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Studies Find Harm From Cellular and Wi-Fi Signals
Over the years we've discussed the possible health risks of cellphone and other microwave radiation: studies from Israel and Sweden indicating a link between cellphone use and cancer, one from England exonerating cell towers as a cause of "microwave radiation sensitivity," and a recent 30-year Swedish study that found no link to cancer. The question won't go away though. Reader Artifice_Eternity writes "I've always tended to dismiss claims of toxicity from cell phone and Wi-Fi signals as reflecting ignorance about microwave radiation. However, this GQ article cites American and European studies going back decades that have found some level of biological harm caused by these signals. Why haven't they gained more attention? Quoting: 'Industry-funded studies seem to reflect the result of corporate strong-arming. Lai reviewed 350 studies and found that about half showed bioeffects from EM radiation emitted by cell phones. But when he took into consideration the funding sources for those 350 studies, the results changed dramatically. Only 25 percent of the studies paid for by the industry showed effects, compared with 75 percent of those studies that were independently funded.'"
...Beacuse nobody calls me :(
I know I always go to Gentleman's Quarterly for my journal articles regarding the dangers of electromagnetic radiation exposure.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
Or "in part funded by opponents of radiation"?
One that hath name thou can not otter
Although it can be fair to argue about whether or not the industry studies are biased, I think it goes the other way too.
There are A LOT of people out there who are 'convinced' that cell phones and wi-fi cause cancer. And it doesn't matter how many studies you show them that it doesn't, they just won't believe you.
And if you consider that many of these so-called 'independent' studies are in fact paid for by fringe anti-science groups, then perhaps their results are aren't as unbiased as they would have you believe.
Surely not. People skewing tests in accordance with funding would never happen.
The /. demographic sees it as fact that studies funded by the oil industry regarding environmental effects are to be dismissed out-of-hand.
This same demographic sees it as fact that studies funded by the tech industry regarding biological effects are to be accepted out-of-hand.
We like our echo chambers just like everyone else.
Now cue the nerds screaming about RF radiation is harmless, and always has been, and always will be:
THL phish sticks
...because I have a hands-free phone setup in my car. I just mow over other people when they cross the street and some bitch is breaking up with me over the phone.
It matters not one whit how many studies show result X. What matters is what is shown by peer-reviewed studies done under controlled circumstances and having a significant sample size.
For example 100 studies done shoddily using sample sizes of 3, 4, and 6 subjects do not outweigh one ten-year study across 1,000 subjects.
Now just on general principles, if one watt of radio energy was harmful, you'd think that people like RF welders, tower steeplejacks, plasma researchers, and radar disk repairers wolsd be covered in suppurating pustules. But they're not. Even people whose heads are hit by 100 watts of much stronger photons (sunbathers, cowboys), they do just fine.
So I suggest you use GQ to check up on the latest fashions, maybe not so much on the best science.
The article mentions "modulations" over and over again as if they are some sort of evil force messing with your head.
Roughly speaking, modulations are changes in the energy at the sidebands of the carrier where the information is carried. Old cell phones were pure frequency modulation, the digital ones use a different scheme. But from you're brain's perspective, it shouldn't mean more than a slight change in the total energy being radiate at 2.4 GHz or whatever. The idea that your brain is affected by "modulations" seems extremely specious.
The fact that you're warming up your brain slightly when you hold the cell phone to your ear for a long time might have some sort of long term effect, I dunno, but I'm not too afraid of modulations.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
Bluetooth is just another version of wifi.
The bluetooth frequencies range from 2.402GHz to 2.480GHz
Just the power output is different.
The GQ article with a cell phone next to a pack of cigarettes couldn't be more misleading. We hear about "such and such % increased risk of this", "such and such % increased risk of that". But these numbers are meaningless in assessing behavior changes unless you know the baseline risk.
So here's some numbers. The article starts off with cigarettes, so what's the risk of lung cancer between smokers and non-smokers?
Well, according to wikipedia, For Men it's 1.3% for non-smokers, and 17% for smokers. Wow!
Let's compare that to Brain cancer (all types). According to the National Cancer institute it's .6% for everyone. The Swedish study from 2006 found a 240% increase. So that's 1.44% risk.
