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Cell Towers Not Responsible For Illness
drewmoney notes a BBC article on a major UK study of whether cell towers (or "mobile phone masts" as they are called in the UK) cause illness. The study concluded strongly that symptoms of illness caused by mobile phone masts are all in the mind. People claiming sensitivity to radio emissions showed more symptoms in trials, according to the article, whether signals were being emitted or not. Quoting: "Dozens of people who believed the masts triggered symptoms such as anxiety, nausea and tiredness could not detect if signals were on or off in trials. However, the Environmental Health Perspectives study stressed people were nonetheless suffering 'real symptoms.' Campaign group Mast Sanity said the results were skewed as 12 people in the trials dropped out because of illness."
The obvious way to conduct such a study would be to correlate the incidence of illness with the proximity to radio sources.
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I heard that, this one time, this guy, got like cooties from a cell tower, true story.
prepare the survey weasels.
I'd be willing to bet a fair amount of the 'symptoms' people claim they are suffering from wireless signals (I've even had someone moan that my WiFi signal was giving them a headache!) are entirely psychological. I put the router where nobody could see it, the complaints stopped :)
Basically this is how you do a placebo trial. The science is telling us that these people are sick, but it is not due to radio towers, because having the radiation on or off is not making any statistically significant difference at all in their symptoms.
It is the same as when you do a dug trial with 1/2 the people getting sugar pills, and in a huge majority of *both* groups the people get better. You use statistics to find out the *true* efficacy of your medicine.
Basically - the point is the illness could be being caused by any number of other local-specific factors, but cell towers is not the cause.
but more cell towers means less radiation, as both the towers and the cell phones can then reduce their transmission power.
I was operating a high powered transmitter in a small village with lousy tv reception. One of the locals came down to the site and complained to me that my equipment was interfering with his tv. I asked him if it was happening right now. He said yes and we went up to his house to check out the symptoms. His tv reception was quite noisy. When he drove me back to the transmitter I asked him to come in and take a look. "See that big switch there. It's the main power. It's turned off."
It was sheer luck that the guy complained when the transmitter was off the air. It does demonstrate that people will blame things on radio transmitters because they have no way of knowing that it isn't the transmitter.
then the Nokia Wifi Cloud that blankets London would be making everyone that lives there neurotic and irritable.
Oh wait...
Summation 2
http://www.ericisgreat.com/tinfoilhats/
I once worked for a GSM handset manufacturer that had a couple of test BTS in the building and I can tell you that after a day of work there, I was suffering of anxiety, headaches and tiredness, but almost never during weekends.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/07/14/11838 33843064.html?from=top5
and a video
http://video.aol.com/video-detail/id/1439921521
OR it was because his mobile phone bills were too high, and I know I can relate to that.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
While I don't think there is a strong connection between the two (I work beside a cell tower, and over the last 9 months or so I haven't had more or fewer illnesses than before), it's entirely possible that the effects of the radiation take more than a small measure of time to feel. It isn't like you see a light on or off, or hear a noise.
For example, when placed under a heat lamp, it could easily take 5 seconds before "pain" was registered, it doesn't mean that the heat wasn't hurting you 5 seconds ago, it means it takes a while for the sub-dermal layers to heat up. So it's entirely possible that prolonged exposure to the radiation is causing them problems.
However, if they claimed they feel instant pain the minute the transmitter kicks on, they're probably lying.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Notice the article conveniently omitted any technical details, like how many WATTS are transmitted.
If your tower is talking to hundreds or thousands of phones, the transmit power has to go up or the bandwidth will go down.
A few years ago I attended one of those little village meetings that happen often in little English rural villages, which was called to protest the plans to build a mobile phone mast in the village. It was an interesting experience.
They had handouts that they have printed from websites that were expressing the dangers of living near the masts although, clearly, these were taken from a highly bias source. The guy who called the meetings was not shy about admitting that this biggest concern was the potential drop in value of his grade 2 listed cottage which was positioned quite close to the mast.
The highlight of the evening though, was a little old man they dragged out to talk about the science. Apparently he had worked on some of the early nuclear power stations in the UK and had also spent time as a science teacher, although long since retired. He gave us a speech about the effects of radiation (not really going into detail about the difference between a phone mast and a nuclear power station in terms of radiation intensity), he talked about the electric systems in the body etc. It was all pretty interesting in a 'high-school physics' kind of way.
Then, completely out of the blue, this guy starts going into a really passionate tirade about how the government are using mobile phone masts to plant instructions directly into our brains. The look of horror on the organisers face was a picture! I think he saw this old guy as his trump card until this very moment. The guy was ushered off staging mid-sentance. Containing my laughter was quite difficult. I had never actually seen a members of the tin-foil hat brigade in the flesh before!
The mast got built.
Now I come to think about it, my voting habits changed around the same kind of time too.... hmmmm
I think the Independent article that claimed that that was proven was later shown to have been based on misinterpreting the results of a scientific study. I seem to remember the original story and update were both on Slashdot.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
Will this effect sales of tinfoil hats? Only time will tell...
I've seen subdivisions that are almost right underneath electreical distribution lines - but a Cell Tower?! Unless you're standing right in front of it, its not going to do anything. Thats why they put them up very high in the air!
Yeah there seems to be a correlation between tin-foil and conspiracy theories. Anyway - people protesting mobile phone masts use mobile phones themselves, and forgets an obvious problem. Mobile phones increases their output when far away from the mast in order to make a connection. Closer to the mast their output is lower. If you really want to minimize the power of the mind control radiation, you should stand close to the mast, as this will minimize the radiation from the mindcontrol device you are holding close to your brain.
