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Mobile Phone Transmitter Causes Brain Tumours?
Peter writes "Seven staff in the one building have been diagnosed with brain tumours, and everything seems to be pointing to the mobile phone towers located on the roof. The building is owned by RMIT University and an investigation is taking place. Five of the seven staff worked on the top floor of the building. Medical experts contacted by The Age Newspaper said no definitive link had been proved between mobile phone tower radiation and cancer."
"Nothing for you to see here, please move along." It's a cover up, I tells ya!
Medical experts contacted by The Age Newspaper said no definitive link had been proved between mobile phone tower radiation and cancer.
I'd call seven brain tumours in one building a heck of a link...
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I believe that an SAR (specific absorption rate) of 10 Watts per kilogram is the safety limit set by the NRPB. I guess they need to do tests as to whether the people experienced this from the towers. Cell phones have a SAR of about 0.2 on average. As always, Wikipedia provides a great reference to this subject.
My work here is dung.
Most likely is that the affected people were doing something together out of hours (after all, people who work together, often also play together). It's quite possible (after all, the IT in RMIT stands for Institute of Technology), that they were all building a home made breeder reactor
In short, the only danger mobile towers hold, is when the fuckwit in the SUV doesn't see me on my bicycle, because he's too busy chatting to drive. (seriously, every time I've felt threatened, its been someone chatting on a cell phone)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Better add another couple of layers just to be sure.
Save the DOS prompt: It's an endangered species!
Anyone worried about radio waves causing cancer can try to make that theory work. There is a huge barrier, however, in the form of a very very small number: Planck's Constant. Planck's constant = 6.626068 x 10-34 m2 kg/S. It's that 10**-34 that makes it difficult for low-energy electromagetism like wireless transmissions to interact with chemical reactions. Thirty-four zeros is a LOT of zeros after the decimal point.
Off topic: I've linked to the Encyclopedia Britannica above because the article about Planck's constant is very short. The article in Wikipedia is long. I've frequently seen the Encyclopedia Britannica be misleading because of the severe limitation placed on size of the articles due to paper costs. Wikipedia does not have that problem.
I suppose you're going to tell me that it's a bad idea to stick my head in a running microwave oven, too, eh?
This guy's the limit!
That of course means a hell of a lot of other rooftop towers are going to be coming down across the nation in pretty short order.
A-Bomb
Sometimes I'm wrong, but at least where I live, most commercial buildings have a metal base under the roof (steel, tin, aluminum, etc). And, generally, codes require the metal base be grounded--which makes roofs great for transmitting towers (they need a well grounded base).
But if it *is* built like this, it is absolutely impossible that any radiation of any kind managed to get through that roof to the people below. Unless you want to prove Faraday wrong. I know I don't.
Hmm. I'd say 7 incidents in one building is probably very high; even so, that depends entirely on the relative frequency of the specific kind of tumor.
Also, did any of these people work in hazardous areas? A university can have all sorts of nasty stuff around.
It would seem to me that these incidents could be related to the cell phone tower; or it could be a very sad coincidence. You can't just freeze everything at one single point in time and go ah-ha!
There are too many other factors that aren't considered.
If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
Any chance they were doing research on something that might cause brain tumours? Or maybe they were doing research on the effect of mobile phone transmitters, that would be quite ironic.
Australian Medical Association president Mukesh Haikerwal said there was no proof of a connection but "if you get clusters of disease it's sensible to investigate."
Ya think? Maybe this represents your proof! I like to call this the "Keystone Cops Method" of scientific inquiry.
Dr John Gall, from private health company Southern Medical Services, which has been called in to assess the sick, said last night three of those affected had tumours showing symptoms consistent with radiation.
Indeed, Watson, the killer had a limp... note the dragging of the shoe print to one side and the lightness of the impression on the other...
Given they were working under a tower which is broadcasting radiation, this should probably come as no shock. What I wonder is -- why isn't there shielding protecting the floors below from the radiation from the tower? Answer: then everyone's cell phones would stop working.
I've often thought the chances of contracting cancer from your cell phone was exaggerated, unless you had the damned thing glued to your ear 24/7. This is totally different; those towers are pumping out huge amounts of radiation, to try and make sure you can get a strong signal at great distances. It's not like living inside a nuclear reactor, but its close enough to be a bad idea.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Surely, someone here on Slashdot has one to spare for these poor people!
It's not so much about the power, as it is the prolonged exposure.
Sure, they could blast some cells with massive amounts of radiation for a few weeks or even several months. But that doesn't compare to the years some of these workers may have spent near this transmitter.
Just as smoking 30 cigarettes a day for a week may appear mostly harmless in laboratory tests, smoking five cigarettes a day for 15 years could very well be far more harmful. You're not smoking as many cigarettes per day, but it's the long-term exposure to the carcinogens that eventually leads to problems.
Okay - there's 7 people suffering similar symptoms. Perhaps it is the tower to blame. Or perhaps not. There's no conclusive evidence yet that mobile phones do cause cancer. It seems odd that they'd only cause brain tumours as opposed to any other, and that this particular mast is the only one that seems to be having such an extreme effect when all the thousands of others in the world seem relatively harmless. It's worth investigating, but it's also worth checking everything else.
Me works near the pretty towers but me no get dumb!
Perhaps it is from EMP from all the wires/power/machines that run up the wall *to* the tower, not the tower itself.
... so the tower puts out a pulse that's too small to affect genetic replication (say 10% of the threshold), but there are other EMP signitures or emmisions in the area that compound (say 5 sources at 10%), followed by personal cell phones and computers and lights...
Would it be possible for multiple low frequency signals to interact to form a sine wave of a much higher intensity?
so you could 99.999% of the time have these signals never amount to much until the proverbial "EM Seventh Wave" comes in and makes those brain cells start dividing wrong. It only takes one cell to seed a tumor.
meh
It's more likely it's something in the water.
it's the new Motorola THINKR (tm) implant. It resides in the brain, and is self-assembling. It has TV, DVD, GPS, Java, 12-megapixel camera that uses your eyeballs, and Itunes, of course.
