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Study Shows Cell Phones Safe
PreacherTom writes "In a move worthy of the Mythbusters, scientists in Denmark tracked over 420,000 cell phone users over the course of 21 years in an attempt to determine if the urban legend that cell phone use causes cancer is true. Their results: the RF energy produced by the phones did not correlate to an increased incidence of the disease. Please note that this doesn't make chatting on the highway at 85 mph any more safe." From the article: 'This so-called Danish cohort "is probably the strongest study out there because of the outstanding registries they keep,' said Joshua Muscat of Pennsylvania State University, who also has studied cell phones and cancer. 'As the body of evidence accumulates, people can become more reassured that these devices are safe, but the final word is not there yet,' Muscat added."
why start now?
I carry my cell phone in my pants pocket. Is it safe?
Grundes!
Even the summary of the article doesn't agree with the title of the article. Whilst I am of the opinion that mobile phones are safe, it is impossible to prove it. It is possible to demonstrate that it is almost certainly not the case, but it is impossible to demonstrate to a mathematical certainty that mobile phones (or any other treatment, e.g. medication, having blonde hair, being called Fred) is safe.
Sometimes you need more than a staggering, howling lack of cancer-causation evidence to convince the alties.
causes cancer.
Hey, at least there's a mechanism. Stress has been implicated in contributing to a lot of other diseases, why not cancer?
AccountKiller
They didn't take into effect the amount of vehicular accidents that are caused by inattentive cell phone drivers. This is probably the most unsafe aspect of them
Knowing Mythbusters, they had to somehow crank up a cell phone to a ludicrous level to induce cancer. Poor Buster! Still, it might make for an interesting episode.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
If I had an important paper published in a respected scientific journal and someone told me my work was 'worthy of the Mythbusters' I'd punch them in the face.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
That's true with anything, including that what you see is real. I don't have the time or the energy to teach you basic philosophy but this is not a new debate. Descartes thought about it, and many have after him. For the best modern thought on how scientific method works and how we prove things empirically, get the Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper.
If the cell phones 20 years ago didn't cause cancer, then todays less powerfull phones certianly do not.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Please note that this doesn't make chatting on the highway at 85 mph any more safe.
Or perhaps any less safe than chatting with a passenger while drinking a soda at 85 mph, unless we have data to show otherwise.
Sweden (not Denmark, but close) did start an analog cell phone network in 1981: the NMT system. The system was standardised to be the same within the nordic countries, of which Denmark is one. (Japan started even earlier, in 1979)
It is not always correct to assume that USA is on the edge of technology development and deployment.
This is not at all a "move worthy of MythBusters" as the submitter stated. Mythbusters is entertaining and generally informative television, and this Danish study sounds solid, but the methodologies are totally different, for the obvious reason that sifting through hundreds of thousands of medical records accumulated over many years and applying complex statistical models to them does not make for compelling television.
Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
and other bullshit.
People want to believe in this stuff cause it sounds dangerous. Advocacy groups get funding, lawyers make money, politicians can scare people. Who's gonna listen to a bunch of boring Danish statistics?
Even the WHO subscribes to the 'precautionary principle'. Forget about it - its all futile!
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
>'As the body of evidence accumulates, people can become more reassured that these devices are safe, but the final word is not there yet,' Muscat added."
I am just flipping appalled at the number of people in academia who have not internalized the concept that You Can't Prove A Fucking Negative! Can you prove that Neandertals are extinct? Can you prove that space aliens aren't controlling Bush and Blair with mind rays? Hell no! People seem to spend a huge amount of time worrying about shit that just might maybe could be true because, even though there is absofuckinglutely no evidence FOR it. On the other hand, they will blithely put up with 50,000 automobile deaths per year in the US and god knows how many deaths from tobacco and alcohol. Sheesh!
Speaking of which, I think I'll go have a medicinal gin and tonic and calm down.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Obviously this study has a lot more scientific integrity than what the Mythbusters do, but to say that what they do isn't science just isn't true.
Mythbusters is probbably the only show on TV that actually DOES science and shows what it is rather than just acting as a mouthpiece for science. The do everything that other scientists do, albiet within the confines of a television show. They repeat experiments, they accept "peer review", they establish controls. They do everything but publish a paper in a journal. Tell me how what the Mythbusters do isn't science?
It might not be something you'd want to site in a research paper, so it's not really up to the standards of acadamia, but calling what they do not science is simply wrong.
AccountKiller
"100% conclusive"
There is no serious study that can be 100% conclusive. If anybody comes to you preaching 100%-fool-proof numbers that is a sure tale-tale sign you are dealing with a wanker. What you can do is set extremely low chances for your study to be wrong (less than 2%, less than 1%, etc). Unfortunately the closer you get to zero, the more effort (read size of your case study) you must put into it. At some point you have to have some faith in probability.
There will always be incredulous people or consipiracy theory types. Not much you can do, there have been now plenty of serious studies which have not found enough evidence to correlate cell phone usage to cancer, to me it is enough to feel safe while using it, but as I said no matter how many studies you make, there will always be people who chooses not to believe in them.