They're also not responsible for traffic congestion, the state of my shoes or the colour of aubergines.
In fact the number of things that they don't do is almost infinite.
The campaign group doesn't say if the 12 people who pulled out because of illness were exposed to radiation or 'placebo'.
I'm guessing they got huge doses of placebo.
This post was intended to make no sense what so ever, if you do see the slightest spark of logic in it I pity you...
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
"The results were skewed as 12 people in the trials dropped out because of illness."
Shouldn't that merit further study, to see whether the 12 that took ill are in connection to the mobile phone masts? Or at the very least, add to the claim that they are causing health problems.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SPZI.PK
If you dig a little deeper, you'll find that it was just one guy's study at one university in Germany; all he did was place a cell phone near a bee hive and apparently this caused them to become "disoriented." http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/2 7/1724239&from=rss At the time that this was all being hyped up, I couldn't find any details of the "experiment," and several articles I read had claimed that other than the one quote from the primary researcher, there was absolutely nothing else released about the study. Now there may have been more details since then, but when someone makes a claim like that, and then doesn't publish or release any of their methods, I don't give it a single ounce of credit; it's an automatic dismissal, unless of course they release more information later. Not like every major news publication in America didn't jump on this thing like a pack of rabid wolves. That's why I only get my science from the Weekly World News.
I'm British and watched a TV programme on a similar study a while back. It seemed that those who were complaining of illness were in-fact next to a tower that was not even operating (a.k.a the 'placebo'). Again, people were leaving the experiment due to health issues.
I remember being at secondary school and the school accepting a building contract for a mobile-phone company building a mast in on the school property (occupying a small section of the playground). At the time there was uproar that it could be affecting the children etc, when actually noone knew anything about the dangers of mobile phones, nor what the masts could do to children. Rightly so, perhaps, the parents were at the root of this uproar, but I suppose it just shows how the fears of the many tend to control the hearsy of things people don't know about - that is, everyone feared mobile phone (despite going out and buying one anyway) based purely on a rumour.
ilovegeorgebush
In my research institute they installed WiFi about 1.5 years ago. In my corridor, they put the emitter by the middle. Within 2 weeks, the 2 guys working in the offices next to the Wifi antenna were deaf. More exactly, one was completely deaf on one ear, and the other heard weird sounds all the time. The symptoms are permanent. The doctors don't know the cause. There was no infection, nothing. Nobody else had problems since, but everybody fears the WiFi antennas. :)
I am always leery of articles that do not disclose this early in the article. This article eventually says:
"The study was funded by the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research programme, a body which is itself funded by industry and government."
So, who exactly is the Mobile Telecommunication and Health Research programme? If this were the United States and the study had to do with health effects of nuclear power plants, and if "business and government" meant, say, the EPRI and the "government" agency were the NRC, I'd be very skeptical. On the other hand, if the government agency were the National Institutes of Health, I'd give it a lot of credence.
The Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research programme has a website,, but I can't judge from it whether this is real science or not.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I could have saved them a buncha money and reached the same conclusions.
A much better study would have been to figure out not why symptoms were clustered around cell towers (that's obvious, if you can see the damn things it triggers the symptoms) but why the people who have the symptoms are clustered in the UK.
Inbreeding? Lack of science education? Most likely it's the crappy public health system that can't get to these people in time to head off the descent into delusion, which they then spread to their neighbors in a nice little insular social feedback system otherwise known as mass hysteria.
Wouldn't the ability to detect low-level electromagnetic radiation qualify for winning the James Randi prize for displaying paranormal powers? Why isn't one of these 'sensitives' a millionaire?
Your anecdote is about people assuming that cell phone towers cause problems. It's the kind of thought that this study is disproving, not evidence against the study.
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So the "science" in that episode of Panorama was bogus scaremongering? Well, what a shock. But in the present political climate, I doubt the BBC will be reporting that the science in this other episode of Panorama was just as shaky, presenting only one sided coverage of an ongoing scientific debate. (For example, here is a list of some "off message" articles - notice the reputable journals that they have been published in.)
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
It's not just cell radiation, it's electricity in general!!!! These electro-magnetic waves interfere with your thinking and kill your fornits!!!!! How else do you explain the idiocy that happens around the world wherever electricity appears?????!!!!! BEWARE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now if you excuse me, I gotta call the cable, telephone, and power companies and cancel my services.
It doesn't say what illness they suffered. For all we know, they could have caught something like AIDs although that said groups like this would probably then have us believe mobile phone masts causes AIDs also. Seriously though, it could just as well be something blatantly unrelated like flu that they suffered.
from where i live.
the administration (chosen from residents by residents in the building) decided to let a gsm operator put up a cell tower on top of their building in order to provide income for the apartment complex.
within 1 year, 7 residents of the apartment who had no prior conditions died of cancer, including the chosen administrators of the building who spearheaded the move.
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Now, I know everyone in NYC is irritable, cranky and in poor health. It must be the fact that we're blanketed with cellular "radiation". Nothing to do with poor health, eating habbits, dirty air, poor work/life balance or my f-tard boss hitting on my wife at the xmas party last year.
... that's right around cell/wifi frequencies and it's EXACTLY the ideal frequency for water absorbtion (i.e. food, humans, drinks...etc). More radiation leaks from your microwave than your wifi router emmits intentionally!
It. Must. Be. What. We. Can't. See.