So it seems quite obvious to me that even the most alarming study only showed a small increased health risk from cell phone use, and others have shown none. Compare that to smoking, which has been consistent in showing risk over the years, and an ENORMOUS risk. Oh, and for smoking that's JUST the lung cancer risk. We all should know about the other increased health risks associated with it.
AccountKiller
There is a huge difference between a cellphone and WiFi. First, a cellphone can transmit up to 5 Watts. I can actually hear noise induced in my computer speakers every 10 minutes if the cellphone is nearby when it does it automatic call-home.
WiFi is typically limited to 20mW.
Also, a cellphone is pressed against your head, while Wifi is usually 1 m away. With area of sphere = 4PiR^2, the Wifi will have an energy flux of 1mWm^-2, and a cellphone will have 40Wm^-2 or 30,000x that. You could use bluetooth to reduce your cellphone exposure
BTW, a microwave is allowed to leak 1Wm^2.
Bottom line, 1 hour of cellphone exposure = a lifetime with WiFi.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
(1) Based on the standard rules of statistical acceptance, a study only has to reach requires a 95% confidence level. That means that 1 in every 20 identical studies will produce a false positive merely by chance. When you have an area of study in which thousands of studies have been done over decades you end up with hundreds of studies reporting positive results just by chance.
(2) Statistical meta analysis of studies is largely nonsense unless your talking about a field in which nearly identical studies are done over and over again. Usually, when these meta studies hit the media you find they they equally weight to every study regardless of presumed rigor of the studies. In this case, the gold standard is the Swedish study that followed tens of thousands of people over decades. How to you compare that to a study that just data mined a few hundred medical records?
(3) Exposure to all types of radio range radiation has increased by literally millions of times since WWII. We know spend something close to 3% of our entire energy budget generating radio signals. Yet, in the last 50+ years, cancers rates have not increased and indeed most likely have fallen (especially when you exclude cigarette smoking.
(4) A a sociological matter, just because a study is not linked to an industry does not mean that the researchers or the people funding them are some how impartial or operating from nobel motives. A lot of people outside of industry have both inherent biases as well as professional and monetary incentive to distort science. Academic today tilt strongly to the left side of the political spectrum and many believe in the post modernist concept that every one has a moral obligation to use whatever power they have, such as that held by respected scientist, to advance their political beliefs. They are inherently hostile to the economically productive. Politicians have incentives to create crises to protect voters from. Trial lawyers stand to make hundreds of millions on law suits and they fund "studies" to contaminate the jury pool. Even competing industries can use studies to undermine competitors.
We should remember that science has its reputation because it produces the same answer regardless of the individual motives of the people who create it. When someone begins the question the motives of researchers, they are making an implicit statement that they have no science to back their position up and that they must instead fall back to human factors. If you have solid science, then you don't need to smear people's motives and call their integrity into question.
"Studies" that are funded or sponsored or promoted by environmental organizations should be taken as expressions of religious dogma, essentially worthless to those who endeavor to understand the underlying issue. Environmental organizations, like religious organizations, perceive themselves as above criticism, and therefore not accountable for the veracity of their proclamations. Commercial organizations might be equally and oppositely dogmatic in their desire for lucre, but tend to have a higher regard for logic, even if they reject it when they can get away with it.
I'm fairly sure we'll get this study used a lot in the near future.
Like my neighbor, who recently nearly beat my door down to inform me that if I don't turn off my WiFi AP she'll call the police because she gets headaches from my radiation. Then the cellphone in her pocket rang...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Any waiter that wants a tip.
This brings up what would be a desirable setup: Insulate the scientists doing the studies from the sources of funding. A bit of bureaucracy is the price to pay for greater truth. Industry wanks put their money into a committee to fund studies in predetermined areas. Scientists apply to the committee and receive funds from it with no future consequences because of the results they find. The committee decides who actually gets the money not the industry lackey who decided it needed to be studied. This would greatly root out the "self-confirming" type of study while still getting studies done.
Shh.
Even if there is a link, how can they be sure it's not due to exposure to chemicals given off by the plastic of the phone? Nothing in any of the studies I've seen would rule out chemical causes.
That's ludicrous. Organic molecules are constantly being bent and deformed due to thermal collisions.
