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Implanted RFID Chips Linked To Cancer
An anonymous reader writes "The Associated Press is reporting that microchip implants have induced cancer in laboratory animals and dogs. A series of research articles spanning more than a decade found that mice and rats injected with glass-encapsulated RFID transponders developed malignant, fast-growing, lethal cancers in up to 1% to 10% of cases. The tumors originated in the tissue surrounding the microchips and often grew to completely surround the devices. To date, about 2,000 RFID devices have been implanted in humans worldwide, according to VeriChip Corp." We recently discussed the California ban on companies requiring such implants.
Didn't she get one implanted in one episode?
Makes me think twice about wanting one for my dog. . .
You are not the customer.
There was no talk whether it was the container or the RFI emission. I would have liked to see the results of 'dead' chips versus 'live' chips.
This may answer the issue of cell phone cancer.
Of course, the cell phone company will claim that it only happens if you have the phone (headset) to your ear for 6 hours a day. And of course, the manual says that they only recommend no more than 4 hours of use a month.
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Hasn't it been common practice to inject pets with RFIDs for many years now?
Have these implants been causing cancer too?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
We make compromises on health all the time for convenience and aesthetics -- while most cosmetics are not technically harmful, spraying aluminium on your underarms* or using make-up is not going to give you health benefits. It's easier to take the car to work not cycle or walk (unless you walk down the same road).
*No, it's washing which is the healthy part to not smelling.
The only reason this is even news is that the big C is involved. We "civilised" people make hundreds of choices at the expense of our long term physical or mental health and this is not a novel situation. It will go ahead anyway if the benefits are great and people aren't instantly terrified of the c-word, else it will die out.
What's the point of RFID implants? RFIDs are simple devices which can be fairly easily falsified and/or duplicated. Never mind that the implant itself can be removed and swapped. It's an intrusive security layer which offers no security whatsoever. And on top of that, it introduces privacy concerns... we have ubiquitous cameras all over major cities, why not RFID scanners?
BTW, here's an interesting Wired article on the subject.
Just wanted to drop a quick line to those testing these devices themselves.. A big heartfelt thank you for risking your life testing these awkward little gizmos. Guess I won't be rushing on out to the local Radio Shack to inflict myself, or pressuring my buddies into the latest fad of RFID chip. Sorry to hear about the health problems. Best wishes.
ANY physical contact that somehow disturbs a tissue causes cancer in the long run. Thats why many inert particles cause cancer when continuously taken in for over long periods of time.
Try - just take a small needle and continue to keep poking it in the same spot in your hand continuously for a year.
Read radical news here
I have studied cancer for quite some time and I do know that *sometimes* a tumor is the body trying to put a barrier around something it doesn't know what to do with. In fact, tumors, unless they are doing damage to an important organ, or grow very large, usually won't kill you. It is only when they start to metastasize that you run into trouble pretty quick.
In fact, I have talked to several people that knew people that had tumors for many, many years and never had any trouble, but after their doctors talked them into removing the tumors and doing radiation/chemo treatment, they were dead within a year. Things that make you go hmmmmm.
So a tumor around a foreign body like that doesn't shock me too much.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
RFID does not emit radio signals. It absorbs them selectively and the RFID scnner/transmitter senses the change to the emitted field to know what the RFID is saying. But the RFID tag (passive tags) just basically sit there and alternately go high impedance or short out their antennas to convey information. They get their power from the RF signal itself.
More junk science.
News flash #1: RFID chips do not emit any RF except when they're being read.
News flash #2: Glass is inert.
So is chrysotile asbestos.
but, we implanted one of these RFID chips while you were passed out last night. Tough luck, dude! But, seriously, couldn't there be a percentage of people that don't remember or don't even know they have these chips? That would be a scary thought...
RFID chips do emit radio signals when sending data back to the transmitter. A receive-only RFID is kinda pointless...
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Researchers now have a new lead in the fight against cancer. If the stats prove consistent then we may be able to find a link between certain types of foreign molecules in the body and cancer risk.
Your comment kinda reminds me of the asbestos revelations... there was a time when asbestos was put into cigarette filters as an advertised health feature.
Regards.
So "up to 1% to 10% of cases" (whatever the hell that means) got cancer. Did they mention what percentage of mice that weren't implanted with RFID tags got cancer? It really matters what the baseline is, you know.
