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World's Largest Animal Study On Cell Tower Radiation Confirms Cancer Link (digitaljournal.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the possibly-carcinogenic dept.

capedgirardeau shares a report from Digital Journal: Researchers with the renowned Ramazzini Institute (RI) in Italy announce that a large-scale, lifetime study (PDF) of lab animals exposed to environmental levels of cell tower radiation developed cancer. The RI study also found increases in malignant brain (glial) tumors in female rats and precancerous conditions including Schwann cells hyperplasia in both male and female rats. A study of much higher levels of cell phone radiofrequency (RF) radiation, from the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP), has also reported finding the same unusual cancer called Schwannoma of the heart in male rats treated at the highest dose.

The Ramazzini study exposed 2448 Sprague-Dawley rats from prenatal life until their natural death to "environmental" cell tower radiation for 19 hours per day (1.8 GHz GSM radiofrequency radiation (RFR) of 5, 25 and 50 V/m). RI exposures mimicked base station emissions like those from cell tower antennas, and exposure levels were far less than those used in the NTP studies of cell phone radiation. "All of the exposures used in the Ramazzini study were below the U.S. FCC limits. These are permissible exposures according the FCC. In other words, a person can legally be exposed to this level of radiation. Yet cancers occurred in these animals at these legally permitted levels. The Ramazzini findings are consistent with the NTP study demonstrating these effects are a reproducible finding," explained Ronald Melnick PhD, formerly the Senior NIH toxicologist who led the design of the NTP study on cell phone radiation now a Senior Science Advisor to Environmental Health Trust (EHT). "Governments need to strengthen regulations to protect the public from these harmful non-thermal exposures."

16 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. Look at the results by Kohath · · Score: 5, Informative

    It’s like 2 out of 200 rats got cancer in the control group and 4 in the exposure group. But rates of cancer don’t seem to increase with amount of exposure.

    Can someone familiar with these methodologies explain the criteria for statistical significance of these numbers?

    What is the hypothetical mechanism for low-level non-ionizing radiation to cause tumors?

    1. Re:Look at the results by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      It’s called P-hacking.

    2. Re:Look at the results by locater16 · · Score: 4, Informative

      So the dosage does seem uncorrelated to cancer cells, which is odd. But according to this study then mice in the wild should have a lot more cancer over time, and humans should be getting more brain cancer over time. Neither has happened. In fact incidences of brain cancer have gone down between 1992 and 2014 https://seer.cancer.gov/statfa... . Even if this study is correct, which seems dubious already, you'd be looking at a doubling from 0.6 percent chance to 1.2 percent chance over your life time at most.

  2. Fake News... by gurps_npc · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you trace it back, you find that:

    1) This is a press release that was picked up by a minor news service, then picked up by other news services.

    2) The original source is a web sight: https://ehtrust.org/ if you go to the About page, you see that website is headed by someone with a new book out. Guess what the book is about...

    3) Yes, the book is about power lines causing cancer. Funny how the same person that has already published a book about something that has been thoroughly discredited is now claiming a study proves her right.

    4) The websight mentions no other person except their own 'head', but mentions her several times. It has two addresses listed, one of which is a po box in Wyoming, the other is a home in Wyoming. No office.

    5) She is a real doctor, but is famous for this EMF controversy.

    In other words, the study is not to be trusted, and the news release is fake news, at least until a real news agency can thoroughly check something rather than just accept the word of someone that already has a reputation for accepting junk science

    --
    excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
    1. Re:Fake News... by jd · · Score: 3, Informative

      If you trace it back, you find that the NIH is not a wholly-owned subsiduary of someone with a book. Sorry, whilst the replication study may have flaws, you haven't shown one in the NIH study, which is the peer-reviewed one.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    2. Re:Fake News... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      The only thing I can see referencing the NIH is the link in:

      A study of much higher levels of cell phone radiofrequency (RF) radiation, from the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP), has also reported finding the same unusual cancer called Schwannoma of the heart in male rats treated at the highest dose.

      You'll note the important point in the quote there: "much higher levels of cell phone radiofrequency (RF) radiation"; ie, not environmental levels.

  3. Click Bait by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Read the darn paper. There's barely a statistical link in male rats at the highest dosage. For everything else there no statistical difference than control.

    I'd hardly call this confirming a link.

  4. Re:1.8 GHz by NewtonsLaw · · Score: 5, Informative

    "Microwave ovens operate at a frequency of 2.45 GHz (2.45x109 Hz) and this is NOT the resonant frequency of a water molecule"

    cite: http://www.schoolphysics.co.uk/age16-19/Wave%20properties/Wave%20properties/text/Microwave_ovens/index.html

  5. No, no it didn't by Baloroth · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm calling bullshit: the study did absolutely no such thing. In fact, I'm just going to link to a screenshot of their results (can't link to the actual study as it's behind a paywall). First, a couple of things to note: while their underlying population is large, the number of cases of tumors and lesions is tiny, so any results are going to be highly subject to statistical fluctuations (if the rate for a rare disease is 1/1000, a sample of 1000 people could easily still have 2-4 people with the disease, or none, just by chance). Secondly, there is little or no correlation between exposure and tumors (I'm not actually going to try to fit a line, but by eye the correlation is not great: in some cases the control groups showed a higher rate than the exposure). Third, they subdivided by male/female into separate groups. While there's some justification for doing that, what it means is that they've essentially doubled the number of studies they're conduction (actually kinda tripled, since they take male+female as another group, but that's not independent, so it's a bit more complicated than that), so finding something statistically significant (by chance) is twice as likely. In fact, given they made tests for 4 different conditions, with 3 different exposures, all divided into 2+ groups, they essentially made 24 tests. If you set your statistical significance at 0.05, you'd expect\* (by chance) 1.2 statistically significant results. They found one.

