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Cellphones Do Not Cause Brain Cancer, Says 29-Year Study (gizmodo.com)
A study from Australia reassures us that cellphones are reasonably safe, and do not cause brain cancer. Chris Mills writes from Gizmodo: "The study examines the incidence of brain cancer in the Australian population between 1982 to 2013. The study pitted the prevalence of mobile phones among the population -- starting at 0 percent -- against brain cancer rates, using data from national cancer registration data. The results showed a very slight increase in brain cancer rates among males, but a stable level among females. There were significant increases in over -70s, but began in 1982, before cellphones were even a thing." What makes the study in Australia so authentic compared to other studies conducted in other countries is the fact that all diagnosed cases of cancer have to be registered by law.
There is no such thing as digital, unless you are talking about quantum mechanics. All digital phones, even digital computers, are fundamentally analog systems. Digital means that you ignore all signal level below a threshold. Something like -55dB/decade.
Photons from microwaves can't ionize matter. This is why ultraviolet photons are so dangerous: they can cause chemical changes in living tissue. Microwaves can't do that it it is silly to worry about it.
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Neither TFA nor the researchers make the claim that "cell phones don't cause cancer". That was made up by whoever wrote the Slashdot summary.
O RLY? I disagree. I believe TFA really does say that cellphones don't cause cancer. They provide a bunch of supporting arguments and evidence of such, and then conclude with "We have had mobiles in Australia since 1987. Some 90% of the population use them today and many of these have used them for a lot longer than 20 years. But we are seeing no rise in the incidence of brain cancer against the background rate." What message do you think they want us to take away?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
just as correlation do not prove causation, absence of correlation does not rule out causation. so this study proves nothing.
(however we must recognize that burden of proof is with people who claim causation; proof that cellphones cause cancer, of which there is none).
so heading here at present, "Cellphones Do Not Cause Brain Cancer, Says 29-Year Study ", is wrong. heading in linked article "no increase in brain cancer across 29 years of mobile use in Australia" is more correct.
it is inaccuracies like that which open the atmosphere to false claims; for instance, using same sort of fallacy people may claim, that increase in autism in recent years, it is due to cellphones.
one expects /. to be better and more pedantic at these sort of technicalities, we certainly do not expect editors to degrade from the sources, as in this case.
few other questions,
how did they adjust for other factors?
was that unspecified "very slight increase in brain cancer rates among males" due to any subgroup among males ( iow was that increase more than the vague "very slight", with any more specific group)?
Analog phones output at least 4x more radiation and as high as 20x more. I think that counts. My CDMA phone sends about 0.2watt nominal to the antenna. GSM phones output about 1 watts, analog phones are around 4 watts.
Cellphones output less power and lower frequency than IR at room temperature. Human body temperature emits more than 400watts per square meter of skin in blackbody radiation. The only danger cellphones create is localized heating because they're not in thermal equilibrium, but the total energy is much lower.
Personally, I'm more worried about the localized heating caused by taking a hot shower. That is much more EM radiation than my cell phone and more deadly type of radiation, and it dries out my skin. A hot tub is right-out, along with exercising, and almost anything else that warms up your body more than a cell phone. The only thing more deadly is a lightbulb, of any kind. Very high frequency EM radiation compared to microwave, and much higher amounts of total radiation. Even possibly localized heating if you sit near an incandescent bulb.
There are people that simply do not understand science and will claim "evidence" to the contrary much like how people will show "evidence" that the moon landings were faked. I don't know what drives people to do these things but it just seems that some people don't want to learn.
A few examples of how people that should know better do not understand radiation. My aunt was a school teacher, someone that people would hope have been educated in some basic science. At a family gathering I was talking with her about my work. I mentioned that my desk is in the same room as the servers and much of the networking equipment for the facility. She asked me if I was worried about the radiation that the equipment gave off.
My sister has an insulin pump to treat her diabetes, this is a very sensitive, expensive, and vital piece of equipment. She is also an educated person and knows with some degree what kinds of equipment might damage this device. She had to go through a TSA checkpoint to board a plane and she asked the agent what kind of radiation the scanner emitted. The agent said there was no radiation. Of course this scanner emitted radiation but my sister knew that one kind of scanner would not harm her insulin pump but another kind just might. She ended up getting in the scanner and the pump survived. Although I saw in the news recently that another diabetic with an insulin pump was not as fortunate. The young lady had her very expensive insulin pump destroyed by the scanner because the agent assured her the scanner was harmless.