That or what we don't understand. Try talking about exponential decreases in power @ distance from a tower and most people either politely pretend they have a clue or go on with 'well that's what you may thing but i've seen proof online of...xyz'. They will cry "OMG, that cell tower put outs 100's or 1000's of watts of radiation (and if i recall it's more like 10s to 100's at most). Never mind that TV and radio will run 10-100's of KW. Different frequency, I know. But hell, if the "EM sensitive" can get off (i mean get sick) on a hair dryer @ 60Hz then obviously their lack of knowledge about frequency means it doesn't matter. How about a microwave drawing a KW+
Drive to the top of Mt. Wilson above LA, there are a zillion transmitting towers. The TV towers each put out hundreds of kilowatts of rf. If the birds and squirrels up there are doing ok, then it is hard to understand how a cell tower could cause problems. A friend of mine who used to work on a radio system for taxis up there, said much of his test gear would go crazy due to all the rf. Until someone can show how rf radiation can affect DNA, there is no mechanism for rf to cause cancer.
And from where I live, an apartment house also got a GSM antenna, and oddly enough, people in the house and around started to feel ill weeks after it was set up. What they didn't know is that it wasn't powered, due to issues with the license to even run it in that town.
I beg to differ. There was this place in latvia where the russians put up a huge radar station. Only later they found out that all the villagers were constantly having headaches and some children even struggling to develop motor skills.
Airwaves are nasty.
Actual this was a groundbreaking sample of people living in Second Life. They used a script to query their user stats from the superuser account.
That doesn't provide evidence of anything on its own. How many people died of cancer the year before? The prior decade? How old were the residents? Did any of the residents work in the same place? Were there any changes in the quality of water reaching the apartments? Were there any renovations in the building? Any maintenance or pest control?
Even if everything else was controlled, the construction itself could easily be at fault. Construction often places a number of hazardous materials in the air (fine particulate matter, glue fumes, etc.). I'm guessing they also installed extra power and communication lines to feed the antenna, both of which could increase local radiation levels themselves. Heck, one of the construction workers could have had a nasty virus that got passed to the residents and lead to their illnesses.
Psychosomatic factors could be to blame as well, and there is also some probability that it was just a coincidence.
G
when I get an annoying phone call. Does that count?
Also what was the age of the appartment building? is it possible they had asbestos in the roof? They could have easily disturbed the asbestos, and caused it to break up in the air and that could have caused the cancer. or any other construction also what kind of cancer did they die of? did they all die of similar cancers? or did they die of different cancers?
[quote]How many people died of cancer the year before? [/quote] none [quote] The prior decade? [/quote] probably at most 5, due to age. [quote] How old were the residents? [/quote] young, old mixed. [quote]Did any of the residents work in the same place? [/quote] none of them. [quote] Were there any changes in the quality of water reaching the apartments? [/quote] no. this is a high quality neighborhood with considerably good income. quality of life is good. [quote] Were there any renovations in the building? Any maintenance or pest control? [/quote] no. for the latter, people around here do not like that kind of thing - also pest issue is something that is nearly nonexistent.
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One in four people will get cancer anyway. Your story has no correlative value.
People were dying in droves from cancer long before the invention of radio. Cancer rates have increased because people are living longer. Without a proper statistical and medical analysis of the situation, you can't say that the GSM tower had anything to do with their deaths. Cancer clusters are more illusion than reality. People see patterns in the noise of random events.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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I've been an amateur radio operator for a number of years and I've ran almost right to (never over!) the legal limit on HF bands (40 and 80 meters, mostly), yet I have never experienced any side effects from the RF from my transmitter, tuner, coax or antennas. HF is more likely to bake your brain than the high band stuff from cell towers. Now where did I put my keyboard so I can reply to this article about uh, what was it again?
I almost believed you, until I read the word friend.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
well, heavens help them.
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yay.
"anyway" - you really tied it up despite there being nothing to support a counter argument.
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Both the complete report and the abstract are available here.
I can't help but note the report is very badly written. The writers' habit of stuffing loads of numerical data into sentences, instead of in a table, is annoying. The tables at the back use incomprehensible labels. And why do people still generate PDFs that completely lack navigation aids (hyperlinks, bookmarks)?
the entire neighborhood is statistic in itself.
age disposition, income disposition, their employment (current and prior if retired), their occupations of daily life, lifestyle, what they eat, what they not, what they do in free time, when they get up when they go to bed are almost identical to each other. im talking about a neighborhood of 10-20.000 people living in almost identical apartment complexes that were built exactly in the same 5 year period in the past.
there are no occurences of 7 people suddenly dying from cancer in a year in none of them, but this.
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I was talking to someone once about corn circles. She was convinced they were made by aliens. I pointed out that they all seemed to be within a few miles of a university, and asked her what she thought that suggested. Her suggestion: "That the aliens are seeking out places of learning, so that they can communicate with smart people?"
Years later, it was revealed that two men had been responsible for a large number of corn circles. One of the original pranksters (the other had tragically died in the meantime) revealed their methods for how they had produced their corn circles on a TV programme about hoaxes (including how they altered the designs from a simple circle when scientists suggested, with some plausibility, that freak whirlwinds may have been responsible for the phenomenon). There were still people who, after seeing this, professed that the other corn circles must have been made by aliens!
