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Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

wsj.com

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Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#51

Post by 1337biz »

kome wrote: post #45

Cellphones or Wi-Fi today are like cigarettes in the '50s. A huge lobby pretend they are just fine, people are in denial because they love them and we lack of longitudinal data about their effects on health. But thanks to further research, and time, we are starting to understand better the effects of cellphone radiation on health. The World Health Organization already had a rapport in 2011 about cellphones possible d…

> Cellphones or wi-fi today are like cigarettes in the '40s.

That is exactly the same question I am always asking. But with most controversial topics this could be true.

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#52

Post by kome »

Confusion wrote: post #32

One in 20 studies will find that, with 95% certainty, there is a link. You can easily find 19 others that found that, with 95% certainty, there is no link.

To be fair, a meta-analysis is already done, and it proves there is a link: http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/05/31/who.cell.phones/

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#53

Post by alex_duf »

joshvm wrote: post #17
djmdjm wrote: post #6

Does anyone have a link to the actual paper? As usual, it's impossible to get any useful information from a sensational mainstream science article. The article states that they studied rats and mice at 9 hrs/day exposure (at what RF power?) but aren't reporting results for mice at this stage. Of the rats (how many?), they found the "cancer association appeared in male rats" but no effect size or confidence interval i…

Mother Jones posted this link: http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/05/26/055699.f... Key points: - The rats were exposed in utero and throughout their lifetimes - They did pilot studies to find what radiation level did not cause a body temperature rise to remove that as a confusing factor - 900MHz CDMA and GSM signals - SAR of 0, 1.5, 3, 6 W/kg. For comparison the FCC limit is 1.2 W/kg in 1 gram of tissue.…

Thanks for the summary, very interesting!

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#54

Post by ptaipale »

svantana wrote: post #31
lucaspiller wrote: post #24

Ok this is the first study that says there is a link, but let's assume for a moment that what it says is correct and it has the same effect in humans: Would the same also be true for wifi? According to Wikipedia the average cell phone TX power is 500 mW vs 200 mW for 802.11n [0]. Cell phones usually operate at lower frequency than wifi, however wifi (at 2.4Ghz) is at the same frequency as microwave ovens. In the stud…

I think the reason why people worry about cell phones and not other radio equipment is that they are transmitting very close to the body. Remember, EM intensity falls off as 1/r^2 so proximity makes a big difference.

And a particularly stupid way to react to cell phone radiation fears is to insist that cell network base stations should be moved away from schools and there should be no wifi base stations. Think of our children!

What that means is, of course, increased exposure. The kids are not going to give a way their phones, they'll continue using them. When there is no wifi, they will be using the LTE or 3G or 2G networks. When the base station is further away,the phone will transmit at higher power. The phone itself is by far the dominant source of RF power to people's bodies.

Thus, ignorant parents want to decrease radiation, and the very proposals they make would increase it. Whether that really has any impact, we don't know, there's no proof, or a good theory about possible mechanisms, just speculation, mostly based on fear and suspicion.

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#55

Post by shirro »

legulere wrote: post #46
retrogradeorbit wrote: post #40

It's important to note that according to official dogma, non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer. I've heard my own concerns about non-ionising radiation dismissed (even belittled) so many times that I've lost count. Most often this comes from educated people who think that their education constitutes the whole of all knowledge about the universe and that there is nothing left to be discovered. But one should und…

I guess a better way to say it is: Non-ionizing radiation can't cause cancer the way UV, x-ray or gamma rays cause cancer. We haven't found any other way radiation can cause cancer yet.

That may not be true. UVA is not ionising and possibly increases risk of skin cancer.

Non-ionizing radiation can cause chemical reactions (photochemical, heating, burns) that damage cells and might lead to increased cancer risk.

I really doubt if that is the case with mobile phones but I think it makes more sense to look at the epidemiological data rather than make a bunch of hand wavey arguments about the radiation. There are a hell of a lot of cell phone users and if there is a risk worth being concerned about I think it should have shown up before now.