    \*I'm simplifying here, it's more precise to say that if you conducted an infinite number of identical studies the average one would produce 1.2 "statistically significant" (p less than 0.05) results by pure chance.

    --
    "None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
    1. Re:No, no it didn't by macklin01 · · Score: 5, Informative

      You're exactly right.

      I took a brief look through the paper. Table 3, glia (rightmost columns) seems to sum up this study nicely. Control group had 817 mice, 3 malignant brain tumors. Highest dose had 409 mice, 3 with malignant brain tumors. Not a significant difference in this entire table at any dose in any sub-population, even at p = 0.05 levels.

      Table 2 focused on schwannomas, and they had to dig deep to male mice at highest exposure (n = 207) to get a significantly significant (at p = 0.05) difference. We're talking 3 / 207 male mice with malignant schwannomas at highest exposure. The control males had no cases (n = 412), but we're really in the weeds here where a stochastic variation of +/- 1 mouse makes a huge difference in their tallies. No other significant difference in any other dose in any other sub-population in any other table in this paper.

      Kaplan-Meier survival curves (Figure 3 g-h) look just about identical for all doses: we're not seeing a big difference in survival times at any doses. And there's no effort to estimate error bars for those curves. That's a hint about (lack of) replicates.

      From what I can see, there was exactly one replicate for each group / arm (e.g., mice exposed to a specific dose). This is not good, because technical and biological variability can cause flukes and false differences. 1 technical replicate per arm: if a technician had a bad day or screwed up a protocol when the exposing the mice to the highest dose, your one measurement set could be off. 1 biological replicate per arm: a weird batch of mice, or a batch of sick mice, etc., could throw off your one measurement set for the arm. Most cell line experiments we've worked with have at least 3 technical and biological replicates, in very controlled culture conditions. You'd be amazed at the variability, even in "identical" cells.

      Oh, and read the neat Nature story (summary) where the sex of the scientist performing the experiments on mice can cause statistically significant differences. Because the male and female scents in our clothing can actually induce stress hormone changes in mice. Experiments are sensitive. Replicates are a good thing.

      --
      OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
    2. Re:No, no it didn't by Tailhook · · Score: 3, Informative

      The e-field figures (5, 25 and 50 V/m) are pretty unrealistic as well. An LTE macrocell has 20-69 watts of energy at the antenna feedpoint. If you concentrate 69 watts with a 10 DBi gain lobe (typical for cell antennas and completely ignoring radiation efficiency losses of the antenna) you have to be within about 3 meters line-of-sight to get 50 V/m, 6 meters to get 25 V/m and 29 meters to get 5 V/m. There probably are cases in densely populated urban areas where you find yourself in the main lobe of an antenna at these distances, but cellular transceivers in these areas necessarily operate at the low end of the power range due to cell density, so it's pretty difficult to imagine a scenario where large populations of people are getting the amount of continuous e-field exposure used in this work.

      --
      Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
  6. Re: Wonder why? by c6gunner · · Score: 4, Informative

    Given that they're engaging in P hacking, you could put the rats 10,000 miles away from the antenna and probably get similar results. Or just get rid of the antennas entirely. Either way, if you test for enough things you're going to get at least one "significant" result.

    Xkcd explains:
    https://xkcd.com/882/

  7. Re: If cell phones cause cancer by shaitand · · Score: 3, Informative

    "study found a link between cell tower radiation and specific type(s) of cancer, and followup studies successfully replicated those results"

    This is a large scale lifetime Italian study, finding statistically significant increase of a specific and uncommon cancer which replicates the results of a U.S. National Toxicology Program study which found a connection between this radiation and an increase of this same uncommon cancer.

  8. Re:1.8 GHz by LordHighExecutioner · · Score: 5, Informative

    NO!!! Water molecule resonance is spread over a very large spectrum, ranging from microwaves till to infrared (just check a manual about molecular spectroscopy). This is due to the fact that there are many oscillation modes for H2O molecule (rotation, reciprocal vibration, etc.) . Just imagine having a system made of three weights connected by springs, and ask to yourself in how many modes it can oscillate. Then repeat the exercise replacing the springs with rigid bars, and ask yourself in how many modes you can rotate it.
    The 2.4 GHz water resonance bogus claim appeared many years ago on QST and, like many urban legends spread by ham radio buffs, is misleading people from physical truth.

  9. Re:Straight up lies by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Posting anonymously because I can't avoid moderating your post "overrated" (because "huge mistake" is not an option). The abstract you are linking is a different paper, which studies the impact of 50Hz electromagnetic radiation. The paper being discussed now studies the impact of 1.8GHz radiation, eight orders of magnitude higher. The actual link for the paper under discussion is this one.

    There are other comments presenting and discussing the flaws of the study, but linking to a different paper is completely misleading.

  10. Renowned Institute? by Wdi · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Ramazzini Institute has been publishing dubious studies for more than a decade. They have been accused of data fabrication and deliberate misinterpretation of their own source data (which they tend to keep under wraps even to government institutions) on multiple occasions, and most often publish on environmental and health topics which already got a lot of press (glyphosate, aspartam, methanol, now cell tower radiation). EPA, its Euro equivalent and other reputable institutions have more or less ceased taking these studies seriously (and not just since the new administration took office) and are actively reviewing and updating their older reports which referenced data from that source: http://www.epaarchive.cc/node/92139.html

    Given this history, I am really skeptical wrt this new study.