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World's Largest Animal Study On Cell Tower Radiation Confirms Cancer Link (digitaljournal.com)
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."
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."
This couldn't be further from the truth. The linked pdf from ehtrust.org is a preprint version. It is NOT the published version of the paper. I pulled the published version of the paper down from my university account and the abstract is completely different, and the results show no statistical differences between those exposed to the magnetic fields vs controls.
The pubmed entry has the correct abstract: http://pubmed.gov/29549848
Read it for yourself.
The ehtrust.org should be reprimanded for knowingly spreading false information.
I love it how they use a 0.05 p-value for groups of size in the hundreds, with a "detected" non-null probability of about 1%. This is a joke, there's no statistical difference between the distributions of the control and the other groups in their data. What happened, the "paper" did not pass peer review in a serious journal and they tried disseminating it online?
This is a large scale lifetime Italian study, finding statistically significant increase of a specific and uncommon cancer
Not really. This appears to be a large scale farce which subdivides a large population into 24 subgroups and then tries to pretend that the result is still statistically significant, despite it being pretty much what you would expect from chance alone.
Seems like it could be a natural instance of p hacking.
We just run the same study over and over and over, everyone hoping to find the link, but only the people who find what they want publish."Cell phone still don't cause cancer" isn't sexy.
Scientist here.
First thing that strikes me is... they don't have replicates, so there is no measure of experimental error. So when they show in Table 2, for example, that the control group had a 0.7% incidence of hyperplasia Schwann cells... we don't know the error. I think this is important because if the (standard) error is, say, plus/minus 0.5%, then some of the results would be within the experimental error. The 95% confidence given that error would be, approximately (0, 1.7) --technically (-0.3 1.7), but -0.3% has no biological meaning here). The claims they make in the paper would vanish.
Then, for some reason not justified in the paper, the sample size for the groups III and IV is half of that for groups I (control) and II. This make me feel weird, because the statistics (as much as you can do with that data) says the results are significant _only_ for males, in group IV, and when both types of Schwannoma are added together (adding up to 1.4% incidence). You'll see a 1.5% (total) incidence in group II for males and females.... but that group doubles the sample size and doesn't seem to be significant (essentially, the smaller the sample, the higher the error and a lot of things can happen here).
And, for some reason, they don't run stats in table 3. Or if they did, none of it is significant as there's no asterisks like in table 2.
In my professional opinion, a) the analysis seems a bit sloppy/inconclusive and b) given the effect on society, if the study was truly strong it would have gone to a much better journal (say, PNAS, where peer-review is usually a bit of a pain for all the requirements) instead of Environmental Research (lower profile journals use to have softer peer-review).
How about Albert Einstein?
The wavelength of ionizising radiation (the type that can cause cancer) is well known. Cellphone towers don't emit it.
While not ionizing radiation, RF radiation can and does have physical effects - Usually heating.
So I'm not going to write off the entire idea of carcinogenic effects, but I think it is very unlikely. And unless there is some homeopathic thing going on, holding a cell phone right up to your head exposing it to the the near field is going to dose you a hella lot more than being in the far field of a cell tower.
Humans have been carrying that experiment on for years now, I know people who spend hours every day soaking up near-field radiation from their smartphones. We should see some human results.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
2.45 GHz is used because it's unlicensed spectrum, so it's less likely to interfere with other uses.
Larger industrial microwave ovens often use 915 MHz, which is also unlicensed. The wavelength is 2.5x longer, which means a larger resonant cavity, which is why this frequency isn't used for domestic or smaller commercial ovens.