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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."
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 :)
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.
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.
They are now trying to prove a causal link. There are many reasons for an apparent correlation, including just coincidence and bias in the studies (e.g.:where they choose to do them), and, even if there is a real correlation, a direct causal link is one of many possible explanations (e.g.: off the top of my head, poor people might get ill more due to a lack of good food and medical care and radio transmitters might be put in poor areas more because people there have less resources to combat planning applications for masts).
This method is the most obvious and easiest/cheapest way to attempt to prove a causal link (but if the study shows no link it doesn't mean there isn't one). For the reasons you give, they need to do further more complicated studies to be sure whether there is a proven link or not.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
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.
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
"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.
In SOVIET RUSSIA the hot grits profit you!
It all sounds like a kind of circular argument to me.
I will have a sig when the market demands it.
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.
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.
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.
Look, Microwaves and other radiation has been THOROUGHLY studied over the past 50 years. Yes, 20 years ago you might have been able to buy a consumer item that damaged your body. But we stopped selling sillyness like x-ray shoe fitting machines long ago.
Any modern piece of radio based equiptment will NOT harm you, even if you hold your cell phone to your head and run it 24 hours a day.
There are lots of things we don't know about - new medicines, new drugs, new kinds of pollution. But Radio waves are OLD news. We know what they do.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Badscience.net http://www.badscience.net/ have been covering this quite extensively,as well as the silliness over the supposed MMR/autism link.
old analog cell phones put out tons of power. i think my current cellphone claims .001watt to 1watt max. old cell phones where like 1watt to 10watts and typically used higher wattage due to crappy signal.
To summarize your post: "Many people believe microwaves are unhealthy" (you, your father, the government of Switzerland, etc.) Many people believe the Earth is 6000 years old, too. But that doesn't make it true.
(and 'cause I know someone will call me on it, of *course* microwaves are unhealthy when you've got enough of them to cook popcorn. But that has no bearing on the cell phone question. Clean drinking water will kill you if you drown in a giant tank of it: does that make it unhealthy?)
Specifically re your friend who can tell when her neighbor leaves his TV on: I can do that too. My hearing is good enough to notice the high-pitched whine of the flyback transformer. It has absolutely nothing to do with electromagnetic death rays.