Once someone has a stupid idea in their head, it takes a lot of shifting.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
You know, there are other things that really do cause cancer, *many* of which can still be found in older buildings, or in extremely cheaply built tenements (just because there are rules, doesn't mean they were followed). If 7 people in my apartment building died of cancer in a single year, I would DEFINITELY MOVE OUT! But I wouldn't blame it on whatever was installed a year ago, because cancer from most low-level pollutants takes YEARS (usually well more than a decade) to occur. In fact, if cell mast exposure could cause cancer in anyone within ONE YEAR, it would be one of the most cancerous substances in our environment today, more provably dangerous than smoking, smog, DDT, and asbestos put together! Even if cell mast radiation is dangerous, it is obviously not very *provably* dangerous, or it would have been proven almost immediately in the dozens of studies we have seen from various sources -- and there would be at least a few studies that were extremely alarming. (Just like smoking, DDT, and asbestos, and also smog BTW although we do nothing about it.) Cell phone research has come nowhere near these other substances in their conclusions. In other words, your rationalisation for what happened in your apartment building can't possibly fly. But you should still get out, because unless it's the most populous apartment building I've ever seen, 7 cancers in one year is a huge anomaly, and a strong sign that everyone there has been exposed to something for many, many years. (And guess who has been exposed the longest? Probably the building administrators, who were among the ill.) Get out of this apartment. Period.
I find it unusual that people claim they are being harmed by the transmissions from cell phone towers and it doesn't matter where they are from.
In Europe where it's primarily (or only?) GSM and in North America where it's primarily CDMA people are convinced it's harming them. It's seems odd that people are harmed by a broad spectrum of the radio spectrum specifically from 900MHz to 1800MHz and not by microwave ovens, wifi or other common sources.
It always seems that a 300 foot tall tower a couple of miles away gets more attention than a cell phone transceiver mounted to the top of an office building. You'd think the latter would cause more of an outrage but it's always the tower in the middle of nowhere that gets people riled up. If they can't see it they won't complain, ignorance really is bliss.
Oh. Sorry. You don't live in the apartment. It's 200m, away, duh. Still, too close for comfort. Move. And don't worry about the cell masts.
On a more serious note than your post probably deserves, can you really equate a radar designed to be powerful enough to send waves out for tens, even hundreds of miles and then return off the target which isn't optimised to do that - probably the opposite - with something designed to send them a few hundred feet at most. Likely a different frequency too.
I will have a sig when the market demands it.
Assuming pure line of sight (can you see the antenna from your building?), Power dissipates with a 1/d^2 law. It's also not hard to imagine that the null in the direction straight down from the antenna is -20dB, so if you're 200m away (at roughly the same height as the antenna), you'll get about the same amount of power as someone 2m below the antenna. So essentially, you're getting hit with the same amount as someone on the top floor directly below the antenna. This doesn't even take into account your own body acting as an antenna (straight up) and someone who receives it from above.
For this reason, hospitals will actually prefer a cellular provider to place their antenna on top of the hospital rather than on top of another building that is away from them, but still in the general area.
When I was 12, I'd hang out in the school library reading books on programming.
The programming section of the library was right next to the UFO section of the library, so I got quite a bit of exposure to the cook section, as well. I remember seeing one book, "The Irradiation of America," or something like that. I opened it up, saw all the predictions about how we'd all be dead by now, due to the TV and radio signals flying around.
I asked myself, "What educational value could the library possibly see, in getting this book for us kids to read?"
Now I know.
no you dont get it still. i understand it might be rather hard to imagine for someone not living here to think some neighborhood like that is possible.
most of the buildings were built by the same contractors back then, so they are if not identical in plans, identical in materials, manner of construction and such. and, back then, stuff like asbestos and other additive materials were unimaginable here due to cost. most basic stuff is used - plain concrete which is done with beach sand (beach close by), iron/steel bars that are still used today in the same fashion and paint, which is used still since that times.
there are no changing circumstances in that neighborhood, yet alone that building except the cell tower. therefore i conclude that being the cause.
additionally NO apartment complex herearound is letting anyone put up cell towers anywhere due to that incident, leave aside their own building - they dont even let anyone set up anything 2-3 buildings away.
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c.f Portland, Oregon, where the beautiful Washington Park ridge is now sight-polluted with ugly cellphone towers.
So far, the 21st century sucks.
Advice: on VPS providers
Assuming pure line of sight (can you see the antenna from your building?), Power dissipates with a 1/d^2 law. It's also not hard to imagine that the null in the direction straight down from the antenna is -20dB, so if you're 200m away (at roughly the same height as the antenna), you'll get about the same amount of power as someone 2m below the antenna.
Stop trying to use science and facts to attack the grandparent's anecdotal evidence! Cellular masts cause cancer through magic, not radio, so the effect isn't bounded by space or time.
Even when reporting studies that are able to assign a statistical probability to a specific event, many (most?) people get it wrong. For example, if the study reports that there is a 95% probability that the results were not due to chance, that still means that there is a 5% probability that the results are due to chance - and the statistically improbable thing will indeed happen with that probability.
That's why in scientific circles there is so much weight placed on corroborating studies - a single study doesn't mean a whole lot, unless for example p << .01 (much less than 1% probability of the result happening by chance). If the bulk of the studies show an effect, then there's probably a real effect; if not, then there probably isn't.
It's not unlike the lottery: somebody has to win (eventually, anyway), but it probably won't be you. But that won't stop people from thinking that if they just bet their birthday, or wear their lucky hat when they buy the ticket, that it will have some effect on the result. And indeed, they're even likely to get some "confirmation" of that when they win some minor prize - which would probably have been a lot less surprising if they actually worked out the probabilities (there are usually lots of minor prizes given out for exactly that reason - it keeps people playing).
Unfortunately most people's intuitive grasp of statistical probabilities is poor at best.
