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

Planck's constant = 6.626068 x 10-34 m2 kg/S

[Futurepower(R)]

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.

Ancilliary problems

[bigattichouse]

Perhaps it is from EMP from all the wires/power/machines that run up the wall *to* the tower, not the tower itself.

Would it be possible for multiple low frequency signals to interact to form a sine wave of a much higher intensity? ... 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...

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.

Re:Not the power.

[pithylittlegeek]

Actually, it has been shown in the last 10 years that the cellular response to ionizing radiation deviates from the "linear quadratic" (a strange term indeed) model at very low doses. There is a dose threshold below which it is actually more damaging than previously predicted. The theory goes that at very small doses the cell's repair mechanisms aren't triggered. There's a fairly recent review article by the guys who discovered the phenomenon here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1498249 0&query_hl=1&itool=pubmed_docsum Bear in mind that this is IONIZING radiation, so it is a totally different animal, but it is important to note that extrapolation/interpolation doesn't always give you the right answer. So personally, I would view cancer incidence data from low doses as very suspect at this point.