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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.
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
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.
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]
"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.
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 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 thought it was insightful, but I didn't have mod points today; I also haven't had my first cup of coffee yet. I never use mod points until I have my first cup of coffee as lack of caffeine hinders my reasoning capabilities. I'm off to find coffee before I post something else like this and find my karma so low I have to dig for it. Be back in an hour to join you fine gents' in todays series of flame wars.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Don't stop there -- you may not be aware of this, but there is an enormous fusion reactor in the sky pouring untold terawatts of electromagnetic energy down upon you every day. The existence of this "Sun" is, of course, a closely-guarded secret.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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