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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."
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.
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!
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
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.
No it isn't. The fact that they were all working in the same building only points to a correlative factor between the building and the incidence of cancer. Could be something in the ventilation system. Could be rat poison in the coffee machine on the top floor. There is absolutely nothing about this situation that definitively links cancer to mobile phone tower radiation.
steampunk web design
Surely, someone here on Slashdot has one to spare for these poor people!
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.
Or maybe they all get lunch from the same Chinese place a few times a week. Or maybe there's something in the water cooler. Or maybe it's just a clustering phenomenon unrelated to all those things. I'm definitely not discounting the possibility, but remember, "correlation does not imply causation".
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Also, again from a maths point of veiw, don't forget that a cluster of seven people with brain tumors is perfectly possible by random without any outside influence.
Help children born unable to swallow - www.tofs.org.uk
Air conditioning is a wonderful thing.
Yes it's an unusual number of cases, but no, this is over a 5 year period. It's not like all the top floor workers got it a week after moving in.
Of the 7 brain tumors, 2 are malignant. Indicating that possibly different kinds of cancer are occuring. While the building could be to blame, it's probably not the towers sitting on top of it. More likely something else which they are exposed to inside of the building, hence why they shut down the building instead of lowering the tower's output. (They fail to mention that numerous other buildings have similar towers and exposure, but not the cancer rate.)
My thought was also that it may just be something in the building. There are thousands of other buildings with cell transmitters around the country and this has never been reported before. I think it would be very wise to check the building itself for some other source of radiation (or otherwise) that may have caused this to happen. I tend to lean away from the idea that it's linked to the tower.
* 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
Heh - the aircon at my previous employer was known as the "sickness recycling system".
It could be that brain tumors cause mobile phone transmitters.
"Anybody object to putting antennas on the roof right above you?"
"Duh, uhhh, nope, ok"
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Cancer must be contagious!! Kill the lab rats--quickly!!
When a scientist says "no link", they mean no CAUSAL link, not correlative.
Come on. Any idiot knows that it takes at least 8 people to call it a link.
I'd call seven brain tumours in one building a heck of a link...
Actually, no. Enough people get cancer that you'll see groups of people with cancer from time to time. Doesn't mean that anything about the building caused the cancers. As Freeman Dyson points out, you can expect something with a one in a million chance to happen to you every year. See, miracles *do* happen!
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
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!"
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.
Yup. Correlation is not causation.
Also, as far as I know, no-one has shown a proven (or even plausible) mechanism that allows non-ionising microwave radiation at such low energies to produce cancer. If it is non-ionising, it has to operate by thermal effects, and the power output of phone masts is regulated such that thermal effects on humans and other animals is so low as to be unmeasurable. You are more likely to get skin-cancer from standing in front of an incandescent light bulb - which (horrors) is pumping out 100 Watts of (gasp!) radiation when it's on. [Granted, most of that is IR, but there will be some UV.]
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.
It acts in a cumulative effect, over a short period. But having a series of chest x-rays one year, and having another set 5 years later, and another set 5 years after that, doesn't mean that after the last set you're suddenly going to have radiation sickness and thyroid cancer.
Besides, I'm not sure where you're going with the comparison to hard radiation. Sure, we're talking electromagnetic radiation here, but cell phone towers don't pump out gamma radiation or x-rays...They pump out much lower frequency microwaves. I would be suspicious to see such a high incidence of cancer coming from microwave exposure, unless there is a problem with that tower.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The internet seems to agree with me. I'm not trying to be a jerk, rather I'm trying to help spread understanding. I hope this link benefits everybody here.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
"Has been shown"? You are referring to the linear-no-threshold model, which is not agreed upon universally by any means. Radiation hormesis seems to have a decent amount of high statistical quality evidence backing it up, though the mechanism for a causal relationship is not fully understood.
Exposure seems to behave linearly over a certain range of dosage levels, true, but not necessarily for all dosage levels.
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..
How do you know how much radiation is being put out by these towers? I've worked in the industry for quite a while, and can tell you that very few towers, even ones with lots of antennas on them are actually putting out significant amounts of power (where significant = within an couple of orders of magnitude less then you experience when using a cell phone, at distances where the general public is exposed, including floors directly below the transmitters)
Contrary to popular belief, neither the size of the antenna nor the number of antenanas tell you anything about the power output. Big antennas are particularly useful for picking up weak signals, and multiple antenna arrays provide spatial diversity which also improves the reception of weak signals. Think about the Deep Space Network dishes, they are huge, not because the signals are powerful, but the opposite, because they are so weak.
