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AM Radio Waves May Be Harmful?
Klar writes "Wired News reports that: 'Korean scientists have found that regions near AM radio-broadcasting towers had 70 percent more leukemia deaths than those without.' The article continues: 'The study, to be published in an upcoming issue of the International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health, also found that cancer deaths were 29 percent higher near such transmitters.' While 'their study did not prove a direct link between cancer and the transmitters', the FDA and the World Health Organization are urging more studies, especially of radio waves from cell phones."
Although I can't decide if it's a liberal conspiracy against Rush Limbaugh, a government conspiracy against Art Bell, or a gay conspiracy against Dr. Laura. They want them off the air whoever they are!
At my job we refer to our two way pagers as 'birth control.' We may have been right all along...
We liked pop, we liked soul, we liked rock, but we never liked disco
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Wonder what this laptop, resting on my lap, cooking my legs with the battery, and my gonads with Wi-Fi is doing to me?
Get your own free personal location tracker
How is AM with their huge power and totally different band have anything to do with any of the PCS bands and their relative piddly power for health effects?
-- dieman - Scott Dier
I think there's a difference between living near a 50,000 watt transmitter and a ~1 watt cell phone.
... in medicine, and one in physics, and probably one in chemistry, waiting for anyone who can demonstrate a possible mechanism of action for health effects of non-ionizing radiation at athermal levels.
Let's see it happen. Personally, I think that if there were a smoking gun here, it would have been found at some point in the last hundred years. There have always been confounding factors in these alarmist studies. Always.
Every one, put on your tin foil hats!
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
When is Slashdot going to get "-1, Pointless Political Statement"?
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Thus, this study might just be showing that people who live in urban centers have higher a higher rate of certain cancers. Which isn't surprising in the least.
So "near" means "within two kilometers"? Given the inverse square law, isn't that close to meaningless? Someone two kilometers from a tower would get a small fraction of the exposure of someone 1/4 kilometer from it.
There might be something going on, but the cause might be something else entirely: for instance, the best neighborhoods with the best health care tend not to be near radio towers.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Frylock: "It's emitting radition."
Shake: "Yeah, but like, you know, the good kind, right? Like how they find tumors and gave Spider-Man his powers and stuff."
Frylock: "No Shake. The bad kind. The other kind. The kidney losing kind."
and that tinfoil stops RF waves.
To summarize,
Higher density of RF waves at night
Tinfoil blocks RF waves
Putting these two together, we can conclude that wrapping your body in tinfoil when you sleep at night will reduce your risk of developing RF related complications by >50%:
Repeat after me: correlation is not causation. Yes, people near power transmission towers and antennas get cancer more frequently. But poor people tend to live in the houses next to unsightly power lines or antennas. And poor people have higher cancer risk, because they tend to be exposed to more pollution and hazardous substances, live under higher stress, and are less likely to get proper health care. Besides, you get more radation from your cellphone.
314-15-9265
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the video star.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
for non ionizing radiation to cause cancer
a nobel prize awaits if you figure it out
AM transmitter antennas work best when placed in locations with good ground conductivity...such as swamps and other low places. They also get placed near occupied areas (short range) and where the land doesn't cost much (like old industrial areas)
Doesn't this sound like it might correlate with pollution enough to affect the results???
Perhaps the population who lives close to AM towers are lower class than those who don't live next to AM towers and as such smoke tobacco more or don't eat salads as much...
Other factors could be contributing after all..
I wonder what Wi-fi will do to us, since all of us are going to be surrounded by it more and more. Here is what Google thinks about +wi-fi +cancer. And then there is Bluetooth...
Simpy
I've long felt that right-wing talk radio was harmful. It's nice to have scientific proof.
Thalidomide
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Surprise surprise, all the highly rated posts say "those environmental wackos are at it again" and explain away the correlation with a variety of explanations that we are to accept as givens.
Realize this: There will never be a study "proving" the ill effects of non-ionizing radiation. Why? Find me a control group. You can't, not on this planet. A hundred years ago, when a five watt radio signal broadcast from New York could be heard in Miami, you might have been able to perform this study then. But now we're inundated with non-ionizing radiation, and unless you build a Faraday cage into about ten thousand homes and collect data over twenty years, you will never get "pure" numbers.
Why are you all so reluctant to even entertain the notion that non-ionizing radiation might create a health risk? Are you that in love with broadcast TV and Radio? Based on the attitudes I see here about the MPAA/RIAA, I find that hard to believe. So what is your explanation? A general love of all things electronic? The chance to pass down the mockery you got from the jocks onto the tree-hugging hippies?
I simplly don't understand the attitude most of you put forward regarding this issue. It's reckless and driven by emotion.
But don't worry, even if a study or three come out demonstrating a link between non-ionizing radiation and cancer risk, the EPA will sweep it under the rug when Infinity Broadcasting supresses the evidence under the Bush Administration's Data Quality Act.
"What I don't know can't hurt me" is not a particularly effective survival mechanism. Who knows, maybe we should be buying stock in Reynolds this very minute.
The question I have is what was used to clear the brush under the antennas.
The problem could be something other than the radiation, it could be the nasty chemicals used to keep the plants from taking over the tower.
This has been found to be a problem with powerlines in some cases, it could be part of the problem here as well.
The first thing that comes to mind is not always the real cause of the problem.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
When you have statistics as your only data and no matched control group, most of the correlations you can find will be coincidence or garbage.
Epidemiologists use the heuristic that they start paying attention when one group has three or more times the risk of another group.
>maybe we should be buying stock in Reynolds
Smoking is a good example: the risk of lung cancer among smokers is about thirty times higher than among nonsmokers.
>Find me a control group. You can't, not on this planet.