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because earrings are outside the skin, the initial wound is allowed to be healed, and the earring touches with the exterior of the skin without inducing any wound.
everything needs to be neutral. if any material within it has surfaces that disturbs the tissue where its implanted (and it is a high possibility) or, any material within it has properties that induces any kind of other continuous effects on the nearby tissue it may be a cause. granted, there is going to be a noticeable higher concentration of emissions around it - if passive, it will reflect a certain wavelength, if its active, itll emit a certain wavelength. therefore the vicinity will get affected.
Read radical news here
"none of the studies had a control group of animals that did not get chips, the normal rate of tumors cannot be determined and compared to the rate with chips implanted." The AP (and the Slashdot post) report this as if it were a fact that RFID emissions cause cancer. You cannot intelligently draw that conclusion from these studies, since there was no control group with inert RFIDs implanted. This is yet another inaccurate portrayal of an inconclusive, pseudo-scientific paper as fact. When I am emporer, I will require all journalists to take a remedial science course. "studies have shown..." == "here comes a crock..."
In the early 1980s RG Serle was in trouble. Their animal studies showed that Aspartame caused brain cancer. A Researcher for the company blew the whistle and Congress was investigating. RG Serle brought in a problem solver who began by throwing having the rats with brain cancers removed from the studies. The whistle blower, for some reason, reversed his statements. The acting head of the FDA approved Aspartame for human consumption, then resigned. A few weeks later he was announced as the head of the legal department of the new Nutrasweet corporation. His two assistants were the lawyers Congress assigned to investigate the RG Serle problem.
Shortly after that stories linking Saccharine with cancer flooded the media while the Nutrasweet corp flooded the media with stories about Nutrasweet and its safety. Within months the use of Saccharine plummeted to single digit figures and Nutrasweet took over the artificial sweetener market.
For his leadership RG Serle gave Donald Rumsfeldt a $6M retiring bonus.
I am waiting to hear of a competitive RFID chip entering the market. One that is "cancer free". Then I'll know who planted this story.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Firstly there are all sort of tumor, but as far as this only means "abnormal tissue growth". The one which metastases and invade all tissue are malignant and left untreated as far as I can tell, always kill you, either by destroying utterly the organ they originate from or by metastasis. What you are thinking of is some sort of benign tumor which surround a foreign body. I dunno how often it happens, but usually what surround a foreign body is scar tissue, or even necrotic tissue, not tumoral tissue (biologist correct me). Tumoral tissue in that specific would happens only when the signal triggering the scar growth run awry or the stop signal is not detected sufficiently.
Now about tumor which removed, and suddenly become mortal (your second part). I call bullshit on that one. Some benign tumor might turn malignant with timem on their own, but not due to medicinal intervention as you seem to pretend. I can't also imagine a tumor left for many years and suddenly the doctor says "oh we need to take that out now, radio therapy and chemio !". I would say it is rather that the doctor detected that the tumor did go from benign to malignant and my guess is that since they knew he/she had a tumor for years most probably it is a skin tumor easy to detect and can be deadly if change are not detected quick enough (it happens. I had a naevus (big sort of mole 4 cm wide) which changed of texture when I was 13. Out of concern the oncologue ordered immediate chirurgy and a biopsy. From what I gathered it can happens that such a big mole with time turn malignant. Turn out that had to take a LOT of my left muscle out over 13 cm and more than 2 cm deep, but biopsy was negative. Relief ensured).
Bottom line : you are mixing up cause and effect. It was not the therapy which was caused your friend tumor to grow malignant, it was the tumor growing malignant which caused your friend go get a therapy which failed and he died.
PS: I say friend above, but it seems after rereading your post it was only an acquaintance , and thus the quality of the info your present is even doubly doubtful.
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Name address and phone number is all they ask from me when I buy stuff there, and they don't insist if I'm paying cash. They haven't demanded I let them implant a RFID chip yet.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Checking over the descriptions of the papers, it looks like they were trialling chips in large numbers of mice for other reasons, and apparently decided to knock out an extra paper with the "omg cancer!" angle to get some extra citations and some more funding in the future. Given the vast variation in results and lack of controls, these studies seem fairly unremarkable. There may be something there, but these studies really don't show anything meaningful.
Bioactive glass is a group of ceramic materials that are currently the subject of various studies related to bone-replacement and reconstructive surgery for (among others) persons who have had bone removed due to cancer.
New developments in making the materials with porous structures to stimulate bone growth have brought a spurt in the use of it as graft material and encouraged investigations into other medical uses, but I wonder now whether it and other silicates as a class pose a significant cancer risk, themselves.