--- sig moved for great justice.
* There are mobile phone radio masts on tens of thousands of buildings all over the world, for almost a decade.
* There has been no significant increase in the number of brain tumours since mobile phones became popular.
* Why would people in one building sudenly have a greater chance of getting brain tumours from a radio mast, while the chances of the many (possibly hundreds of) thousands of people in other buildings with radio masts on them getting cancer stay the same? There's an antenna on the roof of a building next to the one I work in, I can see the antenna from here througn the window. Why don't I and all my colleagues have cancer?
Unless there is a huge difference in the way this mast is installed and operated, or the structure of the building from other similar installations, there's no reason to suppose this cluster of cancers has anything to do with the radio mast. There could be thousands of other factors that could be the cause.
Or there might be no cause. How many buildings are there in the world? How many random instances of cancer are there? Statisticaly, you'd expect to see the occasional fluke cluster of cancers in one building from time to time. If the odds against such a cluster in any given building were a million to one, in a survey of 10 million buildings you'd expect to see roughly 10 such clusters just by pure chance. Even if the chances were 10 million to 1, there's still no reason to suppose finding one such cluster in the sample is at all suspicious.
Simon Hibbs
I know that scientific studies thus far have been unable to show a plausible link between brain tumors and cell phones. However, I wonder if everyone calling nonsense here isn't just engaging in a bit of wishful thinking. Kind of like how people were resistant to the idea that sun exposure could lead to skin cancer. I'm no luddite, I sure hope this proves to be a false alarm. However, while a bit of skepticism is healthy, how can we be sure? Cell phones have only recently reached the masses in the Unites States.
I just looked up some statistics on brain tumors. The incidence rate is 14.1 per 100,000 people, or roughly 1 in 7,000. Unless 50,000 people worked in this building, this is quite the statistical anamoly. Makes you go hmm...
Now excuse me, my cell phone is ringing.
why me laugh?
Cancer must be contagious!! Kill the lab rats--quickly!!
All installations strictly follow government regulations, Tens of Millions in studies have been financed to PROVE that this is NOT a problem. So, Ladies and Gentlemen of the the Board the legal department assures me your options are safe.
Please, remember this.
The world will be a better place if we all do.
You've probably heard the interference your phone generates in your radio.
Do you still have a CRT Monitor, and not a flat panel? Here's a fun experiment. Take your cell phone, dial up a number on it and place a call. Now, hold it up to your CRT - the emag field from it skews the electron stream in distinct waves. You can probably correlate the frequency the phone operates on to the wavelength on the screen if you know your monitors vertical refresh.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Please remember correlation is not causation....
Given that there has never been evidence of this before, it's far more likely theres another cause. Maybe the building is full of asbestos, or some other harmful material... Maybe all the employees took an employee training course near a nuclear plant or something.
It could be any number of things, but this pseudo-science where people assume correlation has any bearing on causation is only for the ignorant.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
Why just brain tumors? I thought the Cell Phone / Brain Tumor link was due to the cell phone being held next to the head? Why no stomach tumors? Why no big toe tumors? I smell a rat.
TT
People working on last floor are CEO or VP, so it's maybe cause by a chemical in cash that is carcinogen above a very high dose.
Given the average percentage of people developing brain tumors in some geographic area every year, as well as the standard deviation of said average, the probability of this many people in the same building being diagnosed can be computed. Many office buildings are equipped with cellular base stations nowadays because it's cheaper than putting up a tower. Unless they show the epidemiological statistics to prove this event unlikely to occur in even one building in a sample of cell-equipped office buildings, this is bullshit. Obviously, test away to be sure the tower is operating properly, but given that it is, it's giving off non-ionizing radiation. One more example of luddites looking to prove that we've unleashed another technology to destroy ourselves.
they want their paranoia back.
It's been 10 years that I've been living in front of a mobile phone transmitter. I had 8-watt cell phones. Since it was part of the paranoia, I had a scanner, like a year ago. Nothing wrong with my brain, kthxbye.
at this point. Also for thost who are worried about radiation from a cell phone, use a headset. You can get a cheap headset for under $20. Personally I'd prefer a bluetooth headset, but I'm cheap and use the one that Sony Ericsson included with my phone. Cell phone not next to my head means no brain tumor, its a no brainer to me.
So what happens when you leave a cell phone in your lap?
"When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty."
This is a business school. A diseased mind is an entry requirement.
That doesn't make sense. Cell phone tower emissions may well "cause" cancer, but in the sense of a small increase in risk; and the increase has to be small because it has been hard to demonstrate experimentally.
If there is a common cause for these cases, it's more likely to be some kind of chemical pollutant or biological agent. Chemicals, fungi, and viruses can and do cause cancer at high rates. I'd rather look to the chemistry department or the biology labs than the cell phone tower for a cause.
Kinda lost interest once I read...
"...the 16th and 17th floors are home to offices of senior management..."
-- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
Vinyl Chloride is one of the only environmental substances known to specifically cause brain cancer. Is it possible there is a source of contaimination in the building? Accidental or deliberate, perhaps? Small amounts of vinyl chloride can dissolve in water, and it is found in tiny amounts in tobacco smoke. These people may have been exposed years ago and are just now showing disease.
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
Parent reads FRICKIN ON-topic to me Charlie
You know what I don't understand?
You have to turn off cell phones because they will "interfere" with hospital equipment. Okay, I'll buy that for now.
But a HUGE hospital here in town (Austin, St. David's, BTW) has its roof LITTERED with giant mobile phone relay antennae. Others probably do as well, it's just that this one is right by the elevated freeway and they are easy to see.
Whaa?
I recall reading that when autopsies are performed about 1/3 of the time brain tumours are found. These are generally benign and caused no problem. They are found because people went looking for them.