You ever hear the aphorism, when you've ruled out the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? It's impossible for that cell mast to have caused cancer in 7 people within one year, man. Period. Even the most evil cancer-causing substances that we have ever tried to expose ourselves to intentionally, the ones that nobody disputed were cancer-causing, and were withdrawn from the market quickly, EVEN THEY for the most part could not cause cancer in anything close to a year. So, consider your two alternatives: one theory, in which something clearly impossible must have happened, or another theory, in which there is some other unknown element causing cancer in that building. You can't possibly be about to tell me that you have exhaustively checked everything and are certain there are no other cancerous agents in that environment. Therefore, your assertion that there are no other such substances is speculation. Compare that to your alternative theory, which clearly contradicts everything we know about not only cell technology, but about cancer, too. It's quite clear which theory is on far weaker ground, here. Where you went wrong is in assuming that you had all the information at your disposal to decide what caused the rash the cancers, and then just picking the most suspicious-looking element you *know* about. That isn't the way the world works. In science, things you don't know about can kill you, too. Which is why you should get out of that neighbourhood.
You have to understand this isn't the first study to be done on this. People have been claiming the evil radiation from various sources has been killing us for DECADES. Power lines were a popular target, cell phones of course, WiFi, radio stations, etc. Well there has been some rather serious research that has gone in to this and nothing has been found for any source. This is just basic AFDB crap.
The power lines are the ones I remember the best, since the house I lived in as a little kid was very near some large distribution lines. My mother worried over how much damage that had done to me and my sister. Thus when I got older it was a topic I looked in to and found that indeed there is no evidence of harm. Now, almost 3 decades later, there's STILL no evidence power lines cause any harm.
At this point, it is not incumbent on people to prove transmitters don't hurt us, it is incumbent on those who think they do to prove they do. First step would be to show the method of action. The only things I ever hear as total BS such as "It can slowly heat up your skin!" No, it can't, even if our bodies didn't self regulate (they do) it requires constant input way higher than that to heat something up. You can set a cellphone right next to an egg and it'll never cook. For that matter you can blast it with a magnetron that's not in a chamber of the right size to build standing waves and it won't cook.
That's what tires me about this crap so. We have scientific explanations for why this shouldn't have a harmful effect on humans, and we have plenty of evidence supporting that indeed it doesn't. It really is now incumbent on the people who think it does to come up with something. Come up with a real method of action that it would have and test for it in properly controlled tests. Instead all I ever see is examples of how people started to feel bad when WiFi was turned on in their building. Ok that means nothing. We had people complain when ours went in because the APs were sometimes above people's heads. One lady said it made her feel sick and made them move it. Fun fact: None of the APs were powered. That didn't happen till weeks later.
apartment complexes here occupy rather a larger area than common buildings in u.s. and europe. for example the one i live in is 500 m2. from what i remember (that building is not in los from here, but next to it is an apartment complex one of my friends live, so i saw it from there) the antenna is put on close to one corner of the building.
forgot to add, in the next building, in which my friend live, 2 people died from cancer in that same year in addition to the ones in the tower building.
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I see a lot of wannabees rant about this study being run by oh-so scientific scientists and the wearyness about MW being pushed by unscientify crackpots. And that the sun and radio and tv is more radiation blah blah ...
:-) . Her life isn't that fun though. When her neighbor above leaves his 20" CRT on she can't sleep. She's got other trouble with that aswell and people often don't believe her and think she's crazy. She's had her sensetivity tested in a university laboratry and senses alternating fields of CRT coils at different angles with different intensity. I personally presume that the origin for this sensitivity is acutally the inner ear which apparently gets affected by magnetic fields (just an amature theory of mine).
I've got news for you: Microwaves damage health. Period.
The debate is only about at which intensity do they start doing that.
I generally turn my Wifi of if I'm not using it and have stopped carrying my cellphone close to my body, since it's on all day. I turn it off at night. I also hold it away from my head when I make a call until the cell handshake is over and the remote connect is there. My old Siemens M35 even had a beep to indicate when the connect is there. Smart people the Siemens engineers, aren't they?
Handshake you ask? That's the high-power meep-meep-meep you hear in nearby active FM radios just before you make or recieve a call. It's what establishes the conection to the cell network for communication.
I know a woman who can sense the cellphone handshake (she has e-magnetic field sensetivity) from meters away and has the habbit of anouncing cellphone calls seconds before a phone rings. Fun to watch with unsuspecting others near by
On it goes:
My father was a high profile radar electronics engineer - with Military (Nato, Cruise Missile), Airbus, Nasa/Grumman Aircraft (Lunar Module, Skylab & early Space Shuttle) and some others. He forbid us to have a Microwave oven (they ALL leak Microwaves) and steared clear and went the other way whenever we got to close to a radar bubble when going hiking.
There are people who've had terminal brain tumors due to intense cellphone usage and I work with doctors (medical IT) who keep all equipment far away and well cased according to TCO.
Don't think it's not unhealthy just because most people don't care or some Telco funded (sic!) study from the UK says the health issues are all bogus and the people claiming health issues are hysteric. It is scientifically proven that even lower wattrange microwaves predictably lower the threshold for internal blood clot (mw induced heat + blood protein == hardboiled) and influence plant groth. Switzerland (iirc, it was some european country) official acknowledges e-magnetic sensetivity and authorities even funds radio shielding paint and other countermeasures for people who are affected. Whatever you make of that, I, for one, would *not* want to live right in smack of the middle of a directional radio beam or the raycone of a cell transciever. Not with proper shielding anyway.
