Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Cell Towers Not Responsible For Illness

Posted by kdawson on from the tinfoil-underwear dept.

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."

20 of 355 comments (clear)

  1. Bad science or bad science reporting? by nokilli · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    That's not the test. People can believe and are in fact poisoned by additives in our food and yet if pressed to detect if a given mean contained additives they wouldn't be able to tell.

    The obvious way to conduct such a study would be to correlate the incidence of illness with the proximity to radio sources.

    --
    Censored by Technorati and now, Blogger too!
    1. Re:Bad science or bad science reporting? by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Funny

      I've had a toothache for the last week (seeing the dentist tomorrow alright?) and I've been reading Slashdot every day. Must be Slashdot causing my toothache because my friend, he doesn't read Slashdot and he doesn't have a toothache.

      Science ftw.

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
    2. Re:Bad science or bad science reporting? by GauteL · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well, you could have bothered to RTFA. People's perception is important because it may be (and the study suggests) that it is people's perception that causes illness.

      They tested on both people's perception and symptoms such as sweaty skin and high blood pressure.

      They found that people with these symptoms felt unwell regardless of whether the mast was off or not and that they generally had no idea whether the mast was on or off. If they were truly ill from signal sensitivity they should be able to tell whether the mast was on or off depending on their general feeling of well-being.

      The effects were, however, real. Thus it seems like a classic case of placebo, but the "Mast sanity" campaign group obviously refuses to acknowledge that this may be psychological effects.

    3. Re:Bad science or bad science reporting? by Billosaur · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Actually, the best way would be to use subjects which have no subjective bias: rabbits, monkeys, etc. After all, they are trying to test whether or not the masts are causing the symptoms. Mind you, they cannot control for other possible environmental influences, i.e. other sources of radiation, because they are so prevalent and widely varied. The drawback to using animals is that how do you know if they are nauseous or dizzy?

      I'm going to save them a lot of trouble and expense and posit that the masts are not causing the symptoms, from the standpoint of radiation exposure, because radiation is all around, in various intensities and wavelengths all the time. While I don't have my old astrophysics textbooks handy and I don't have statistics on cell tower emission strengths, I'm willing to bet the extra amount of radiation from the masts is insignificant compared to the general background radiation and would only pose a threat if it were highly concentrated and you were living in extremely close proximity.

      --
      GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
    4. Re:Bad science or bad science reporting? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And the irony is: using a mobile phone (as most of the people complaining against masts do) exposes your brain to far more radiation than a mast. And the even bigger irony: if your campaign against a mast succeeds, your mobile phone will be transmitting much more powerfully to reach an unnecessarily distant mast.

    5. Re:Bad science or bad science reporting? by nokilli · · Score: 5, Funny

      A random sample, yes. Of people. Who are living today. On Earth.

      This Earth, not some other Earth.

      --
      Censored by Technorati and now, Blogger too!

    6. Re:Bad science or bad science reporting? by nokilli · · Score: 5, Funny

      If a mobile phone mast falls in the forest and no hypochondriacs are there to feel relief, did it really radiate electromagnetic energy?

      --
      Censored by Technorati and now, Blogger too!

    7. Re:Bad science or bad science reporting? by pe1rxq · · Score: 5, Informative

      That was not the reason for the test....

      They tested a short-term effect claimed by people who call themself 'sensitive' to RF transmitters.
      Those people claim that those transmitters have an almost immediate effect on them.

      When a short term effect is claimed, you test for that short term effect.
      And in this case when they properly blinded those people they found no short term effect.

      Simple summary: The short term effect claimed by these people is bullshit, there might or might not be a long term effect but this test doesn't cover it in any way.

      --
      Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
  2. cooties by Gearoid_Murphy · · Score: 4, Funny

    I heard that, this one time, this guy, got like cooties from a cell tower, true story.

    --
    prepare the survey weasels.
  3. Psychological? by Nimsoft · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 :)

  4. If this were even remotely true by Rik+Sweeney · · Score: 5, Funny

    then the Nokia Wifi Cloud that blankets London would be making everyone that lives there neurotic and irritable.

    Oh wait...

    --
    Summation 2
  5. The effect does exist! by aadvancedGIR · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:The effect does exist! by eggoeater · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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. So you're tired and achy at work but feel relaxed on the weekends....

      hmmmm.... I often have those same symptoms and I don't work around transmitters.


      --
      $7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
    2. Re:The effect does exist! by dunkelfalke · · Score: 5, Funny

      afair vodafone has built a cellphone tower in a small german village and the villagians complained for months about headaches and loss of sleep.
      then vodafone revealed that the tower wasn't switched on yet.

      --
      Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
    3. Re:The effect does exist! by Detritus · · Score: 4, Informative

      Amateur radio operators suffer from the same problem. Put up a visible antenna and you will get blamed for all sorts of problems with your neighbors' stereos and television sets, none of which have any correlation to an active transmitter. Normally intelligent people will convince themselves that you are the cause of their problems, and even make threats, while refusing to listen to any evidence that exonerates the amateur radio operator.

      --
      Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
  6. Someone should have told this guy by MrKaos · · Score: 5, Funny
    This guy ran around in a tank demolishing phone towers because he thought he got cancer from them

    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.
  7. Little village meeting... by D-Cypell · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  8. Re:It cuts both ways by Lurker2288 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I would say that because of the double blind control, it's clear that the radio signals are not causing the intensification of symptoms that patients report when they believe the signals are on--clearly, they can't tell the difference whether the tower is active or not. But this study doesn't show that long term exposure to the cell towers doesn't cause problems.

    For what it's worth, I think it's all a lot of BS, but let's not overstate the evidence of any one experiment.

  9. Re:Flexible Bullet by Swampash · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  10. Re:It cuts both ways by Strilanc · · Score: 4, Informative

    Did you even read the study? It wasn't investigating diseases, it was investigating electro-sensitivity to see if it was a real effect or a psychological effect.

    They did a non-blinded and a blinded run. When the subjects knew the field was on or off, their symptoms correlated with it (not surprising). When they didn't know, their symptoms DIDN'T correlate with the field. That suggests the symptoms aren't caused by the field, but by their knowledge of it.

    You can find a link to the study on this page:
    http://www.badscience.net/?p=470