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."

Comments

The Flaw in the Research?

[eldavojohn]

... no definitive link had been proved between mobile phone tower radiation and cancer."

I wouldn't say that's entirely accurate. I seem to remember the problem with the research being a while back that they were exposing cell tissue to thousands or millions of times the amount of radiation that a cell phone produces. I'm not sure if a cell phone tower scales to be thousands of times that of a cell phone but if it does ... there might be a legit concern here.

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.

Re:Cause and Effect?

[lisaparratt]

Certainly a link, but where's the evidence that it's a link to the mobile phone transmitters?

It could equally be down to insufficient ventilation allowing natural Radon to accumulate in the air inside the building.

Re:Not likely to be the tower.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

So if you worked in that building, and seven of your coworkers suddenly got brain tumors at the same time, you'd have no worries at all, eh?

Of course I would be worried - I would be worried about the building however, not the phone mast. I've just been reading the forums attached to the story and there's a few interesting comments in there - notably this one:

I would suggest that regardless of any link between mobile phone towers and cancer, a far more likely cause is toxic contamination of the building.

Anybody who has taken a good look inside the RMIT building in question should be able to plainly that the building is unsafe in many ways.

People may remember the floods and resultant evacuations that occurred at a city RMIT campus last year. Two floods, one cold water, another of near boiling water months later. This is the same building.

The safety (or lack thereof) of the wiring and electrics in the same building is also very disturbing.

Any student need only look beneath the desks in the computer rooms to get an idea.

I think RMIT must investigate ALL possible causes of these brain tumors.

It seems very controvertial as to whether mobile phone towers could cause any health-risks, and whilst I agree that it is impossible to say that these towers are safe, surely this building at RMIT with a mere two low power phone towers wouldn't be the first detected incidence of this in the melbourne CBD.

However, it is well known that there are toxins which are highly carcinogenic. It would be prudent to do a broad panel of tests for mutagenic & teratogenic toxins in this building as part of the investigation.

Re:Ancilliary problems

[dpaton.net]

Cell site base stations are self contained. The only things that run to them are the mains supply cables, which are indeed beefy, but that's 60Hz, not the UHF that mobile phones run at. The antennas used for cell site base stations also have a decidedly toroidal or sectoral radiation pattern. Every one I've seen in the last 10 years has used a set of sector patch antennas, which have excellent pattern control (energy goes in a set direction with set limits, not anywhere else). It's in the best interests of the cell companies to minimized the radiation that goes straight down in favor of the radiation that goes out, as straight down mostly wastes power that could be used to increase coverage somewhere else.

I don't doubt that there seems to be a link, but whether or not it's causal needs some very carefully done science, not a newspaper story.

Re:Not likely to be the tower.

[the eric conspiracy]

The problem with the statement 'consistent with radiation' is that the Doctor means ionizing radiation, and a cell tower emits non-ionizing radiation. BIG difference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation

Re:Hmmmm

[j_square]

>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.

This is not true. A GSM cell phone puts out maximum 2 W peak (900 MHz band) or 1 W peak (1800 MHz band). The average is 1/8 of this. A base station puts out a few tens of Watts. The power levels cannot be that different since you want a fairly symmetrical link budget.

The antenna elevation pattern of the base station is such that most of it is directed towards the horizon, and less towards the base of the tower. Since the power density (W/m^2) will drop off as the square of the distance, these two factors will cancel in such a way that you essentially get the same power density when moving out from the base station at ground level, at least for several hundred meters.

You will not be nuked from the handset, and certainly not from the base station. The power density from the base station will always be many orders of magnitude below that from the handset...

Since your handset will automatically decrease its power to mW when close to a base station (to save battery time, etc.), the best way to get less exposure is actually to be as close to a base station as possible!

Parent is correct

[BigDukeSix]

As a physician, but not a neurosurgeon, I had to do a quick Pubmed search to refresh some things I haven't thought about since med school. Most environment-related brain tumors come from organic chemical exposure (pesticides, benzene, vinyl chloride, etc) or exposure to other known bad actors like asbestos. TFA says that the building used to be an old theater, so there's no telling what might be in there; the clustering of cases on the top floor might imply a lighter-than-air causative agent.

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

Re:I'm calling bullshit...

[Farmer Tim]

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.

A sheet metal roof like that is a ground plane http://groups.google.com/group/sci.electronics/msg /6d422cb367cac613, not a Faraday cage.

I'd also say you're wrong on empirical evidence: cell phones generally do work inside buildings, this one is no exception.