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.

Research

[cephalien]

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.

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:Cause and Effect?

[muellerr1]

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.

Re:Cause and Effect?

[XxtraLarGe]

I'd call seven brain tumours in one building a heck of a link...

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".

Re:Trying to cover this up again...

[catwh0re]

The press would love to spin it that way.

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.)

Statistical clusters

[simon_hibbs2]

* 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

Re:Cause and Effect?

[lisaparratt]

Heh - the aircon at my previous employer was known as the "sickness recycling system".

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.

A little story about mobile phone towers

[GroeFaZ]

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.

Re:A little story about mobile phone towers

[deathcow]

I dont blame the natives, it's scary having one of those antenna nearby. I moved into my house here in Alaska 10 years ago, I was a spry 26 years old and felt healthy all the time.

Now, about 5 years ago a cell phone tower was installed in lot adjacent to us, maybe 350 feet from our house (and I telecommute so I am exposed to it all the time.)

After five years of exposure to this tower, I've become very sedentary, I've stopped riding my mountain bike years ago, and I frequently end up working all day sitting in front of the computer with just short breaks. The cell tower has also bloomed my Coca Cola intake level, and I've put on about 45 pounds of unwanted weight. I feel less healthy than ever now.

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