Finally, big antennas are more efficent at directing the energy in a specific direction. Unless they are pointed down at the roof it is very unlikely that there is much energy actually making it into the building.
--- There are two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don't know it
>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!
1) Waste heat in the electronic circuitry
2) Lacking air circulation arount your ear
3) heat from your hand
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
Some kind of statistical significance is needed, for a start. Considering the millions of office buildings in the world, what is the chance that in *one* of them you'll find something "VERY rare" happening? Random chance alone guarantees it.
Much more surprising would be if you couldn't find a group of seven people with brain cancer in any office building at all in the whole world. Demonstrating this is a trivial problem in statistics: assuming a person has a probability "p" of developing a brain cancer, what is the probability that seven out of a group of "n" people will all develop brain cancer in a given time period?
I'm not worried. I have a rock that keeps cancer away.
English is easier said than done.
"correlation does not imply causation".
True but it sure is good for making some scary headlines.
No matter where you go, there you are.
If that were the case, you would expect to see brain tumors from anyone working in the top floor of a building that had a mobile phone tower on top. If that were the case, there would be overwhelming evidence all over the country. But there isn't. It's far far more likely that there is a chemical reason behind this cancer cluster. A cleaning agent or fumigant used at some point on the floor would be the first place I would look. I can't rule out the possiblity that the construction of the tower focuses the right frequency of radiation somewhere on that floor, but it wouldn't be anywhere near the top of my list of suspects.
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.
It's a coincidence, not a link. We don't have nearly enough information to call it a link, let alone a causal link. For example, were the tumors all of the same variety? What's the family history of these folks regarding cancer? Are there other known cancer risks in the environment where these people work? For that matter is there any reason to think that cell phone radiation would selectively affect brain tissue differently than other tissue in the body? In the case of cell phones, proximity of the radiation source is thought to be a potential issue. In the case of a cell phone tower, these people were not holding it next to their heads. They would have been having whole body exposure, and if cell tower radiation was the cause one would expect an increase in all cancers (especially leukemias).
Almost one out of two people will develop cancer. When we realize that fact, then clusters of cancers seem less amazing. For some reason, people think that cancer is a rare disease, but cancer is extremely common. Of course "it" is a set of diseases, some of which are fairly common (prostate cancer, breast cancer, skin cancers, leukemia, lymphomas, etc.) and some which are rare. Brain tumors are not all that rare, including the tumor that public sentiment tends to think is linked to cell phones (acoustic neuroma).
In one of my Criminology classes we talked about the use and misuse of statistics. The example was used that areas with a high stork population have a high human birthrate. Does that mean that storks bring babies?
Like the post above said:
Correlation is not causation.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
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.
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.
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.
No, correlation doesn't prove causation. It does imply it, however.
Only for people who have no real understading of those two terms.
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
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.
Although I agree with the essence of your analysis, you might want to consider:
- a GSM basestation would be potentially transmitting in all 8 timeslots hence the average power would be 8 times higher than a handset;
- GSM/PCN basestation trasmitter powers are quite often about 25W (although I'm not sure whether this is the power after combiners/feeder losses).
Correlation doesn't imply a causal link. For the media, it does imply a casual link, however. Usually far too casual.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Approx 1 in 1500 people are diagnosed with a brain tumour every year, and according to the article the tumours were discovered over the past 7 years. The building is big: 17 storeys. If the building contains 1000 people, then you would expect 4-5 brain tumours every 7 years *on average*.
There must be many hundreds of similar buildings in Australia, so it's hardly surprising to find one with slightly more tumours than average. Human instinct is notoriously poor at judging probability, and the media exploits this to hype-up their stories.
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
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
To be convincing, as in the case of the effects of tobacco on the body, there has to be a pretty strong correlation between the cause and effect. With tobacco, this was very easy to see, even in the pre-modern medical age. When it comes to cell phones, whether go into it believing it one way or the other, the data clearly show no strong correlation between cell phone use and anything. You are now down in the are where the signal to noise ratio in the data is one, and it becomes a heck of a lot harder to attribute the effect to the cause, because now how you slice and dice the data makes big differences in your result.
"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