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“We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

blogs.scientificamerican.com

441–450 of 613 posts

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even at 100% absorption these are minuscule amounts of power compared to huge doses of ionizing radation we bath in every day.

What ionizing radiation are you referring to? I'd hope you are not bathing in ionizing radiation everyday...

Sorry I always forget UVB is not technically in the ionizing range, but "near ionizing" with enough energy to cause non thermal DNA damage.

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really. Plentiful nutrition which has led to 90% of the population of the USA being overweight, obese, or overfat is another potential cul…

It's anecdotal, but a friend of mine with cancer switched to a keto diet and he had one tumor shrink, to the point where his doctor said they could (and should) now operate on it. The large increase in sugar and starch in our diet does contribute to fast growing cancer cells and there are studies that link being overweight/obesity with cancer. We weren't this fat decades ago. Some may blame more office work, but the…

My (very limited) understanding is that tumours need glucose to survive and grow, so presumably a keto diet or fasting could potentially stop a tumour from growing.

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#443

Honestly, after a glance at the links, they don't inspire confidence in me either. There are papers about very small changes on very rare types of cancer, measured by proxy on a species where it's common; papers criticizing the critics claiming association with interested parties (what is a perfectly fine thing to claim, but what is it doing in a scientific paper?); and the only wide review I could find claims that t…

The thing that concerns me about millimeter wave tech and 5G is that it seems like a solution looking for a problem. My city just had a wave of poles dropped in a few neighborhoods, and they seem to me to be an expensive boondoggle. IMO, we would be better served by the heavy hand of the FCC allowing fiber providers to run telephone poles and trenches without any accountability (as the wireless carriers can with 5G).

These radio bands have been in military use for a long time. I’m surprised that no health studies have been done or released to the public.

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#444
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but there are plenty of factors with a better-explained causal mechanism than non-ionizing radiation. Like the three you listed. My money is on diet and pesticides/preservatives/etc. being another big one. With this, too, there is little official evidence that, say, Roundup, causes cancer, but there is, imo, a stronger lobby against a positive outcome in those studies, and they don't necessarily control for i…

I agree with your comment in principle but the specific example of Roundup is rather weak. Yes, glyphosate is usually studied in isolation rather than as a commercial formulation including surfactants etc., but we have decades’ worth of epidemiological studies showing that proper use of Roundup has, at most, a marginal effect on tumour incidence. Conversely, the most-discussed studies that purport to show Roundup’s c…

Ok, fair enough. I have enough other reasons to be against roundup without needing to cling to believing it's carcinogenic. Thanks!

For the record, the other reasons are to do with the larger ecological impact of roundup-based practices, such as harm to soil fungi and bacteria, and collateral damage from runoff or wind. Plus, there were some studies finding it may cause harm to intestinal lining and such, even if it's not actually a carcinogen.

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#445
post #419

The author's bias is apparent from his biography: "Joel M. Moskowitz, PhD, is director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been translating and disseminating the research on wireless radiation health effects since 2009 after he and his colleagues published a review paper that found long-term cell phone users were at greater ris…

Did you see, at the top of the page, "Observations | Opinion"?

Should that absolve them of writing deceptive articles that feed in to a type of paranoia that is fairly harmful to society[0]?

[0]: Not that the anti-wireless people are particularly influential right now, but they're fairly close to antivacciene people in how they perceive the world with an almost complete absence of rational thought.

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not do the study? The phycologists have and they realized their field of study was built on sand. No amount of meta-analysis will fix that.

Phycology, the study of seaweed, is indeed all on top of sand! ;)

Doh; and here I completely misunderstood the underlying message... thx for setting me straight! :-)

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#447

I'm amazed at how many people here actually decline to click on the links in the article, which would guide one to a large list of scientific publications, with links to the original publications themselves. Yet they are very ready to call "more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields" "wackos" or "cranks with a PhD", call…

>At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why.

There is a clear and well known pair of reasons for this. First people are living longer and the longer you live the more prone to cancer you are. People who died of small pox did not die of cancer.

Second, more controversially, atmospheric bomb testing in the 50's and 60's.

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#448

The thing is that there's really ton of evidence that non-ionizing radiation is not significantly harmful to humans at levels that don't cook you. If you want to counter that you can't just pile up small studies that might be hinting at possibility that there might be some other effect. You need a smoking gun. Single study, but bulletproof and large, showing strong effect. Everything else will be dismissed as "maybe,…

This comment explains precisely why the dismissal from so many here. Correlational studies without a plausible causal mechanism are highly suspect. As an illustration, people have used obviously bogus examples like, in the past 100 years, piracy has risen. So has global warming. Therefore, pirates cause global warming. Unless a 5G study specifically addresses the mechanism, and how non-ionizing radiation can cause da…

> As an illustration, people have used obviously bogus examples like, in the past 100 years, piracy has risen. So has global warming. Therefore, pirates cause global warming.

Actually you got that wrong. This was related to real piracy (i.e. people with eye patches on ships robbing other ships) which went down, not software piracy. So the decline of pirates is related to global warming.

(The example came from Bobby Henderson, the founder of the flying spaghetti monster.)

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#449
I'm amazed that I scanned a bunch of comments and it seems like no one read the article and noticed that it's not actually a proper SciAm article, just an Op-Ed.

Let me repeat, this is not a proper SciAm article in which some actual academics condense their interesting research into something more easily understood by people outside the field.

This is an Op-Ed. It's an opinion. And more specifically, it's an opinion from someone who is most certainly not unbiased.

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#450
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because you're only exposed to radiation if you actually use a phone. Google for "inverse square law". Your exposure is orders of magnitude lower from "second-hand cellphones" than from using it yourself; it's not like second-hand smoking.

> it's not like second-hand smoking Shouldn't smoke follow the inverse square law as well (in the absence of air currents)?

Not if you are in a sealed room with the smoker.
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