The basal metabolism of the human body is roughly 120 watts. A couple of sit ups releases far more thermal energy than could be adsorbed by the body from a cell phone.
(1) it's a meta-analysis, looking at other studies, not a study actually looking at links between RF exposure and disease.
(2) it's a meta-analysis of a veritable zoo of studies. About the only things the subject studies have in common is that most of them involve humans and most involve RF! This is not a valid application of these statistical techniques!
(3) the so-called conclusions of the meta-analysis look at opinions on factors in the subject studies which were not controlled let alone investigated and measured according to a set of standards -- opinions on funding.
And somehow I don't think this paper was subject to peer review, although I'm not familiar with their review process...
FWIW, I'm a GSM RF Engineer. Two issues with your post:
In the US, phones are limited to 1 W max for 1900 MHz (aka PCS) transmission, and 2 W for 850 MHz.
The interference you hear on your speakers isn't due to the amount of power being transmited, but it's actually caused by the modulation of the signals being transmitted. That modulation occurs at 217 Hz....which is audible.
Hate to break it to you, but power lines emit RF too. That's why this is a joke: all alternating currents emit RF.
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
Experimental Procedure: We put the laboratory mice in a microwave oven and cooked on "High" for five minutes, exposing them to radiation of similar frequency to that emitted by common cellular phones.
;p. Even if actual cellphones, etc. produce effects in rats, that still doesn't mean that the same effects would be observed in humans: rats are a lot smaller. You might as well throw humans in microwaves and call it a valid model.
Results: The mice appear to be done approximately "medium."
Conclusion: Microwave radiation is quickly fatal at doses two orders of magnitude beyond cellphone level (meta-conclusion: effects were found).
This is the problem with statistical analyses such as sociologists like to perform: aggregating papers, attributing some binary conclusion to every paper, and then producing nearly meaningless percentages. This one was compiled by a biologist, but that's the next thing to sociology anyway
One of the scary references in the article is to a early 2000s study purporting that cellphone EM caused Alzheimer's in mice. But wait...Cellphones reduce mouse Alzheimer's (2009). (meta-conclusion: effects were found). Now, you might say that researcher is working for The Man, but he claims he was expecting the opposite result when he began. Someone else could write a meta-study "Microwave study results rarely replicated: are biologists bad at designing and properly controlling physics experiments?"
Something to keep in mind, as smart phones become more common, so is WIFI radiation exposure right next to your head. That's going to be roughly 4x as much TX power right next to your ear where the skull is less likely to stop it all.
I'm just say'n...
Looks like you don't know your basics Radiation can mean any number of things - in this case it is electromagnetic radiation - so yes they are talking about photons. Light IS radiation. It doesn't matter if it is visible, UV, IR, or radio waves - all photons.
I was going to RTFA but it's densely packed in an unfriendly typeface and when I opened it up, I immediately saw warning signs of conspiracy-mongering (Hey, this guy publishes an "investigative newsletter" called Microwave News! And he has a doctorate in environmental policy from MIT! That means if he says that the science is 100% solid about cell phones causing harm, he must be right, because God knows no one who got a doctorate at MIT ever got convinced of some cockamamie theory and started "investigative newsletters" to pursue some non-existent threat!) and research fail ("The "hearing," however, didn't happen via normal sound waves perceived through the ear. It occurred somewhere in the brain itself, as EM waves interacted with the brain's cells, which generate tiny electrical fields." First of all, any time someone mentions the Frey effect, 80% of the time you're about to hear schizophrenic ranting about government mind control transmissions. Second of all, the author seems to have made up the theory that the Frey effect happens because of EM waves interacting with brain cells; it seems quite inconsistent with Frey's own findings that there were some individuals who could not hear sounds around the frequency of 5Kc who also could not hear the "rf sounds". If the Frey effect bypassed the ear and directly stimulated the brain, why would anyone who had a brain be unable to detect this stimulus? Why would the people who were unable to detect this stimulus also be those with known deficiencies in their ears? Coincidence?)
