Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
* 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
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.
>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!
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