others and the environment, calls for some serious fucking wrath. And this is as good a starting point as any.