Anyways, I suspected that what I would find in the article was a situation similar to the Myung meta-review of cell-phone/cancer studies, where the author declared that even though the overall review of the chosen studies had failed to establish any sort of convincing evidence that cell phones caused cancer, a "sub-group" of "high-quality" studies established a "significant positive association". What the meta-review may have failed to call attention to, however, was that seven out of the eight "high-quality" studies were all done by the same researchers, a group led by Dr. Lennart Hardell, and that Hardell is frequently retained as an expert witness in lawsuits against cell-phone companies. I wouldn't be surprised if at least 75% of the "independently funded" studies in the GQ article are also by researchers who profit handsomely from testifying in similar lawsuits. People talk about how they can't trust any studies done by "industry", but they're naive to think that litigation itself is not an industry.
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
My initial time at undergrad university thru to Masters was in German Literature back in the day. Then computers came along and I was hooked by this magical technology(PDP-11 days).
Over the coming years I worked thru a Comp Sci degree, Post Grad work, and more in GIS(info in Geographic Info Systems). All the while also doing part time work back at the old dept teaching German Lit. I have been out of academia and in the industry for 15 years now.
But the Comp Sci gave me research exposure to the Food Research Industry.
Research, scholorships, and funding in the Arts we almost pure in their implementation. Food research and funding was rotten to the core. I have been on the recieving end of table thumping food industry ceo's. You are then told to bend over, take it, then go inform relevant parties of desired outcomes.
Thank christ I am out of that sewer.
In todays world I can only imagine what jewels lie in the communications gold veins and how that drives research.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
The energy of a carbon bond is a few electron volts. IOW, that much energy is needed to cause a chemical change in the molecule. The energy of a 2GHz cell-phone photon is about 0.00001 eV. Cell-phone photons cannot cause a chemical change.
Where do you get the idea from that the only thing that can cause cancer is changes in chemical bonds?
In fact, anything that alters regulatory mechanisms within the cell might cause cancer. A lot of the structure and function of cells are determined by electrical fields, conformations of molecules, and vibrations of molecules. 2GHz microwave radiation can certainly change those.
Ten watts of X-rays is very bad for you. Ten watts of microwaves directed at your eyes can blind you. Ten watts of radio pass right through you. And ten watts of light is nice for reading.
With EM radiation, its precise frequency and location matter a great deal.
As I said, unreputable sources. :)
You can find someone who will assert just about anything. It reminds me of my BBS days. As CPU speeds approached 33Mhz, there was a discussion on FidoNet (if I recall correctly), where a few people were terribly insistent that computers would never exceed 100Mhz. Not that it couldn't happen, but when it did, it would be hazardous to be around, the power consumption would be impossibly high, and it would effectively destroy VHF and FM broadcast abilities.
I remember all the folks who screamed that the 2.4Ghz spectrum would kill us all. Any wireless device would be the equivalent of putting an unshielded microwave oven in your lap.
I'm still waiting to die of it. I've been pretty well exposed for quite a few years now, and I'm still alive and kicking. :) I may have almost died a few other ways, but they've never been by any method conspiracy folks have screamed about.
Shhh.. I hear the silent black helicopters coming to take me away now. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Where do you live that WiFi is limited to 20mW? In the US the limitation is 4W (EIRP) (PTP links are different). In most of Europe it is limited to 100mW. The typical home WiFi router is usually in the 80-100mW EIRP range.
Your brain's awash in radiation all the time, with a higher energy per photon than what you get from a cell phone, and with much more of it.
If you leave a transistor radio playing on top of a baseboard radiator which has been cranked up for the winter, the same will be true. But the radio, due to its design characteristics, is only going to respond to the wavelengths transmitted by the radio tower miles away. But if you put the radio next to an electronic device which outputs noise which falls within its range of reception, then you'll get static.
The problem is that the brain responds in some very weird ways to a range of modulated signals delivered via microwave carrier, and those signals happen to come from cell phones and other electronic gear. Among many such responses, one of the big ones is that the Blood Brain Barrier stops working properly and starts allowing all manner of foreign particles across its membrane, so if you have medicines or other toxins in your blood, they are able to enter and affect brain cells. That's just one of many ways EM can alter your nervous system.
-FL
Stop trying to pass off a bad strawman argument as if it were truly based in logic and fact. The energy of the photons in the UV part of the spectrum of the Sun is FAR greater than anything generated by a cellphone.
It's not the number of photons, it's their energy, but I suspect you knew that already.
"Photons are light" - yeah right. In that case how can you make torpedoes out of them?