We would hope that the people that operate the scanners at airports would be trained by the TSA on how those scanners work and what kind of hazards they pose and do not pose. Which brings to mind something else I read recently, some of these scanners emit X-rays but the people operating them do not take the precautions common to people that operate medical X-ray machines. At a dentists office the technician will leave the room before a very short burst of X-rays are emitted into someone's head. They also take the precaution of putting a lead lined apron on the patient to protect vital organs. I'd like to see the cancer rates of TSA agents after 29 years of operating these X-ray scanners. It is quite possible the X-rays do not penetrate the skin like those used to look at bones and teeth but even so the skin is still exposed since the whole point of these machines is their ability to penetrate clothing. Their skin is still being exposed.
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Photons from microwaves can't ionize matter. ... it it is silly to worry about it.
There are other ways to foul DNA than ionization. For starters, it is a long molecule with charged regions. One way that you can detect electrocution is that the DNA in the cells has uncoiled and lined up in parallel along where the electric field was oriented. Since the folding and unfolding of DNA is part of the regulation of gene expression that could have non trivial effects. (On the other hand, that's an effect observed when the exposure to electrical activity is extreme, so any effect might be lost due to the death of the affected cells.)
BUT....
A very substantial effect of electrical (and changing magnetic) fields on cells HAS been detected. It is being used therapeutically - on brain cancer - with great success.
You may have noticed that the electrical activity in living cells is almost entirely confined to electrical potentials across membranes and fine-grained patterns of charge on molecules that affect their interactions at close range. There is very little involvement with, or sensitivity to, large-scale fields.
On the other hand, you may ALSO have noticed, in pictures or drawings of cell reproduction, that the mechanism for separating the DNA into two nuclei looks very much like field lines, or the patterns iron filings take up in the presence of a strong magnetic field.
This is apparently because the cells use gross electric fields as part of the mechanism for gene segregation. So any other use of large-scale electrical fields has a strong selection pressure against it - it must both avoid fouling cell reproduction and provide an extreme advantage to offset any problems it does cause. Very few mechanisms have made this cut. Similarly, any other sensitivity to large scale electrical fields must be small, to avoid being fouled in turn by the fields that occur during cell division.
So cells are very insensitive to large-scale electrical fields through them, EXCEPT during cell division. But it turns out that fields - especially those from changing magnetic fields, DO interfere with cell division:
- Sometimes they prevent gene segregation. After a while the cell passes the phase where it would divide, but without dividing - resulting in a diploid cell, which then commits suicide via the apoptosis mechanism.
- Sometimes they result in incorrect segregation, resulting in two progeny cells with the wrong compliment of chromosomes. Then both either die through missing genes or again commit suicide.
Brain nerve cells, along with most of the cells supporting them, are very long lived and rarely reproduce - to the point that for decades it was though that they didn't reproduce at all once the brain was mature. (In fact there is some new nerve growth, which may be involved in learning and mental plasticity. But it is very slow and mostly newly differentiated cells from stem cell lines rather than reproduction of existing nerves.) So the cells of the brain are almost never in the stage where electrical and changing magnetic fields would be an issue.
Cancer cells, on the other hand, reproduce a lot, and spend much of their time in the vulnerable state. So electrical fields that would cause them to die are particularly useful in treating brain cancer, selectively killing the cancer cells while almost never affecting the normal cells with which they are comingled. Electromagnetic coil devices to produce them have recently shown such excellent results in treating inoperable and rapidly fatal brain cancers that the FDA aborted the tests and fast-tracked an approval.
Yes, the individual photons of radio signals are too low energy to ionize most molecules. But they are coherent and their fields add up to enough to have major electromechanical effects. (They COULD also add to produce ionization, especially on structures appropriately sized or massed-and-sprung to resonate, but at the levels involved in a cellphone this
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Yup, autism causes vaccines (and probably better cell phones too).
...