The same issue surrounds the thyroid cancers associated with the Chernobyl disaster. Again - the tumours appear to be natural and generally cause no problems.
This of course does not change the fact that anyone so diagnosed will be scared to death (bad pun) and wonder when the next shoe is going to drop. So while I feel for the patients I have to beleive this is blown out of porportion.
Anyone notice when you speak on a cell phone for a lenghty amount of time, the side of your face gets all hot.. is this from the radio waves passing through our brain? I imagine these towers are making fried eggs with our brain..
www.brido.com : not your average blog..
One of the board of directors members of our church had the audacity to consider putting one of these devices in the bell tower very close to where service occurs (i.e. right above our heads), citing the revenue it would bring in. I said that while there is no concrete evidence they cause harm (and I think the scientific jury is still out on this one, but prefer to err on the side of reasonable caution), I didn't want any transceiver with that kind of wattage anywhere near me, especially right over my head while Im in the middle of a sermon. I added that if they put one up anywhere on church grounds (ours has less than 3 acres of land) I would leave the church, take my tithes with me and encourage other members to do the same.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
There is absolutely nothing about this situation that definitively links cancer to mobile phone tower radiation.
Are you stuck on stupid, or do you work for Nokia? What would it take to convice you that there was a link? And what about the moderators that score you ignorance as +4 Insightful?
Seven workers in the same building all developing brain cancer is VERY rare as well as VERY telling! Five of the seven worked closest to the transmitters!!!!
You can go ahead and keep telling yourself whatever you want but, I know with certainty that radio transmitters are bad for people. Apparently cell phone transmitters can cause brain cancer, and I know from experience that SSB transmitters can cause physical burns on the skin. In my mind that says, it's probably best to avoid close proximity to radio transmitters/antennas, especially powerful ones.
Darwin will take care of you.
There was a small village in rural Germany. A broadcast tower for mobile phones was to be built there, and despite rabid protests from the locals, which were concerned about negative health impacts, the tower was built. Soon after its completion, more than the usual number of locals went to see their doctor, complaining about headaches, nausea, and various other little ailments which they linked to the tower.
The funny part? The tower hasn't even been operational.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
The parent is on-topic! Man, I hope I get this one in Meta Mod...
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
This reminds me of going office-space hunting a few years ago, in a commercial building that had a big room full of Verizon Cellular transmission amplifiers, racks and all the rest, with the antenna on the roof, being proposed renting one of the office suites with a wall immediately adjacent to that gear, and feeling extremely queasy about what could possibly happen.
.... I didn't think so.
I mean, that stuff is no joke. Heavy industrial-strength droney vibration, and all the rest.
I would feel the same way about being near any AM or FM radio transmitters. These machines are electricity-guzzling beasts, and emit such an array of close-range EMF and all the rest.
Would YOU like the to be the one to spend years around that stuff to see if there is proof that it is harmful or not?
Z.
If there was any harmful effects of EM radiation, I think it would have been well established by now from the 100 year history of broadcast radio, where the people working at the station are exposed to more than 10,000 times the energy that people are in a building with a cell tower.
This is just as stupid as the paranoia over high voltage trasmission power lines. They may be ugly, they may be dangerous if they fall down, but you're being exposed to thousonds of times more EM radiation from the wiring in your own home than from those lines, and it's never caused any trouble.
This is the FUD wagon coming around again, probably started by the terrestrial phone monopolies to scare people back to using land lines.
I've frequently seen Wikipedia be misleading because some 10 year old has seen fit to erase stuff written by Ph.D.'s, and replace it with his own misunderstanding ramblings on the subject matter. Britannica does not have that problem.
Explain that to the microwave!
Electromagnetism energy, at the "microwave frequency" is still energy. Even if it is not strong to pop-corn your brain in 2 minutes, it can still have some effects..
I've worked in the IT department at an Australian University, and it's the hot air radiating from academic kiddies fighting in the sandbox that cause the problems.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
I used to work on cellphone software, and outside our building we had a COW (Cell on Wheels) to get us good quality reception to local mobile operators. I had a nice view of it from my window, since it was right across the parking lot from me.
One day we had some tech dudes from an overseas MO, and being the geeks they were they fired up their phones in "test mode" to check out our COW.
The look on their faces when they realized how strong the output of the COW... priceless! They suggested we go out and twiddle the appropriate nob to turn it down some. We did.
Neil
Lets get rid of those tumor causing towers, then we can get rid of all the drivers talking on their cell phones. Then we can get rid of the rest of that dangerous technology. Then we can all move to caves and kill our food with sticks and rocks, and cook our meals on the open fire.
Corolation does not imply causality. Works in this case too.
If it's dead, you killed it.
Interesting, didn't think that this would come to /. Well I go to Monash (another University in Melbourne) and looks like they're covering their bases - they sent a email in the afternoon the day this news broke out saying that all the towers and such at my uni are safe - blah blah. Looks like this will escalate into a media frenzy - typical.
This is prima facia evidence. Yes, there are other possibilities. But if you RTFA, the chances of them are evidently low.
To those saying that the causality implication is low, I'd say there's near empirical evidence to the contrary.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
You'd think that given millions of people and hundreds of thousands of towers, there would be at least one case of a few people getting cancer. For the scientifically illiterate, you get more daily radiation from 15 minutes in the sun, or your watch, than those people would have received. Don't let that stop the enviro-freaks and scaremongers thought.
The fact is, the human brain is surprisingly tolerant of radiation exposure. Radiation oncologists take advantage of this characteristic to treat cancers that have metastasized to the brain. Whole-brain external beam radiation therapy uses ionizing radiation, many orders of magnitude more energetic than any cell phone tower, but the occurrence of de novo brain tumors after brain XRT is actually pretty rare.
6
Yea...Offtopic. Sheesh.
