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

blogs.scientificamerican.com

541–550 of 613 posts

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

#541
post #498
post #491

This thread would be much shorter if someone had read this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26151230

and also this: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14914

These are good things to read to understand a consensus that yes, electromagnetic radiation has biological effects.

For people reading this stuff, always search for something called the Odds Ratio (OR), which is a gold standard way of comparing how clinically significant a thing is. For example, smoking has an OR of 60 for lung cancer. A well covered paper on birth control suggested its OR for developing depression is 1.26, and the massive aspirin on heart health study had 0.95 OR of cardiovascular disease in one of the surveyed counties (ie aspirin improved clinical outcome).

If error bars on measured OR contain 1.0 you can’t say if it is helpful or harmful. OR accounts for baseline incidence in a way that RR (relative risk) does not. So it lets you actually choose among behaviors instead of within diseases or outcomes. It informs why it’s possible to tell everyone they shouldn’t smoke (OR is very high), keep taking birth control (because depression outcome is better than unwanted or complicated pregnancy outcomes), and aspirin for cardiovascular disease prophylaxis (very limited side effects, very cheap so even 0.95 is worth it).

I don’t know if there’s a consensus that electromagnetic radiation from electronics has clinical significance. If there is clinical significance it will be a small OR for most outcomes. It won’t be comparable at all to e.g. smoking.

However this is still an imperfect measure. In Japan OR for lung disease from smoking is 15, 4 times better than the US. The researchers speculated this has to do with a specific filter on common Japanese cigarettes but it could be genetics or other things that they didn’t control for (ie BMI and gender matching but not Japanese ancestry). So technology can have huge effects on clinical outcomes but 4x 15 is a much bigger deal than 4x 1.015. My point is that it has its limitations but OR definitely measures something real.

This is a robust framework for evaluating how this research matters to you in a way that does not require conspiracies or investigating the researcher’s backgrounds. Additionally it is widely accepted by legitimate medical practitioners across the world.

Under this framework, the reviews posted here do not document clinical significance, although individual papers cited in them might.

A big limitation is that mice are tested with orders of magnitude higher incidence rate of the disease to quickly find RR (high RR in mice vs placebo is strong research evidence just not strong clinical evidence). So mouse OR isn’t often predicative of human OR. But this applies to chart reviews too. Still a pretty durable framework.

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

#542
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know the exposure is a bit like a bell curve. Right besides the tower you're in a blind spot, then it gets more intense as you move out of the blind spot and then it gets lower as you move further away.

5G requires more towers, closer to their end users. To quote the article: > 5G will require cell antennas every 100 to 200 meters, exposing many people to millimeter wave radiation. 5G also employs new technologies (e.g., active antennas capable of beam-forming; phased arrays; massive inputs and outputs, known as MIMO) which pose unique challenges for measuring exposures.

Isn't more cell antennas equivalent with much lower transmission power? Especially the phone needs to use way less power, so total amount of EM for humans nearby is going to be significantly lower.

Now compare to AM/FM transmitters that cover a huge geographic area. Those can be scary. FCC allows up to 50000 W transmission power. It's required because the antennas are spaced so far apart.

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

#543
post #147

I clicked on a few links and Googled a few names. It's roughly what I'd expect: People with few publications now working in other fields, people without scientific publications, but university degrees, people who regularly speak at events from radiation critics, people who are invested in other fringe theories. People get fooled by "large lists of peer-reviewed publications". Peer review is a lowest level quality mar…

> Peer review is a lowest level quality mark for a piece of science.

Peer reviewed used to be the epitome of proof, now it's been relegated to base minimum?

Are you saying that consensus is no longer considered valid proof? (not that I disagree, it's just that this is a rare argument in my experience)

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

#544
post #280
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You conflated ionising and non-ionising radiation (flying/banana/chest x-ray vs. radio waves, wifi, light from lightbulbs). Just so you know. Your point still stands though, although i would say we're bathed in more intense radiation than 5G and have been bathing in it for millenias - sunlight is radiation as well! Better live underground, i guess. Oh, oh, but what about skin cancer you say? That's caused by sunlight…

Other points: while excessive radiation is bad, below a certain point it is not harmful, and in fact is beneficial. There's some good reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model Most scientists today would say that below a threshold, there is no negative effect to radiation (or rather, you can't predict the effect in a stochastic way as a function of dose) and also that within certain regime…

> Most scientists today would say that below a threshold, there is no negative effect to radiation

Every time I was enticed to look up more about hormesis, I see the same issue: an intrinsically linear effect of a factor is studied, with a precise linear generator of the factor, but outside of the generator there is a background component to the factor which is ignored, which causes a misinterpretation of non-linearity.

A concrete example, suppose you have a light sensor in a "dark" enclosure, then at large enough intensities the current through the photodiode is linear with the incident illumination, but if there is some light leaking (or alternatively thermal radiation, and hence temperature, and hence dark current) then as the light generator is set to lower and lower levels, the light sensor will no longer linearly approach 0, since the signal starts to delve below the noise floor (so it will allways be measurable, but require more and more oversampling to decrease the noise floor). To confuse this effect which has nothing to do with photons getting converted to electron hole pairs, it is a misinterpretation to consider the effect "non-linear" close to the noise floor, and an even bigger misinterpretation to consider it "beneficial". Sure even high levels of ionizing radiation can be beneficial to the offspring of a colony of bacteria, fungi, or plants as a group, but it most certainly is harmful to the the individual bacteria, fungi or plants individually.

In the case of the light sensor, the current through the reverse biased photodiode will still be ideally linear with the total incident illumination, just no longer linear with the illumination of the non-dominant light source.

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

#545

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…

Frankly, that's SOP on Hacker News. Half the people are commenting on something they haven't read, and the other half are complaining that news from reputable sources isn't free and/or complain that they can't read it with NoScript in Lynx on Arch Linux.

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

#549
post #533
post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going off this page: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db288.pdf Please note the table you showed the 73% is combination of "overweight" and "obese" while the row that shows obese is the same number as my citation.

I don't understand why people are downvoting me when I'm literally quoting the stats from the agency that defines this. If you're downvoting, can you at least reply to provide some technical signal so I can update my knowledge? EDIT: I misread the original message and thought it was referring to just obesity, not obesity/overweight.

The original post included 'overweight'

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

#550
post #197
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don’t click the link because they already know better. We are bathed in radiation everyday. So guess what, the people who say 5G is unsafe, are also the same people that will say flying is unsafe, or using a microwave is unsafe, or eating a banana is unsafe, or being in your car is unsafe, or using your phone is unsafe. Because all these things emit radiation. Do people care about that though? No. The effects…

You conflated ionising and non-ionising radiation (flying/banana/chest x-ray vs. radio waves, wifi, light from lightbulbs). Just so you know. Your point still stands though, although i would say we're bathed in more intense radiation than 5G and have been bathing in it for millenias - sunlight is radiation as well! Better live underground, i guess. Oh, oh, but what about skin cancer you say? That's caused by sunlight…

Really, complete bullshit for 100% of the population no questions asked? With all the wrong information Science has helped spread when it comes to Diet (example: eating fat makes you fat) is it really fair to say a study that says we need more studies is automatically bullshit?
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