While I don't think that cellphones cause cancer, one of the problems with such a large study is that over the years different brands, different frequencies, different telephone companies, and even different protocols would potentially have effectively kept changing the study. For instance the difference between frequency hopping spread spectrum is wildly different than an older analog phone, or even one of the early digital phones. Typically the older ones were just pounding out the power, and holding it steady on a given frequency. But different telcos have different parts of the spectrum. So Telco A might have far fewer customers than Telco B which had the cancer causing frequency. Then Telco B might have quickly jumped to a better technology to compete.
Then you get all kinds of trends. For instance heavy users of cellphones often switched to earpieces of one sort or another, then there are cultural trends such as holding the phone like a blowing on a bowl of soup.
The only way I would begin to accept such a study would be if they kept exposing animals to various types of cellphone transmissions with all the usual control groups and whatnot.
All this study tells me is that the vast majority of cellphone technologies over the years probably don't cause much cancer.
That is not how science works. Real science always tries to disprove its own default assumption (null hypothesis). In this case the null hypothesis may be "cell phone use does not appear to cause a higher rate cancer than the population rate", and the alternate hypothesis could be "cell phones may cause higher rates of cancer". The scientists job is to gather enough evidence, analyze it, and present the findings in such a way that they can disprove the null hypothesis. They can neither prove the null hypothesis, nor prove the alternate hypothesis by disproving the null hypothesis. When they say "we are seeing no rise in the incidence of brain cancer against the background rate", they are saying that they have insufficient evidence to disprove the null hypothesis. Therefore the null hypothesis survives. Not because it is without a doubt correct, but just because there is insufficient evidence to prove it is incorrect at this moment.
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Digital means that you ignore all signal level below a threshold. Something like -55dB/decade.
This is how computers measure digital signals but it is not how digital RF systems work. You are right in that digital RF is fundamentally analogue but they do so by measuring differences in a continuously transmitter carrier signal at a specific frequency.
In the early days of mobile phones they were incredibly simple. They used frequency modulation of the carrier where the frequency change from the true carrier was related to the analogue signal on that carrier. Dead simple to decode.
These days RF signals still have the same carrier and they still operate the same fundamental way by altering the phase, frequency or amplitude of the carrier in relation to what is being sent across. The only difference is now this change in carrier is related to zeros and ones rather an analogue audio waveform.
All of this ignores the fact that even early analogue cellphones had a "digital" component which was used to communicate with the base stations. How else would the provider know to which base station to route the phone conversation, and how else would the individual phone itself know the call was for it, and not someone else.
When I was till a student, waiting for a teacher in a lab, I stumbled upon a paper that was showing the changes in the brain with the usage of a cell phone.
Three measurements where showing a cut before, while and after the use of a GSM (I don't recall all the details, it was 15 years ago). It was clear there was an increase in temperature slowly decreasing after use.
In the same period of time, there was this student that was always on the phone. He ended up with a patch of grey hair just around where he put the phone.
I've briefly known that antenna communication amateur in his sixties that told me he stopped because most of the other amateurs he knew got leukemia (because of the power of the antennas ). That one is not about GSM but about the "non-ionizing radiation is OK" I've seen on other reporting of the study.
So you'll forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical about the message "GSM is safe" because a study shows no (significant) increase over background noise of brain cancer.
Irrelevant news and morons using moderation to mod down what they disagree on. 2018 resolution: so long.
That is not how science works. Real science always tries to disprove its own default assumption
Even the article, let alone the study, shows that this is what they did. So why are you still complaining?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Might it not be more accurate to suggest that digital/analog is about interpreting the signal?
CMDA is designed to work with a worse signal to noise ratio than other radio encodings, so it can use less power.
In 1982 virtually no one had cell phones. That's the point. So brain cancer incidence in 1982 would be a useful baseline for comparison with layer years. I didn't have a cell phone until the mid 90s.... And I'm an early adopter.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Just not brain cancer - some folks think it might make people temporarily stupid - that's a joke there son....
And I was ready to make the "Correlation Causation" statement. ;)
Indeed. Smartphones don't make people stupid - they just allow stupid people to have access to technology where they can showcase their dumbnitude.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.