It's tempting to attribute a causal relation to something that could just be coincidence. It's not really past the realm of possibility, so the chance that it is just chance has to be appreciated.
Brain cancer is one of those weird ones. The brain is soft tissue, with a lot of stuff going on in it...There are environmental factors that can lead to brain cancer (eg vinyl chloride), and it can even occur "spontaneously" as it were.
Microwave emissions seem unlikely to cause brain cancer, because it's non-ionizing radiation...Mean's it's less likely to screw with your electrons and cause weird chemical crap. On the other hand, it can cause dielectric heating, which could possibly lead to some scrambling. Seems we'd see a lot more cancer though, if it did cause cancer. Hard to say, however, due to the fact that cell phone popularity has risen so recently.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
If seven people's tumours are pointing to the Towers above, would each person sitting at their desk have a pointy tumour uniquely angled to point at the tower from their station?
Spending Resources on Defense leaves Less to defend.
If you can do that and still be able to close the door, then yeah, that would be an incredibly bad idea.
Though it would make for a unusual and rather disturbing video.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Heh! In this case there is quite possibly a greater chance of a "casual" link than there is of a "causal" link. What I think you meant, though, was "causal":
casual - occuring by chance . causal - Of, involving, or constituting a causeIOW: You can't casually cause causal casualties! :)
My brother-in-law flys navy seahawks and has to land them on ships and carriers with huge radar arrays. The ship's crew is suppose to turn off the radar before they land since it interfers with brain function. As my brother-in-law puts it, "...your hair starts to stand on your arm and you being to get really angry for no reason. Then you call the radar tower and yell at them to turn off the radar array."
e x1.html
Here is a pretty interesting link to the WHO (World Health Organization) on electrical and magnetic fields and what they do to your body.
http://www.who.int/peh-emf/about/WhatisEMF/en/ind
...all those asshats you see that act as if their phone is an extension of their ear will soon be coming to a cancer ward near you.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
While the medical profession plays "catch up", people die to make corporations money. That's wrong.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
There is a radio tower on the roof, just like there are radio towers on the roofs of thousands upon thousands of buildings all over the globe. Just because one building had a statistically anomalous number of brain tumors, doesn't implicate the radio tower, it implicates the location as a whole.
You can't just assume that because there is a cell tower and you so desperately want cell phones to cause cancer, doesn't mean that they do. The vast majority of the evidence (the fact that this is one isolated incident) suggests that the cause is elsewhere.
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
What do you want to bet they're leaving a lot out of the story. Sounds like a "SUV" type of write-up to me.
What do you want to bet that after the first two cases, these people were having their heads x-rayed every week to check for cancer.
or
These people, who all happened to be members of the "uranium headband" club, lived in the same apartment building, bought all their food from Thrifty Eddies Surplus Food Club, were members of the same carpool, all smoked at least 3 packs of Plutonium Powered Wakko Tobacco per day, and all worked in the radiation labratory. We have been unable to determine any correlation beyond the cell tower. "You've got to feel sorry for them," said their publicist, "what with having to frequently report to their parole officers over the drug manufacturing convictions, and now this."
Some cancers are caused by viral infections.
That said, poorly-shielded microwave (GHz) equipment may produce spurious lobes on their radiation pattern that could affect the wrong places.
And microwave radiation can also cause genetic damage leading to cancer.
Smoking wasn't RPOVEN to cause cancer for hundreds of years either.
That doesnt mean it didn't.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
How they could get infected is a mystery but DNA tests should be done ASAP, on all of the staff.
That's an important missing detail. If it's a metal roof, that's going to be a lot better at protecting the top floor from all RF from the transmitter than a wood/shingle roof or a wood/asphalt roof.
The insightful comments are actually all insightful today...is this Slashdot or did someone take my favorite work distraction away from me! :-/
Protestors against mobile masts always rile me somewhat - they are the first to complain about one being setup in their local area. However, they are the first to by little Jimmy a mobile phone for his birthday and to walk around with the latest Nokia xx00 phone with multimedia video whistles and bells, and then they complain about the fact there is no reception near where they live.
I won't start on their failure to grasp the concept of an inverse square law.
...until I got a tumor on the same side of my head as I used my cell phone (luckily, non-malignant - did leave a really cool scar where they cut it out, though)...now I realize this is purely anecdotal, but it does make me more receptive to arguments that cell phones may be dangerous...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
So many people seem passionately convinced that our technology and the people who create and manage our technology are actively killing us that I really have to think that there is a big social or cultural driver for the belief. People just seem to assume that the cause of unexplained cancers are in the technological environment and they latch onto the first quasi-plausible source and blame that without considering, as in this case, that literally millions of other people are living and working in the same environment without encountering problems.
Years from now we may find that our contemporary fetish for blaming our technology for cancer was as valid and perhaps had the same sociological roots, as those in the past who blamed various ethnic minorities for plagues.
if you are really concerned get a bluetooth headset and a compatible phone as a way to minimize exposure. The amount of EM...
..coming off of the headset will be less then some exposures you get from other man made devices daily. Just as the sky is lit with lights at night, we have also lit to the horizon with light we can not see. Now imagine - some kinds light give can give you sunburn, but there are plenty of lights you'd never think twice about (L.E.D lamps, for instance). We have lots of lights around us, even when it's just out eyes that *see* dark. Thin slice of spectrum, really, lots of other wavelenghts to use.
(Break)
Whoa! EM, let's not say radition huh? EM radio waves are Light (as in bulb), while Radition as know it is actually subatomic particles that have mass, can ionize, etc. These are two extremely diferent things, and aren't involved in the production of radio waves. They can interact magnetically so as to make you suspect they might have been, i.e holding a cell phone to your monitor.
.
The thing to keep in mind is that it's *light*, almost like what comes out of your flash light.
