That is certainly a popular conspiracy theory.
It’s hard to believe, though. Cellphones have been around for a generation. The early ones had higher output power than modern ones. If there was any risk of harm, we would see it by now.
It’s hard to believe, though. Cellphones have been around for a generation. The early ones had higher output power than modern ones. If there was any risk of harm, we would see it by now.
That statement feels a little problematic to me. Who's to say that possible effects aren't cumulative, maybe more exposure time is needed for big problems to appear, and maybe it's been contributing to smaller problems so far. Truth is, we don't really know enough to say that for sure.
Think asbestos and mesothelioma. The onset of that can be forty years after exposure to asbestos. That's roughly two generations. And a one off event can be enough.
Except that mesothelioma can onset at 15 years and is less rare at 25. And it is one of the longest because of the particular mechanism of encapsulation and migration. DNA disruption has no such reason to be slow.
There are almost always some people with a fast response to a biologically active agent. DNA damage would almost certainly show up quite quickly in some subgroup.
While you can't prove a negative, absence of evidence certainly moves the Bayesian priors.
Hypothetically, if EMF radiation were to cause a wide range of low-level effects such that common diseases had increasing prevalence rates over time, how would we be able to link that back? Cell towers are ubiquitous, there's no non-exposed control group that epidemiologists can easily compare to.
Incorrect. Time of onset is a control.
Look at the results on breast cancer from when they stopped giving post-menopausal women hormone replacement therapy.
Different countries and areas of the country get different generations of cell phone and towers at different times.
While there may not be a huge amount of funding going into this, the result of finding an effect between cell phones and biology would be so huge, that researchers in relevant fields very much pay attention.
If someone they thought they could get any correlation, even with massive p-hacking, someone would publish it.
If latency time is decades long (not unreasonable for brain cancers, for example, which are very slow growing), then every brain cancer survey will pick up people who moved in from other areas and were exposed at different times and rates, considerably lowering the signal-to-noise ratio.
Also relevant:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-studies-link-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Q...
The difficulty is in getting statistics right. How do you compare two groups of people controlling for the variable when people who don't use cellphones are very different in other aspects than people who do.
Edit: To add to this, when I was 8 years old my dad developed kidney cancer - or at least that is when they found it. He was a commercial airline pilot, which so happens to have a higher level of kidney cancer (probably other cancers too) due to being surrounded by electronics in the flight deck + exposure to more radiation; I can only imagine they've tried to improve reducing exposure as much as they can, however who knows if that means more direct costs and perhaps they don't care about indirect costs. I know power line workers and certain other professions have a much lower life expectancy as well, we also know that exposure to strong(er) magnetic fields like from MRI machines can disrupt pregnancy. Knowing all of this it's hard to come to the assumption that smaller quantities/exposures can't not have some impact with in the "right" environment.
The higher dosage of solar/space radiation due to the altitude is surely the correct explanation.
Apparently there have been a few studies, but with questionable rigor. For example http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.603...
No. The American College of Radiology contradicts this: "Present data have not conclusively documented any deleterious effects of MR imaging exposure on the developing fetus. Therefore no special consideration is recommended for the first, versus any other, trimester in pregnancy."
With 5G, the carriers are having to densify the cell towers significantly. So, on average you are going to have to transmit less distance for less time.
A good test would probably be: does your battery last longer doing radio things? Energy in a battery is fixed. If the battery is lasting longer and hasn't gotten bigger, it's turning less of that energy into radio power.
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/wireless/a-beam-...
For example, standing in full sunlight might not be a problem normally unless you stand for entire day and get burned (extended exposure without allowing the body the time to repair) or maybe the sunlight gets concentrated by a lens and burns your finger without changing total exposure to sun (concentrated in space) or maybe gets somehow converted to UV (concentrated to restrict wavelengths to hit specific molecules reacting with UV) or stored as energy in the form of oil and released quickly when burning (concentrated in time).
The first cellphones where much larger devices placing the source of the radiation further away from your body. They were also omnidirectional making sure that the maximum density of the field was low. New devices use beam forming which means it sometimes hits with a dense wave travelling through your body as if it was a sunlight concentrated with a lens.
Also, new cellphones are much better transmitters with much better control of the spectrum to maximise the power at a specific frequency. It further exacerbates the effect meaning if the beam interacts with something in the body it interacts much more strongly, again, akin to the concentrating lens. With old cellphone everything would be getting warmer a bit, with newer ones it may come into much stronger interactions because it may do it much more selectively (in space, time and choice of a molecule it interacts with).
On related note, I've wondered if the circulatory system would function as antennas of various lengths.