Bottom line:
It's not about being hysteric or overly paranoid. But a little common sense and forsight is needed when handling technology. You don't get universal flawless wireless connectivity and mobile coverage without a tradeoff. Anyone who believes that is a crackpot himself.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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If the article is any true reflection, this was the worst-conducted study in the history of studies. ...or else they were just going after the low-hanging fruit for a press release, and not really concerned with science.
I did read, and did not think it was germane to the question.
Please re-read my article - you obviously missed the most important points, so I could accuse you of the same thing!
In order to demonstrate the effect you want to prove, you must:
- Come up with a study that can assign a specific probability to this event;
- Show that the same hypothetical cause has resulted in similar statistical anomalies in other places;
- Show that there are no other confounding causes (simply because you can't think of one doesn't mean that there aren't any - this means that professional epidemiologists will almost certainly need to be involved, not lay people or, even worse, reporters); and
- Show that the frequency of these observed anomalies is significantly greater that would be expected (It is to be expected that there will be some installations that will show no or very little effect and some will show a large effect - the question is their relative frequency: If the number of installations showing a "large" effect is at about the chance level, we are safe to assume sample error).
If you cannot do this, I would have to conclude that you are simply blowing smoke.Well, even though my post was marked as flamebait, I'd like to say thank you for clearing that up for me. I thought I remembered the story on Slashdot, but did not remember the update.
cat /dev/urandom | hexdump -C | grep "ff ff ff"
/dev/urandom!"
00321460 c2 35 ff ff ff 89 1a 03 66 8c 98 c4 c1 84 7c e7 |.5......f.....|.|
"24 bits in a row, all ones! Something must be wrong with
Just because something is rare, doesn't mean it's significant.
Liberty you never use is liberty you lose.
Lawsuits have nothing to do with science and little to do with the truth. Haven't you learned that yet? Look, obviously you are determined to believe that something impossible caused cancer in your neighbourhood instead of dismissing it rationally and worrying about the real culprit. I've tried to help you by making it clear to you that you have identified the wrong source of danger in your environment. Done my best, but now it's over. Sooner or later, persuasion fails and Darwin takes over. Good luck. I hope that either (a) it's just a statistical anomaly (which as others have pointed out, is perfectly possible -- unlikely, yes, but way MORE possible than a bunch of cancers from a single cell tower in a single year), or (b) that you get lucky. Take care, true believer.
Actually it looks like 26 bits in a row, all ones! Something must be really wrong with /dev/urandom! LOL :-)
yes im blowing smoke.
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unfortunately i cant trust statistics, law, courts, common belief or anything else to work out their common slow mechanics, that is a matter of life and death. Apparently more so for other people around here too, noone is accepting any cell towers in any place near them. So, im safe as far as im concerned.
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Good! You're on your way to wisdom.
Look, I've spent a number of years of my career providing statistical analysis support for epidemiological researchers, and I'd be the first to tell you that statistics can be treacherous: At best they can be highly suggestive, and even sometimes identify a causative agent, but they don't usually tell you much of anything about the mechanisms involved and/or the best thing to do about them (unless you're able to identify an agent that can be easily avoided). At worst they can be used by the unscrupulous or ignorant for the most misguided purposes.
Ditto that for the courts.
Take care,
Why not just assume that it could either the cell phone tower or something else in the environment, admit that you don't know for sure. (You can admit that, right?) And then make the logical conclusion that the best course of action is to ASSUME THE WORST (right?), and the worst case scenario is NOT that a cell tower gave your neighbours cancer. The worst case scenario is that it's something else that you don't know about, yet, and that you have misidentfied the source. Therefore, regardless of what you *suspect* happened, you should MOVE OUT ANYWAY. Move to somewhere else with no cell towers if it pleases you. If your guiding principle really is, as you say, to take no chances in matters of life and death, then this is STILL the most logical course of action. But if you prefer to rest on your own assumption of right thinking, then I would have to conclude that being right is more important to you than being safe.
Have gnu, will travel.
now, the point is, i moved in this neighborhood when i was 4.5, and i grew up playing around in here, there and right next to that apartment block, where one of my family's long time friends and their son who is a long time friend (since we were born) live.
i can assure you that there are almost nothing that will affect the entire building changed there in the last 25 years.
cell tower is comfortably far from me. so no need to move. but, my friend's parents have started to feel ill and observed irregularities after tower was erected at next building, and they moved out to another city soon after. they are fine now.
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- Some kind of chemical agent dispersed through the buildings air ducts, possibly during renovations;
- Some kind of biological agent that infected the air ducts (both of these may no longer be at easily detectable levels after a year or two from the initial exposure)
- Familial or other clusters that may explain the anomaly though common lifestyle or heredity (These clusters may well affect only one building out of a number of buildings, and need to be eliminated).
That's just a starter list. You can't just assume that "well, all these buildings superficially look alike, therefore they are alike." The real world doesn't work that way.you too
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1. You are being affected by something else. Maybe you are drinking contaminated water and are so obsessed about the harmless tower you never thought to check your water. Duh.
2. There is something special about YOUR PARTICULAR tower that makes it far more deadly than any other tower in history. Perhaps you should see if it is run by aliens intent on taking over the world. Or maybe someone made it out of the dead bonus of native americans. Or perhaps it is made from depleted uranium.
3. That shear random chance means that in any give year, there will be one apartment building that has 7 residents getting and dieing of cancer and you are too stubborn to consider that sometimes CANCER HAPPENS.