Anyway, a microwave oven is resonant with water molecules, vibrating them thus making heat. The key word is resonant, and probably, flourescent colors are a good example of resonance we can see, even it there is no heat (not enough energy!) and a cell phone tower is, in my mind, a Spot-Light, starting with what you see on the back porch all the way to those you see on the clouds... As a rule of thumb You Don't Want To Stand To Close to a spotlight, do you? but from afar it's power is that of a L.E.D lamp, maybe alot less. and in this case 'afar' maybe 0.. it's not like the light that already exists everywhere kills you dead, we've become well aquainted with indoor lighting.
and we've become well acquainted with light outside our vision, too. A bluetooth headset emits less of this then some of the things you you'll encounter day to day like electric motors and street lamps, so it's a neglible things.
that's what i know about it all.
james.
At my last job, the company I worked for built transmitters for cell towers. We were routinely running these things without their covers on, and microwave emissions leaked all over the building. There was a story that once the leakage alone from a dummy load they were running a demo unit into was jamming Sprint service for the entire conference hall the demo booth was in. Many of my coworkers were working with tower equipment since the very first Motorola demo. There was not any evidence whatsoever of an increased incidence of cancer. If everyone's fears were true, one of my coworkers would've been a hideously deformed mutant instead of an active, healthy (but completely grey-haired) old guy.
The article said the tumors were "consistent with radiation" as the cause. People will continue to be stupid and not realize the difference between electromagnetic radiation (better turn off your light bulbs... There's RADIATION coming from them!) and nuclear radiation. Yes, I know gamma rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation, but they have extremely high energy and can cause ionization, while microwaves cannot cause ionization until their field strength exceeds the breakdown threshold of the dielectric they're in - by the time that happened to someone they'd be thoroughly cooked by thermal heating.
It's an old building, there's probably traces of asbestos or some other nasty construction material that's been banned for decades.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It is certainly reasonable to check out clusters of cases when the pop up, but it is important to keep in mind the natural human bias toward overestimating the statistical significance of clusters. For example, when asked to write a series of random numbers, people almost always have fewer clusters than chance would predict. Another classic example is the birthday problem, where most people wildly underestimate how big a group you need before you are likely to have two people with the same birthday.
To consider the probability of a suspicious cluster arising by chance, you can't just figure the likelihood of a cluster arising in that particular building--you have to think in terms of the probability of a cluster randomly arising in some building that is in the vicinity of something that might plausibly be blamed.
Not but a handful of towers are on buildings. Fewer still are close to where humans habitate. The radiation patterns in the freqs used by GSM diminish rapidly as a function of distance. If you're 100m away from the antenna, you're far less exposed than say, 10m away.
And yes, your search of the phrase turned up the Wikipedia version reveals my mispelling. The intent, however, was clear. Arguing the form is obfuscative. And droll.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
This picticular problem might have something to do with other factors. It might even be totally unrealted with cellphones. It might even prove that slashdot needs to find something to post other a load of BS for publicity. At any rate I didn't want to copy and paste a serveral pages of info so I posted a few links on RF control and SAR mesurement. This is all FDA and FCC stuff. Cellphones do techniclly ability to cause cancer but put out MUCH less RF than say your pc monitor that your glued to. Its soo small in fact I can't in remeber the RF emmited per KG.
m /
RF Safe limits and effects: http://www.fda.gov/cellphones/qa.html#3/
FDC Cnotrol act on devices: http://www.fda.gov/opacom/laws/fdcact/fdcact5c.ht
It's not -1 Flamebait! It's +5 Funny. You just didn't get the joke...
Obviously there are good facts from both sides and we can talk for hours. But much more interesting to me is what would everyone do if it is true that cellphones or cellphone technology causes cancer or negative effects on humans? Say, I was kind of getting used to my cell phone being my the one and only. Without land line for good 4 years. oh crap whats that apple shaped thing growing on my head :)
So, many cell phones work at 800 Mhz or thereabouts which is in fact a direct harmonic of 2.4 Ghz.
No. You've got it exactly backwards. 2.4Ghz is a harmonic of 800Mhz, but 800Mhz is not a harmonic of 2.4Ghz, in the same way that 24 is an integer multiple of 8, but 8 is not an integer multiple of 24.
Harmonics are always higher frequency than the fundamental.
--MarkusQ
this was a very interesting story
test sig
When you have a radio repeater situation, as is the case with cell phones, it does not make sense to have the fixed repeater transmitter power level higher than the remote transmitter (cell phone). The cell phone power is rather low, otherwise you'd have a backpack to carry the battery. In ham radio repeater circles, a repeater with a high powered transmit is referred to as a repeater that's "All mouth". Here's some technical explaination of the radiation situation regarding cell towers. http://www.fcc.gov/oet/rfsafety/cellpcs.html/
I'm not a statistics expert, but I know that abberations in distributions of whatever effect are not impossible, or even improbably, given a sufficiently large study group. My wife has experience in disease clustering in her past administrative job at a university where there was a "cancer dorm". In the end, it was all BS, panic and hype. The actual distribution was not far off the norm. Remember that perception is often much more powerful than the truth in many people's minds.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"But some think the bursts used by GSM protocol create a low frequency envelope that may affect living tissues (that would behave like an AM receiver)."
Prove that, and win a Nobel Prize. Get your name on the front page of every newspaper in the world, and never have to work again.
The interaction of electromagnetic radiation and matter is very well understood. Find some new interaction, and you will be as famous as Einstein.
"On the other hand, the high occurence in this very building compared to the lack of such situation near the large majority of other antennas make me agree with the idea that there is another cause to this particular situation."
There is no reason to believe that it is due to the cell phone tower. My first guess would be that there is a leak in the air conditioning ducts and some poisonous chemical is leaking into the duct and poisoning the air on those floors.
I dont know about cancer, but a girl friend of mine lives in a house on the second floor opposite a school. There were always a lot of seagulls on the roof of this school, until they put a big GSM send/receive antenna there. Since this antenna is there, the seagulls stay away, so the radiation definately does something.