My other OS is the MCP!
"They didn't take into effect the amount of vehicular accidents that are caused by inattentive drivers."
Fixed.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You better stop your needless worrying. According to my new theory, worrying about cell phones causing cancer causes cancer. Don't believe it? Well no one has disproven it yet!
;)
Also according to my made-up numbers, 10 years ago people used to only worry about cell phones causing cancer 5 minutes a day. These days with people like you around people worry about cell phones causing cancer 20 minutes a day! Maybe the worrying wasn't detectable back then, but it is now! We'll only know in 30 years!
Putting a device that emits radiation next to your head is harmful. How much? Who knows.
Worrying about dangers that don't exist is harmful. How much? Who knows. But if I state things as if we don't know anything about it, that totally false sense of uncertainty sure sounds scary.
My prescription includes making fun of people that don't understand science.
AccountKiller
The numbers form the study (males and females) of cell phone users between 15-21 years: 10,968 and between 10-15 years: 45,680. Total number of subjects were 420,095 persons. The study was supported by the Danish Strategic Research Council and the Danish Cancer Society. According to the article: "The funding sources were not involved in the study design or data collection, analyses, or interpretation."
The article do discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the study, any blame on putting things in a better light should be placed on the regular media that is reporting about their article and findings.
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen"
-- Albert Einstein
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
You have to remember that many times Jamie and Adam are looking for aggregate effects and not the minute differences that professional scientists are looking to find. A lot of professional science is attmepting to increase the resolution or accuracy of previous experiments. Hurricanes and straw, crashing cars, exploding cell phones, most of these experiments are more concerned with specificity than sensitivity, i.e. whether a particular event does or does not occur rather than to what degree.
Just like science, the methods Jamie and Adam have used over the years have improved as have the certainty of their results.
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen"
-- Albert Einstein
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Is there any European that does not use a cell phone?
... then we would be talking about the nation of Japan in the past tense. I rest my case.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Wow. I've come across some biased Wikipedia articles before, but the one you referenced sets a new low. It's current version, (with a single exception in non-bolded typeface buried in a paragraph), only mentioned studies which illustrate the safety of cell phone tech, and it does this using bolded headline entries. This is a shamefully poor representation of the available data on the subject. The article also fails to mention any of the many cases of conflict of interest which pollute many of the studies which claim safety. That's just pathetic and Wikipedia needs a solid re-write on this one.
I don't think the claims being made are bullshit, as you suggest, and I certainly am not motivated in my opinions because I like 'dangerous' sounding things. I just don't trust the telcos or the military, and there is plenty of reason not to. Anybody who argues differently is, in my opinion, either ignorant or willfully ignorant. It's the second variety of ignorance which baffles me.
-FL
It's about fuzzing the brain.
Please pardon the bold face, but it seems this subject calls for it. . .
The blood-brain barrier becomes permeable when exposed to EM cell phone frequencies. This is shown by injecting dye into the blood of rats and exposing them to cell phone EM. The short version: control groups don't end up with dyed brains while the exposed groups do. This experiment has been repeated numerous times.
--Now aside from an artificially permeable blood-brain barrier making your brain more susceptible to whatever agents happen to be in your blood at the time, the really interesting question people should be instantly asking is, "How does cell phone EM cause this to happen?"
And better yet, "What OTHER cellular responses are stimulated by cell phone EM?"
This isn't rocket science. It's simply a matter of taking the data as it comes, remembering it as you read more articles, and applying it in a logical fashion to form more questions.
Why the heck is everybody so caught up by the Cancer question when there is OBVIOUSLY something else important going on?
-FL
You would be correct. According to Wikipedia, Humans emit around 95 Watts with a peak wavelength of 9500nm (infrared). For reference, the equivalent numbers for mobile phones are 0.6W and around 30cm.
:)
The question now is... Are you giving your mobile phone cancer?
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
This is the original report on the cell phone radiation research. Much better than abc news http://jncicancerspectrum.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/c ontent/abstract/jnci;98/23/1707
You suck zonk
However, blood-brain barrier permeability due to EM radiation has been demonstrated numerous times.
here
here
and here
and here's an actual post from another prominant researcher, Allen Frey, regarding his own experiments in the area.
And here is perhaps the most interesting. . . An excerpt I scanned from a book on the subject; the notes are regarding something called, cyclotronic resonance, an electromagnetic mechanic which shows one likely candidate for how certain chemicals manage to cross the Blood Brain Barrier when the subject is exposed to an EM field. . .
"In 1985, Dr. Carl Blackman of the EPA and Dr. Abraham Liboff of Oakland University, working independently, integrated the reports of Jafary-Asl and the attempts to duplicate Bawin and Adey's experiments. They concluded that the strength of the local steady-state magnetic field of the Earth at the site of each of the laboratories was the hidden variable that determined the different frequencies reported."
Also. . .
here's an interesting article on how the original experimenter, Henry Lai, has been repeatedly undermined by Motorola in an effort to discredit his work.
-FL