Pointless? On the contrary, it would be very useful, like write-only memory!
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The Associated Press is reporting that microchip implants have induced cancer in laboratory animals and dogs.
TFA only mentions dogs in a few paragraphs, and only two cases of cancer near the chip have been reported in over 10,000 chipped dogs (only one of which is said to be linked in some way to the chip). It even says that the link between chips and cancer is not established in dogs, and that it is only something that should be studied more. So, yeah, the AP is not reporting that implants have induced cancer in dogs at all.
http://modblog.bmezine.com/
Quite a few people there have implants (horns, weird shapes in the forearm, etc.) and there hasn't been any warning there of increased cancer risk. The body-mod crowd is generally about doing crazy and interesting stuff that's ultimately safe.
Of course, these things are inert in EM fields, unlike RFID chips. I know they don't transmit, but absorbing energy from a field has to generate a small amount of heat that's channelled or dissipated into the surrounding tissue, right?
You can see that more on MythBusters TOO HOT FOR TV COMING SOON ON DVD!
from the submission: up to 1% to 10%
"up to" is the equivalent of "maximum". How can you have a range for a maximum value?
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
The chip is a foreign object in the body, a glass capsule. It's not surprising that the body reacts to it in some way, trying to encapsulate it. These devices also include a coating to promote growth of connective tissue in the vicinity of the device so as to anchor it and prevent movement of the capsule.
So, what we have here is a biologically active foreign object. This result is, unfortunately, not surprising.
So, will Citywatcher.com be laying off their data center workers as being 'at-risk' for higher future medical costs?
They had control groups. The control groups were chipped too. They were using the RFIDs as a book keeping device for data collection and control. The cancer was noted empirically and independently of the research they were undertaking. The appearance of sarcomas developing physically around some of the chips looked like an observation worth reporting. It offered a new line of potential investigation.
The real reason religious fundamentalists think science is pseudo-religious is because too many "scientists" believe the advance of scientific knowledge is limited to the purposeful reporting of the results of studies guided by the scientific method. Too often we forget that Darwin wasn't out there conducting a lab experiment; he was in the REAL world, observing real things. The real essence of science is the observation that leads to a "that's odd" remark, or an experiment where the operator goes from "oops. The culture spoiled" to "that's interesting" like Fleming did. The results of experiments under controlled conditions are just half of science. The rest is the observation of things outside the experiment, things that could lead to entire new realms of empirical and experimental investigation.
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Let's see, folks have pacemakers in them long term. Pacemakers contain a receiver and transmitter so that doctors can checkout how they doing and make adjustments to them. Many years ago friend of mine was almost killed in a chemistry lab explosion. To this day pieces of glass still surface on his body. So it is awfully hard for me to understand how a glass encapsulated microchip could cause a health problem.
A few minutes with Google shows clearly that the corporation filed chapter 11, and that those proceedings protected the assets of corporate officers and other significant assets worth at least 900 million dollars, and furthermore the bankruptcy court denied compensation to over a half a million victims who apparently missed a filing deadline.
An apparently well researched and well respected source of information on the corporate fiasco that was the Dalkon Shield is this book:
Bending the Law: The Story of the Dalkon Shield Bankruptcy (by Richard B. Sobol. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.)
A review of the book containing enough details to confirm that a simplistic interpretation "AH Robins went out of business" is not sufficiently detailed to be a meaningful contribution to the discussion:
Reviewed by Cary Coglianese, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan
An article from the day that bankruptcy was filed:
Robins, in Bankruptcy Filing, Cites Dalkon Shield Claims
A band named after the fiasco, with MP3 files online:
Dalkon Shield
Please, get a login, use it, and post under your real name. It might help provide you with incentive to read more and mouth off less.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
to come up with a new sign.
This human contains materials known to cause cancer in the State of California.
I always wonder what it is about California that makes so many things cause cancer?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
>The FDA is overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, which, at the time
>of VeriChip's approval, was headed by Tommy Thompson. Two weeks after the device's
>approval took effect on Jan. 10, 2005, Thompson left his Cabinet post, and within
>five months was a board member of VeriChip Corp. and Applied Digital Solutions.
>He was compensated in cash and stock options.
Sounds like Tommy boy was on the take for quite some time.
FDA approvals are not granted overnight -- they can take many years. For him to claim he never heard of the company means he was either lying or not doing his job overseeing the FDA by being ingnorant of such a major case.
Of course, nothing will ever be done -- same as in most similar cases...