-- Cheers!
For the stubbornly ignorant, while the Sun IS a big source of radiation, it does NOT broadcast a microwave signal modulated into the 10 htz range where brain cells start acting funny. --Like dilating the pores in the blood-brain barrier so that any old foreign (and toxic?) particle can enter. If you spend a lot of time in a specific radiation zone where your blood-brain barrier is constantly not doing its job, then yeah, I can see how your brain might be at greater risk from toxins in the blood.
--Oh, and wrist watch manufacturers stopped using radioactive paint many decades ago.
I've heard the "Sun emits more ration in 15 minutes" argument so many times that it started sounding like another urban myth. --I always wonder why so few people stop to double-check such ideas. I did, and found it seriously wanting. I think perhaps people just want easy answers so that they can stop worrying that their favorite toys are making them sick and stupid.
Because, you know, pretending that a negative situation isn't there is so much more practical and effective than getting up and actually doing something about it.
-FL
in the break, the 2nd paragraph, the sentence:
These are two extremely diferent things, and aren't involved in the production of radio waves.
should read:
These are two extremely diferent things, and Radition isn't involved in the production of radio waves.
Thanks for reading.
There are a lot of buildings with cell tower antennas on the roof. Most of them have been added within the last 5 years or so, to existing buildings. The cell phone companies like using rooftop cell sites because they are elevated, easy to hide, don't require building an unattractive tower, and are relatively inexpensive to lease. Maybe the building you work in has a 5,000 watt cell transmitter antenna on the roof just a few feet above your head. If cell phone radiation increases the incidence of brain tumors, as is looking more and more likely, stories like this are just the first to come out of the pipeline but they will not be the last.
Since all the affected people were officed on the two topmost floors, has anyone looked around the region to see if someone else's microwave towers (even miles away) could be shooting microwaves thru the building (or attempting to just go around the edge of the building -- the building still being in the fresnel zone) from some distance away? We've got several 23GHz licensed microwave towers that shoot beams across town several miles away, and there's at least one path that has a tall building almost directly in the line of sight path, but the microwave link still works good enough. The height of our microwave antennas is typically 75 feet above the average elevation of the terrain in our city... right even with the upper floors of that building. There are no hills around here, the terrain is mostly flatland. The building is vacant right now, except for the ground floor, since it's a derilect old hotel so I don't think we're frying anyone's brains except maybe for the rodents that undoubtedly still occupy the old building.
now THAT'S satire!
Typically, an industry shattering health problem is suppressed by corporations. How many millions of people died while the cigarette companies (I smoke, BTW) sat on evidence that it was harmful, suppressing it when possible? Go watch Erin Brockovich for another example of corporate suppression of science to make a profit. (Warning: Her character is annoying and 30 minutes of deleted scenes was more than I could bear.)
And, furthremore, there have been some studies that have indicated some link.
Wisdom manifests itself at the ability to know right from wrong without having to resort to academic elitism. You don't need to have a controlled study to know shit stinks. The fact that the cell companies have pressured some of the scientists in these studies to change their findings sends a clear message to me that they have something to hide, just as the ciagrette companies did.
Rewind 200 years. You would be able to sit here with me and argue that cigarettes are safe, because there have been "no carefully controlled studies that show the link between the two". You would be wrong. A wise man, however, knows when to observe phenomenon, and when to draw conclusions that might not be based on the elite academic studies of peer-reviewed medical journals. A wise man can know the truth before it's out, simply based on a pattern recognition. I'd rather be wrong sometimes, than have to wait for an closely-controlled study to come out before I am allowed to believe anything. I think it bodes well for my survival, and no, I don't have a cell phone. I use my wife's when I need to. :)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
"Well, we've had radio towers broadcasting for ages now, and there's no problem with them. So obviously EM doesn't cause cancer."
And. . .
"The Sun hits you with more EM radiation than a cell phone, so obviously people complaining about Cell Phone Em are over-reacting."
I've heard both of these arguments thoughtlessly repeated so often that they have become the same as any other meme or garden variety urban myth. I'd like to address them. First, radios. . .
FM radio signals function in the 88 to 108 MHz range, and AM in the 535-1605 kHz range.
Cell Phone signals operate in the microwave bandwidth, 1800 - 1900MHz and 800 - 900 MHz. While this is different than radio, the BIG difference is that Cell Phone microwaves are modulated all the way down to only 10 hz. Why is this significant? Because 10 hz also happens to be the general frequency where the brain's electrical activity operates.
And therein lies the problem.
Brain cells respond both physically and chemically to frequencies in that range and they do so in a variety of strange ways. For instance, the blood-brain barrier becomes permeable when exposed to modulated EM in the 10 htz range. --Which means that foreign (and toxic?) particles can cross into the brain cells themselves from the blood vessels. --If you spend a lot of time in a specific radiation zone where your blood-brain barrier is constantly not doing its job, it is reasonable to assume that the brain might be at greater risk from toxins in the blood.
This is just one example. There are several others.
Similarly, there are other problems with low-frequency EM. --For instance the 60hz electrical signals traveling down power lines have their own issues.
In conjunction with the 10 gauss magnetic field of the Earth, 60hz causes cyclotronic resonance in Lithium atoms. So what? Well, Lithium, excited in this manner, moves on a vector and is able to cross the blood-brain barrier with much greater frequency than otherwise. Lithium, as some of you may know, has a medicinal affect on the brain, and is for this reason the main ingredient used in anti-depressant drugs.
That's not contested science. People are simply not told about it. --The fact of the matter is that the people in charge of our society have a great vested interest in keeping people dumbed down and numbed in the head, both of which are achieved by deliberately designed EM pollution.
As for the Sun. . .
Who says that the Sun doesn't affect brain function? Astrology works, (despite the fierce head-shaking of those who don't like the idea but who have never actually studied a real horoscope). --But rather than cry, "There is no magic!" perhaps it would be better to ask, "Okay. So, how does it work?"
