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Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

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Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#121

Post by dragonwriter »

bkmartin wrote: post #97
tfm wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cancer is a very broad church. There have been a lot of lifestyle changes over the last twenty years, very difficult to specify control groups ....

You could possibly use the Amish as a control group. They are probably exposed less than almost any other group to these types of radiation due to their distance in proximity. They, of course, do come into contact with it in minor ways when interacting in public, but far far less than the general population.

That's actually a bad control group; you want some group whose lifestyle, including lifestyle changes, matches pretty well the rest of society but for exposure to the kind of radiating devices at issue, to isolate changes due to the effects of the devices at issue from the effects of other lifestyle changes.

Since the Amish lifestyle and lifestyle changes over the time period of interest don't match the general public in ways other than cellphone/wifi exposure, they aren't really a good control.

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#122

Post by mangeletti »

myblake wrote: post #117
mangeletti wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conjecture: There is no such thing as "non-ionizing" radiation. There is just a continuum that ranges from "barely a chance for this to ionize a molecule" to "this will ionize something in the first nanometer". I mean, what's the point of understanding EMR as a continuum of wavelength, if we're going to create arbitrary distinctions therein and presume to know everything about those distinctions. Another way to think…

It's been a while since I took chemistry and physics so I could be wrong, but I think you may be incorrect due to quantum effects. Specifically, the quantum in quantum mechanics refers to various phenomena which are quantized, a very common example of which is an electron moving to a different energy level. It's entirely discrete what energy levels an electron may orbit an atomic nucleus at, it's not a continuum, and…

What about wave interference[1]?

1. http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/waves/Lesson-3/Interfe...

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#123

Post by alexandre_m »

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…

I think we should talk about EMF in general, not just WiFi.

It's fair to say we don't have enough data to prove there's no link with cancer or health effects in the long term, yet.

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#124

Post by snerbles »

mangeletti wrote: post #113
mikekij wrote: post #103

Medical Physicist here. The position isn't "non-ionizing radiation can't cause cancer". It's "There is no known mechanism by which non-ionizing radiation can cause cancer." Maybe we'll discover a mechanism one day to explain this. But we seem to understand the processes by which cell mutations, and subsequently cancer, and produced. We should certainly research this area further. But the probability of this study hav…

Conjecture: There is no such thing as "non-ionizing" radiation. There is just a continuum that ranges from "barely a chance for this to ionize a molecule" to "this will ionize something in the first nanometer". I mean, what's the point of understanding EMR as a continuum of wavelength, if we're going to create arbitrary distinctions therein and presume to know everything about those distinctions. Another way to think…

WiFi and Bluetooth do not operate in the 900 MHz band.

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#125

Post by takluyver »

bkmartin wrote: post #97
tfm wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cancer is a very broad church. There have been a lot of lifestyle changes over the last twenty years, very difficult to specify control groups ....

You could possibly use the Amish as a control group. They are probably exposed less than almost any other group to these types of radiation due to their distance in proximity. They, of course, do come into contact with it in minor ways when interacting in public, but far far less than the general population.

The Amish live in a very different environment from the general population in all sorts of ways. So they're not a good control group, because where their health differs from the general population, you don't know if it's because of radiation exposure, diet, electric lighting, chemicals in cars, or any of a thousand other things.

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#126

Post by evgen »

mangeletti wrote: post #113
mikekij wrote: post #103

Medical Physicist here. The position isn't "non-ionizing radiation can't cause cancer". It's "There is no known mechanism by which non-ionizing radiation can cause cancer." Maybe we'll discover a mechanism one day to explain this. But we seem to understand the processes by which cell mutations, and subsequently cancer, and produced. We should certainly research this area further. But the probability of this study hav…

Conjecture: There is no such thing as "non-ionizing" radiation. There is just a continuum that ranges from "barely a chance for this to ionize a molecule" to "this will ionize something in the first nanometer". I mean, what's the point of understanding EMR as a continuum of wavelength, if we're going to create arbitrary distinctions therein and presume to know everything about those distinctions. Another way to think…

Also note, it's already known that Bluetooth and WiFi cause the blood brain barrier to become 10-100x more biologically leaky[1], letting more chemicals into your brain.

No, it is not.

Your source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8012056

No similar effect found at 1439 Mhz: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16142770

Replication of experiment at 915 Mhz sees no effect on blood brain barrier: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19580497

Do you have any other evidence? So far you are shooting blanks.

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#127

Post by [deleted] »

mangeletti wrote: post #113
mikekij wrote: post #103

Medical Physicist here. The position isn't "non-ionizing radiation can't cause cancer". It's "There is no known mechanism by which non-ionizing radiation can cause cancer." Maybe we'll discover a mechanism one day to explain this. But we seem to understand the processes by which cell mutations, and subsequently cancer, and produced. We should certainly research this area further. But the probability of this study hav…

Conjecture: There is no such thing as "non-ionizing" radiation. There is just a continuum that ranges from "barely a chance for this to ionize a molecule" to "this will ionize something in the first nanometer". I mean, what's the point of understanding EMR as a continuum of wavelength, if we're going to create arbitrary distinctions therein and presume to know everything about those distinctions. Another way to think…

[deleted]

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#128

Post by takluyver »

kome wrote: post #52
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/

That article does not describe a meta-analysis (or at least it's not clear that it does), and it certainly doesn't 'prove' a link. They classified it as 'possibly carcinogenic' because there is some evidence indicating that it increases the risk of cancer. The evidence is inconsistent, and applying the precautionary principle doesn't 'prove' something.

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#129

Post by tedsanders »

bittercynic wrote: post #116
mangeletti wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conjecture: There is no such thing as "non-ionizing" radiation. There is just a continuum that ranges from "barely a chance for this to ionize a molecule" to "this will ionize something in the first nanometer". I mean, what's the point of understanding EMR as a continuum of wavelength, if we're going to create arbitrary distinctions therein and presume to know everything about those distinctions. Another way to think…

If a photon doesn't have enough energy to knock an electron out of it's orbital, then it won't. This is not a probabilistic thing. Do you have a source for the blood-brain barrier thing?

It is a probabilistic thing. If your photon arrives at the same time as another photon, then you can have two-photon absorption (which wouldn't have occurred without your photon). Ditto if your photon arrives at the same time as a thermal vibration or any other carrier of energy. This is why semiconductors can still occasionally absorb photons with energy below their bandgap. Anything in a thermal environment has some chance of being excited, and adding extra radiation will only increase those chances.

Furthermore, if we want to get really technical and into even lower probabilities, photons don't have single well defined energies. Wavelengths are not singularly defined for waves that don't extend to infinity. Therefore, even radiation that is emitted around, say, 500 nm, still has a small of chance of being absorbed by a 499 nm transition. Obviously these probabilities get tiny as the difference gets large, but they never drop to 0, technically.

I'm not saying any of this is medically relevant, but practically everything that is quantum mechanical is probabilistic.

(I have a PhD in physics, focusing on experimental quantum mechanics)

Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study

#130

Post by tedsanders »

tim333 wrote: post #60
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…

Don't put faith in that Chinese pollution study. Their "statistically significant" discontinuity in life expectancy only happened because they chose to fit the data with a strange third order polynomial plus step function. Take a look at the data behind that China pollution study and see if you would draw the same fit line: http://andrewgelman.com/2013/08/05/evidence-on-the-impact-of...

There's so much bad science in the world. :(

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