Honestly, #1 seems the most likely to me. #3 is a close second. But who knows? Maybe #2 is happening. It would certainly make for a far more interesting newspaper article.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
In many parts of the world radon contamination is also a real possibility; it might preferentially affect one building if, for example, materials used either in the initial construction or during renovations of that specific building were contaminated with the radioactive precursors to it. This should however be very easy to check - and I would hope that it has been, because that can be a very significant risk factor for cancer.
Badscience.net http://www.badscience.net/ have been covering this quite extensively,as well as the silliness over the supposed MMR/autism link.
Well, as I say, good luck. Maybe whatever it is specific to the other building. Sorry, I am still not going to believe that anything in general use that does actually emit gamma rays or other high-powered forms of radiation is going to give 7 people cancer in a year! I am not a doctor, but have looked into cancer quite a bit. This just isn't the way this disease works. Cancer is simply the result of cell repair going astray -- that's all it is! Every few million cell divisions (and cell divisions are how damaged cells are replaced) there is one that happens incorrectly or starts from a damaged source. Most of these wrong results are just identified, killed, and absorbed. You probably have several of them every day. But every once in a while PURELY BY ACCIDENT (and not as a direct result of the type of damaging agent), the misreplication occurs in such a way that a 'monster' is created -- meaning, a cell that divides out of control and faster than the body's defences can kill the bad clones. Thus, cancer is always and only the result of generalised cell damage. Elements that damage the same exact set of cells repeatedly, chronically, over a LONG period of time, are the ones that end up being labelled as 'cancerous', since they stress your body's local defences to the point where cancer becomes way more likely. (The random nature of it also explains why there are always a few people who seem to engage in any 'cancerous' activities all the way to ripe old age.) So, anything that damages your cells can probably also damage your DNA and has a chance of giving you cancer. And in fact, there is no other way than that for you get cancer -- that is all cancer is. Therefore, it is impossible for something to give you cancer that quickly without massive amounts of collateral damage. You would know it. Not after a year. You would know it right away. It wouldn't be silent. I really don't know if there is a low-level long-term cancer danger from cell towers, but I DO know that there isn't a high-level short-term cancer danger from them, because this just doesn't fit in with the facts of the world, my friend. You might as well be trying to tell me that the cell tower gave them cancer in a single day -- and I'd be as likely to believe it. Anyway, considering your long history at that abode, I can understand your reluctance to move and your opinion that it's currently safe. It's extremely worrying to me however that the people who actually live in that building are working on a certainly wrong theory about what made them sick. This is perfectly illustrative why pseudoscientific activist web pages and info stoking mythic fears about the modern lifestyle based on no actual science are not just harmless rants. They are dangerous.
I meant to write DOES NOT emit gamma rays, hopefully that was clear from the context, but just in case.
> group Mast Sanity said the results were skewed as 12 people in the trials dropped out because of illness
Presumably the reasearchers know what fraction of these got exposure, and what fraction did not, although with only 12, a 10/2 ratio wouldn't really be that significant.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Damn, if it does that much turned off, think how bad it will be when turned on!
Don't ya just love rampant stupidity?
You seem to doubt the EM effect on brain ... well, since I approached a GSM tower for job sake a while ago, I won't doubt it affects the brain (migraine, nausea, ....). ... ...
The simple way to disprove it is to plant your tent right below (about 10m from the actual emitter's) an active, city GSM tower (so you'll be sure there are EMs emitted)
If you can live there for more than a week without insomnia, headaches, irritability, or any other kind of brain impairment, I'll be convinced it's me who's sensitive to EMs
"which is caused by a seratonin trigger that improperly dilates the blood vessels and causes intense pressure in the head"
What part of this is "non-physical"?
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
They also repel tigers. Send me $19.99 and I'll send you one.
When something hurts, it usually means something isn't right. If my back hurts, I probably injured it. When I smash my finger in the car door, my body is telling my brain that my finger isn't in the best of health. Pain is nature's mechanism to tell us when we are/have done something that isn't good for the body. There's a medical disorder that causes certain people to feel no pain, and they are having to constantly check to make sure they aren't bleeding to death, missing a finger, and so on. Some of these people have rubbed their eye so much they blinded themselves because they couldn't 'tell' they were doing any harm. If these people are feeling like crap when exposed to cell phone towers, and I'm confident they are exposed to it close to 24x7, shouldn't they start keeling over and dying because they are doing 'damaging' things to the body?
Not placebo. Except if these people are masochists.
As an amateur radio operator (HF through microwave) I feel symptoms of "anxiety, nausea and tiredness" when I'm *not* near a keyed down transmitter. In particular, the tiredness tends to go away during contest weekends when I receive most of my exposure. For some reason, more transmitters, more power, bigger towers and antennas make me feel much *better*!
So it didn't happen in the later years either? Surely they didn't remove the cell tower after that year, did they? Also, I guess most people still live in that building, right? So if the cell tower radiation had been the reason, there should have been around 7 cancer deaths each year since.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
"Radiation Research" and The Cult of Negative Results - a small meta-study of papers published in peer-reviewed journals about microwave-induced genotoxicity (microwave effects on DNA). They start by listing 85 studies, about equally divided between those that conclude microwaves have a biological effect and those that conclude they do not. Then they add a colour code to indicate who funded the studies. The result is disturbing, but shouldn't really surprise anyone.
TETRA Watch : this site is mainly about the controversial new TETRA police radio system in the UK, but it naturally overlaps with cell phones because both are part of the more general question of whether microwave radiation can damage health. *Lots* of links to articles including peer-reviewed studies. Which I must admit I haven't read many of; who has time to? So most people don't at all, they just accept whatever the 'experts' tell them, even though many of those 'experts' are being paid by someone with vested interests.
how old was the building, could the installation have disturbed asbestos in the building or wiring it up disturbed asbestos in the basement near the air system
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Exactly. It's not bad. Its actually gooood for you, young fellow !