I think there's a possible answer wrapped up in low-level EM emissions from space. . .
For instance, when solar wind from the sun hits other planetary bodies, you get these reflected fields of energy vibrating in the 1-3 hz range which bathe the Earth for periods of time. As the brain tends to fall in alignment with whatever dominating frequency exists in it's environment, perhaps such periods affect the way brains work and develop.
It is, of course, far more complicated than that, as different planets fall into different areas of the sky, and as the Earth and moon move around, you'll get all kinds of different fields in the 1-35 hz range where the brain functions. Indeed, the Sun itself is magnetically divided into 12 slices, rather like an orange. Perhaps as the Earth orbits, its inhabitants are affected?
I don't know if this is the answer, but considering such ideas seems to me a great deal more sensible than a lot of fierce head-shaking.
-FL
That is, "Just because all Cows are Animals, all Animals are NOT therefore Cows."
Or even more simply put. . .
Just because some Germans are idiots, doesn't automatically mean that Cell Phone EM has no affect.
Or even MORE simply put,
Stop acting like damn children. You're smarter than that, so act it.
-FL
The basic question here is not if cell phone radiation causes medical problems, but at what level of exposure. 1. Obviously, normal cellphone use does not affect most people. 2. Stick your head in a microwave long enough and your dead. 3. We don't know at what level of exposure that cellphones do cause damage and guess who doesn't want us to know? The cell phone companies are doing everything they can to block any government research into this. They cite the volume of their own research as a reason to prevent government funded cell phone radiation research. Note that 3 out of 4 cell phone company based research tests show there may not be problems, 3 out of 4 independent research studies show there may be problems. I can't imagine why there is a discrepancy, but if you request funding from the cell phone companies for research in what might be an unsafe direction, don't expect to get any funds. Academics need research funds to do the research. Don't expect to get industry funds if you start finding problems. Most research tests only a narrow hypothesis, not "do cell phones cause harm". Therefore, a lot of possible issues are not explored. It is a crime that we don't KNOW what the exact level of exposure is that will cause problems. It may be so high nobody who talks 10 hours a month has to worry about it, but how could we legally be using these products without knowing this? Why don't the cell phone companies want us to know? It is highly likely they have an idea and it must not be at a level that will preserve their profits. As far as the problem with the cell phone towers, there are a lot of complicating factors. For example, all types of wave radiation form something called standing waves wherever there are reflections. I could be sitting in my cubicle talking to you right next to me, and I might be getting 10 times the radiation exposure that you are because I happen to be in an area where a lot of reflections converge from all the different individual antennas in the larger cluster. If you are in a hotspot you will show problems while other people in the area are fine. The bottom line is when we find out in 40 years that, like the tobacco companies, the cell phone companies covered up and restrained research in the pursuit of profits, your grandchildren will be pissed. I use a cell phone, but why is there all this resistance to finding out the facts?
I've worked with very high power microwave transmitters for over 10 years, and my family has a fairly high risk of cancer (good ol' genetics right there). If it was going to happen, it would have happened to me by now.
Oh yeah? And I know of people that are in their 80s and 90s that are chain smokers for 50+ years. If smoking caused cancer, they would have cenrtainly have gotten some, eh? Thus, there must be no link between smoking and cancer.
Please.
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wish people would stop advancing their semi-scientific theories as fact to show how smart they are. It just shows how a little education, possibly very little, can hide ignorance in almost all areas.
Alright, smart ass. I'd love to know exactly under what criteria the peer reviewed paper of a well-published scientist is "semi-scientific." If you had a methodology critique, maybe I'd consider you to have backed up your own arrogance, but you haven't. I'll give you a chance, though:
Here is the paper by Dr. Lai that I referred to which you "have strong doubts about." The paper is a follow up published in Environment Health Perspectives in 2004 to test the iron-mediated mechanism hypothesized in an original paper published in 1997 in Bioelectromagnetics. Go ahead. Eviscerate it. Show us what you've got. Put a peer reviewed paper in one hand and shaky skepticism in the other hand, and I can easily tell you which one I'll go with.
Also...
The one you cite, if true (which I have strong doubts about) by your own description reported observing something other than cancer.
If you don't understand the connection between DNA strand breakage and cancer, please stop commenting on what you perceive to be the lack of scientific understanding of others. You're clearly out of your depth.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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Congress just passed a law that makes it illegal to get brain tumors from cell phones. Problem solved.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
On the other hand, given my experience with journalists recently, the truth is probably that one person had a brain tumor, one person has an uncle who had a brain tumour many years ago, one had a bump on the head from walking into a closet door, another went on vacation in East Timor, and the building is temporarily being closed down because it's being renovated.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Aha! Finally! A use for these tumour toppers I bought from Andy Dick. These things come in a variety of colors, shapes, and sizes.
Tumour toppers will be the next big fasion trend...
The above is most likely humour. Slashdot foot icon goes here.
I love it - journalist interviews a bezillion people about the story but forgets to mention if they turned the damn cell site off.
Would be interesting to note if the cell site remaining in operation was more important than the health of the people in the building, eh?
I mean, if you just turn the thing off, and assuming the cell site is the cause of the problem, danger removed -- no reason to leave the building at all.
Thus, the real story here is -- "Reporter writes silly sensationalist story while REAL Doctors and Engineers try to find the cause of the problem, long before they really know what it is."
+++OK ATH
I have been told that the blood-brain barrier is affected by EM Radiation, and that it is less effective once stimulated.
This means that when a mobile phone is to your head, toxins are not firewalled out of your brain. When the phone goes off, the firewall kicks in again and they are trapped in there and never get to your liver. Hence smoking while chatting on the phone = brain tumors.
My dad told me this when he came back from france (one of this cousins was involved in a telco-sponsored bit of research). Also supposeadly if you have a mobile phone transmitter going non-stop as if in a phone conversation in an egg incumabtor, the chickens die or hatch deformed. But then again a few cups of coffee can kill a baby too so yeah.