That's what lab studies are for. You can shield one group of rats from RF and microwave a genetically identical group. You can start from conception and have useful results in a year.
>Why are you all so reluctant to even entertain the notion that non-ionizing radiation might create a health risk?
After a hundred years of experience and a zillion negative lab studies skepticism is indicated. I'm willing to be surprised but I don't expect to be.
Honestly, I'm just waiting for this statement to come out of a Scientist. It would get it over with and wouldn't spend millions of Dollars.
"If it is or uses either Electricy or a Chemical, and/or its not found in nature in any way, it will kill you slowly"
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
In any case, the amount of power the human body absorbs from a 1500kHz AM signal is phenomenally small. The body is small compared to the signal wavelength (2m/200m=0.01 wavelength), which means it absorbs almost none of the radiated power. The only way it is likely to be a hazard is if you touch a conductor with considerable RF voltage on it. That could give you an RF burn.
Actually, a study or three demonstrating a statistically significant link between nonionizing radiation and cancer is exactly what I would expect, even in the absence of real harmful effects.
This is epidemiology--hardcore statistics. When determining the risk associated with some factor, you can never be entirely certain that the effects you see are 'real', and not just due to random clustering. Toss a coin ten times--you'd expect to get heads five or so times, but occasionally (1 time in about a thousand) you'll see ten heads in a row.
By making (generally reasonable) assumptions about the nature of the randomness in the data, scientists and epidemiologists tend to come up with one or more measures of how likely an apparent result is to be genuinely significant. Generally, a result is taken to be 'real' if there is less than a 5% chance that the result is the result of noise (a P value of less than 0.05). Alternately, a study may state an odds ratio and 95% confidence interval ("If you take drug foostatin you are 1.7 times more likely to have symptom bar (95% CI 1.4 to 1.95)") denoting that the relative risk is 95% likely to fall in the stated interval.
Under those circumstances, if the scientists do everything correctly, and account for every possible confounding factor, and do all their math correctly...that still leaves as many as one study in every twenty potentially reaching the incorrect conclusion.
The journal in question here--The International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health--isn't exactly a top-flight journal, either. I'm not at work at the moment so I can't check their archives, but their impact factor is fairly low. (Down to 0.924 in 2002, declining steadily since 1997.) Yes, impact factor is by no means the only criterion by which a journal should be judged--but Nature they are not. Unfortunately, the Wired article refers to an 'upcoming' paper, so I can't get at the publication cited.
Looking at the other paper mentioned in the Wired article demonstrates that Wired can't be trusted to accurately report the findings of scientific papers, either. Wired says:
The abstract of the original paper in the American Journal of Epidemiology says: (in part, emphasis added)
~Idarubicin
ever been to a US transmitter site? no? well, there are big yellow signs with a red triangle on them at the perimeter fence, saying that excessive amounts of RF energy found within the boundaries can be disruptive and may affect health. I forget what the radiative standard is, something on the order of a half millivolt per meter, at which the FCC requires these signs be posted.
long-term transmitter engineers, like HV and VHV linemen, tend to have a lot of cancer deaths. but when I grew up around all these guys, they smoked like chimneys and cleaned tools with gasoline as well. they sprayed lots of pesticides. they changed transmitter tubes without wearing masks (beryllium ceramics used in the tubes can cause berylliosis with the tiniest breath of chips or dust.) amazing any of them got to retirement parties.
also, notice how everybody says they need more studies when they publish a study. although "cell phones cause brain cancer, so fscking hang up and drive!" has been screamed from the treetops for 15 or so years, and "power lines cause childhood leukemia" has been around for 30 years, a funny thing happened on the way to publication. the only two large double-blind environmental studies to tackle these issues found no effect at all. none.
the power of microwaves to cook food was discovered in alaska when microwave techs with candy bars in their shirt pockets found after adjusting the dishes that their pockets were full of melted chocolate sludge on a cold tundra work shift. it is well known that directed or exceptionally strong RF fields, such as would be found in the open transmitters of the 20s and 30s or on broadcast towers, will cause cataracts. so there are federal limitations on exposure now in broadcast, and you can't go up a tower while the buzzbox is lit unless it's a pennywhistle station with a few hundred watts.
these are for the folks who are drowned in the beam, whose iPods wouldn't work and who, if equipped with pacemakers, cannot work the transmitter any more.
joe average on the other side of the fence? no problem.
another scare study, get fifty of them with good double-blind methodology and large enough controlled study groups to mean something statistically past four nines, and call me in the morning.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Well, we're talking biochemistry here, so there's really no cause or need to invoke the Incompleteness Theorem.
Further, no--it's not possible to demonstrate every ill health effect. A thought experiment, if you will...
If Wired saw thirteen cases in LA, they'd say that compound Y causes a dramatic (thirty percent!) increase in disease X. If a scientist saw thirteen cases in LA, they'd say that's interesting, but easily attributable to noise.Clearly a jump from 4 to 8 leukemia cases means practically nothing -- statistically. But I don't think it's always good science, esp. when dealing in real-world non-controlled systems with intangible variables, to rely on statistical analysis as the impetus for public policy decisions.
If there is sound evidence (good animal or at least biochemical models) that particular conditions are harmful, then by all means such evidence should be considered. Controlled trials in the laboratory are very useful for sorting out cause and effect. In the absence of demonstrated mechanisms for harm in the lab, epidemiological data are all that we have. If sound statistical analysis reveals a significant correlation--that cannot be reasonably explained by other means or attributed to confounding factors--then it may be a fair basis for policy decisions.
I suppose the problem arises when one asks what constitutes a 'sound' analysis...and in some cases that's a difficult question.
~Idarubicin