And its good for all the tiny, delicate, little living things, too !
Arrrrrrr............
a little message to all you 'scientific types' contributing here; you may believe you understand statistical significance and inference just because you know the difference between correlation and causation... but you must also know that you are only fooling each other. enjoy yourselves, what the heck - its a bit of fun and you can feel clever and maybe even a bit important :)
then maybe you should have a look at all the credible scientific studies demonstrating that living near a nuclear power station is not likely to increase your chances of cancer, and consider that there is also a large number of similarly conclusive studies proving exactly the opposite.
what about the reams of studies over the years showing that smoking isn't carcinogenic?
oh and has everyone has forgotten that the BBC recently admitted to fraud and deception on quite a large scale - if you are prepared to trust these vulgar charlatans for your "scientific data" then who are the gullible ones here???
unfortunately i cant trust statistics, law, courts, common belief or anything else to work out their common slow mechanics, that is a matter of life and death. Apparently more so for other people around here too, noone is accepting any cell towers in any place near them. So, im safe as far as im concerned.
So you would prefer if no one drove? or rode in a plane? no one went to see a doctor, had an operation, went swimming etc... all rleate to life and death. All related to stats, law, courts, common belief etc... What a bad belief system.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
now, the point is, i moved in this neighborhood when i was 4.5, and i grew up playing around in here, there and right next to that apartment block, where one of my family's long time friends and their son who is a long time friend (since we were born) live.
i can assure you that there are almost nothing that will affect the entire building changed there in the last 25 years.
cell tower is comfortably far from me. so no need to move. but, my friend's parents have started to feel ill and observed irregularities after tower was erected at next building, and they moved out to another city soon after. they are fine now.
It's called a negative placebo effect. They coudl have errected a simple tower with no power and your friends parents would have beene xactly the same. Or so TFA strongly suggest.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
one person per building around per 5-6 years. as i said before, you probably didnt read, the buildings and demographic from occupation to age and habits in this 10-15 000 population area are almost identical. 7 people dying from cancer in a year in the same building is phenomenonal. there are no "random chance" occurences recorded in this area a prior. whence do i know ? because this has been the talk of whole city for a long while.
Your story is meaningless because there is no control, no double blind, no anything. You have a populationw hich X happened to but nothign to compare it against no histories no data to draw any significant interpretation. You have 1 case study in confirmation bias perhaps.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
i dont have info about the later years, since my friend's parents moved out from there.
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concept of heat/sound/anything isolation, leave aside asbestos was an extreme luxury and out of context at the time those buildings were built.
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it's still more likely that, assuming the cancer "outbreak" wasn't just bad dice (cancer is at it's nature, random, and random distributed across 6 billion people will lead to some weird and seemingly impossible coincidences.) the cause is more likely to be a local contamination of some sort rather than a cell tower, which there are many of around the world with no similar events.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
It will be great to get confirmation that there are no health effects.
However, the problem of perception remains.
Unfortunately, home values are adversely affected when some people think, rightly or wrongly, that there is a cancer-ray in the neighborhood.
"Negative vibes" from towers?
There's a growing number of people who do believe something like that. Probably the average /.er (if anyone's still reading these comments) will laugh very hard, and consider this to be even 'better' than the tinfoil hats, but anyway:
'Orgonite' is a mixture of resin and metal shavings - basically like fibreglass but with metal instead of glass - and often with quartz and other crystals added. It absorbs the negative form of the basic 'life force' energy which the Chinese call 'qi', Indians call 'prana', and Wilhelm Reich who researched it in the 1950s called 'orgone'; and converts it to the positive form, with a resulting improvement in the surrounding environment.
The most common orgonite device is a simple piece of this substance with a quartz crystal, moulded in a muffin pan, and it's known as a 'tower buster' because the most common use for them is converting the negative orgone energy produced by cell phone (and some other) towers - which produce a lot of it, and people who make and distribute orgonite 'gifts' (as they're often called) generally believe that it's this energy (also produced in large quantities by nuclear reactors and radioactive substances, among other things) that is the real problem. Of course, 'tower busters' can be used for other things; burying one of them next to the two apple trees in my garden made them produce a large yield of edible apples for the first time!
A more exotic orgonite device is the 'cloudbuster', which can do things like this.
It's the craziest thing ever, but for anyone with an open mind, orgonite is cheap and simple to make and experiment with. (several people also sell it pre-made; see the vendors list on Etheric Warriors)
More information: Orgonite Info Orgonise Africa Etheric Warriors Warrior Matrix
I suspect the reason is that it happens a lot.
In this particular case, the transmitter in question was part of a 'portable' Loran-C chain. (It was portable because the antenna was only 150 feet high not the usual 800 feet.) The town was Rossport, Ontario, Canada. The time was about 1978. The reason that I raised the story is because it is quite similar to the cell tower case.
Calling the people 'ignorant villagers' is at least rude. For instance I could call you an ignorant villager because of all the things I know and you don't. You could say the same to me. People are people and, sadly, no matter how educated and smart they are they sometimes reach really stupid conclusions.
I once did an installation of a radio beacon whose id was X. In the phonetic alphabet X is X-ray. Thus you would refer to the beacon as X-ray NDB. I decided not to put the name of the beacon on the side of the building because for sure someone would have complained to the authorities about all the stray x-rays.