Sorry, but there are no hyperlinks from teh interweb to the RealWorld, so you'll have to eihter take my word for it or ignore it.
There are many numbers that I don't have so I will not try to make an argument (scientists will have great fun doing that for years, no doubt), but throwing out Planck's constant is not very meaningful unless you make a fairly accurate assessment of intensity and duration of power absorbed by these people and compare the power levels to other verifiable mutagenic sources of radiation.
I could just as well say, "Oh, the Sun doesn't cause skin cancer. It's 150 billion meters away and that's a LOT of zeroes!" Why your post gets a 5, I have no idea.
"Sunlight causes cancer..."
A Slashdot comment is not a rigorous discussion of all the issues. I was hoping readers would visit the EB article and calculate for themselves. Here is more explanation:
From the linked article in Encyclopedia Brittanica: "The energy E of each quantum, or each photon, equals Planck's constant h times the radiation frequency symbolized by the Greek letter nu, {nu}, or simply E = h{nu}."
The frequency of cell phones is around 2,400 MHz. The frequency of ultraviolet light is 100,000 times greater, if I remember correctly. (I don't have time to calculate it.) So, each photon of ultraviolet sunlight has enough energy to cause chemical changes in skin.
Not only is cell phone electromagnetic energy too small, it has a far greater wavelength, which means that it cannot be coupled into a small area, as can an ultraviolet photon. The most interaction that 2,400 MHz can do is generalized heating. There is not nearly enough energy to do much heating.
Radio and television operate at frequencies below microwave, while the visible spectrum operates at frequencies above microwave. Why would anyone assume that there is anything magical or mysterious about the microwave spectrum? It's only when you get into the upper portion of the ultraviolet spectrum and above (x-rays and gamma rays) where the effects of radiation become a problem.
This does not mean that microwaves can't or don't cause damage to living cells. If the energy of the microwaves are strong enough, they cause water molecules to become excited (friction causing heat). If you put something in a microwave oven or stand too close to a microwave transmitter, things can heat up. If they heat up enough, this can cause cellular damage (no pun intended). Prolonged exposure to heat could cause cancer... however, the victim would feel physical discomfort long before there would be long term effects.
Ergo, the radio transmitter is one of the least likely causes of this "outbreak".
> This is how they 'proved' that weed is damaging to the brain.
a rijuana.htm
> Problem is, that by over-exposing the subject to simulate
> prolonged exposure over time, they gave the subject (a monkey,
> in this case) brain damage through oxygen deprevation.
I know enough potheads with shaking hands and damanged intellects to 'prove' that to myself. If you gonna screw with your brain, expect consequences.
As for the current scientific consensus, it seems to be this:
http://www.marijuanaaddiction.info/brain-damage-m
Pope, the director of the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, added: "The safest thing to say at this point is that the jury is still out on the question of whether long-term marijuana use causes lasting impairment in brain function."
"Now, do you really think you can tell me how the rotation of various polar molecules in a biological sample will affect an organism from first principles, while considering all possible resonance effects?"
My understanding is that there isn't much chance of resonance, because below the surface of the skin, the energy of 2400 MHz is quickly broadened by the constant vibration of the molecules. Also, the energy of room temperature heat is much higher than the leakage from a cell phone tower. (We are considering a case in which the energy must go through skin and skull bone to cause brain cancer.)
The problem is the wavelength of the 2400 MHz energy. The formula for the wavelength of electromagnetic energy is:
Wavelength (in meters) = 3 x 10^8 (speed of light) / Frequency (in MHz)
The wavelength of 2400 MHz is about 12.5 centimeters, and each photon has an energy of about 10^-6 electron volts.
The huge mismatch between the size of the wave and the size of a molecule means that the effect of the electromagnetic energy is generalized heating. There are apparently no resonance effects. The heating is caused by friction of the molecules against each other.
I should have said "Frequency (in Hz) "
Sorry the harsh words, but this comment about the smallness of Planck's constant suppressing EM-interaction with chemical reactions is scientifically completely off: Planck's constant connects *gravity* with electromagnetism. It's smallness is an indicates that gravitational interaction can be neglected in chemical reactions. Wireless transmission is a purely electromagnetic effect and could - as such - very well mingle with chemistry. It is only the low energy of radio-waves which prevents them to become chemically active: Mobile phones operate around 10 GHz, which is about 0.1 meV. Visible light, which is chemically very active, is around 1 eV, that is a factor of 10e-7, not 10e-34!
You're not "sorry". You are using harsh words, and you know they are harsh.
You said "Planck's constant connects *gravity* with electromagnetism."
You and the Encyclopedia Britannica disagree. Planck's constant is used to calculate the energy.
You said, "And I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to look up the importance of the orientation of polar molecules to the functioning of various biological systems, many of which could lead to cancer and other effects when they malfunction."
That "exercise for the reader" would earn the reader a Nobel Prize.
You said, "... resonance effects will show up any time a molecular bond causes a dipole to return to its previous position..."
Molecular bonds are bound with an energy far greater than the energy supplied by electromagnetism, in the case we are considering. In addition, the energy of room temperature heat causes continuous motion. I don't see any way there can be resonance.
Reading again carefully, I have to admit that my harsh words were completely unjustified. Now I'm definitely sorry! I had just recently read and heard too much about high energy physics, where the smallness of the "Planck length" plays a big role. When you wrote about the smallness of the "Planck constant", I saw red and answered before reading carefully. Now, even though your words certainly were not wrong enough to justify harsh words, I still don't agree fully: Accusing the Planck length of making interaction between radio waves with chemistry is somewhat misleading: the Planck constant is of the same size for all kinds of electromagnetic radiation. It is actually their *energy* that differs greatly and makes some interact with chemistry (e.g. visible light) and others not (e.g. radio waves).