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#56

Post by Johnythree »

1337biz wrote: post #51
kome wrote: post #45

Cellphones or Wi-Fi today are like cigarettes in the '50s. A huge lobby pretend they are just fine, people are in denial because they love them and we lack of longitudinal data about their effects on health. But thanks to further research, and time, we are starting to understand better the effects of cellphone radiation on health. The World Health Organization already had a rapport in 2011 about cellphones possible d…

> Cellphones or wi-fi today are like cigarettes in the '40s. That is exactly the same question I am always asking. But with most controversial topics this could be true.

When the statistical evidence for Cigarette usage was closely examined it was immediately obvious that there was a link with health.

But we have hundreds of detailed studies of Radio and Health, and no reproducible link has ever been found.

You can't have it both ways. To conflate the two is simply wrong. The evidence doesn't support your argument.

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#57

Post by tim333 »

From the paper a sample of 90 control rats had no cancer found while the groups (90 in each) of rats exposed to radiation had between 0 and 3 instances of cancer being found. I would have though the odds of it coming out like that by chance would be fairly high.

I also note the control rats seemed to have survived less well "At the end of the 2-year study, survival was lower in the control group of males than in all 2 groups of male rats exposed to GSM-modulated RFR" which shows these things are a bit random and would probably not justify saying cell radiation makes you live longer.

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#58

Post by marvin »

shirro wrote: post #55
legulere wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess a better way to say it is: Non-ionizing radiation can't cause cancer the way UV, x-ray or gamma rays cause cancer. We haven't found any other way radiation can cause cancer yet.

That may not be true. UVA is not ionising and possibly increases risk of skin cancer. Non-ionizing radiation can cause chemical reactions (photochemical, heating, burns) that damage cells and might lead to increased cancer risk. I really doubt if that is the case with mobile phones but I think it makes more sense to look at the epidemiological data rather than make a bunch of hand wavey arguments about the radiation.…

Non-ionizing radiation can also cause other adverse health effects. A famous Norwegian case in the early 90s related to navy personnel on board an attack vessel, where 17 of the 85 children of soldiers who had served on the vessel, had birth defects. A disproportionate number of the employees on the electronics workshop of its home base also has children with similar birth defects

The negative effects are widely believed to have been caused by a 750W radar jammer, which frequently radiated the ship deck. There hasn't been established a clear cause-and-effect link.

https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvikk-saken

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#59

Post by wmeredith »

tim333 wrote: post #57

From the paper a sample of 90 control rats had no cancer found while the groups (90 in each) of rats exposed to radiation had between 0 and 3 instances of cancer being found. I would have though the odds of it coming out like that by chance would be fairly high. I also note the control rats seemed to have survived less well "At the end of the 2-year study, survival was lower in the control group of males than in all…

The subtleness if the differences between the groups seems to undermine their hypothesis. How are they saying this is statistically significant?

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#60

Post by tim333 »

kome wrote: post #45

Cellphones or Wi-Fi today are like cigarettes in the '50s. A huge lobby pretend they are just fine, people are in denial because they love them and we lack of longitudinal data about their effects on health. But thanks to further research, and time, we are starting to understand better the effects of cellphone radiation on health. The World Health Organization already had a rapport in 2011 about cellphones possible d…

Cellphones or Wi-Fi today are unlike cigarettes in the '50s in that if you run the numbers cigarettes cause loads of deaths (maybe 10 years off lifespan) while the effects of Cellphones and Wi-Fi if they cause any harm are so small as to be pretty much undetectable (see eg http://bigthink.com/laurie-vazquez/your-cellphone-absolutely...).

If there's a modern equivalent to cigarettes it's probably air pollution which can probably knock about a decade off your life in the worst places. ("Life expectancy is 5.5 years lower in northern China than in the south because of heavy air pollution, a new study examining 20 years of data has determined."...). Or maybe sugary food.

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