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Two Studies Find 'Clear Evidence' That Cellphone Radiation Causes Cancer In Rats (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: [A] pair of studies by the U.S. National Toxicology Program found "clear evidence" that exposure to radiation caused heart tumors in male rats, and found "some evidence" that it caused tumors in the brains of male rats. (Both are positive results; the NTP uses the labels "clear evidence," "some evidence," "equivocal evidence" and "no evidence" when making conclusions.) Tumors were found in the hearts of female rats, too, but they didn't rise to the level of statistical significance and the results were labeled "equivocal;" in other words, the researchers couldn't be sure the radiation is what caused the tumors. The next scientific step will be to determine what this means for humans. The peer-reviewed papers will be passed on to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for determining human risk and issuing any guidelines to the public, and the Federal Communications Commission, which develops safety standards for cell phones. The FDA was part of the group of federal agencies who commissioned the studies back in the early 2000s.
Ronald Melnick, the NTP senior toxicologist who designed the studies (and who retired from the agency in 2009), says it's unlikely any future study could conclude with certainty that there is no risk to humans from cell phone use. "I can't see proof of a negative ever arising from future studies," Melnick says. He believes the FDA should put out guidance based on the results of the rat studies. "I would think it would be irresponsible to not put out indications to the public," Melnick says. "Maintain a distance from this device from your children. Don't sleep with your phone near your head. Use wired headsets. This would be something that the agencies could do right now." Quartz notes that when the draft results were published earlier this year, all the results were labeled "equivocal," meaning the study authors felt the data weren't clear enough to determine if the radiation caused the health effects or not. "But the panel of peer reviewers (among them brain and heart pathologists, toxicologists, biostaticians, and engineers) re-evaluated the data and upgraded several of the conclusions to 'some evidence' and 'clear evidence.'"
Ronald Melnick, the NTP senior toxicologist who designed the studies (and who retired from the agency in 2009), says it's unlikely any future study could conclude with certainty that there is no risk to humans from cell phone use. "I can't see proof of a negative ever arising from future studies," Melnick says. He believes the FDA should put out guidance based on the results of the rat studies. "I would think it would be irresponsible to not put out indications to the public," Melnick says. "Maintain a distance from this device from your children. Don't sleep with your phone near your head. Use wired headsets. This would be something that the agencies could do right now." Quartz notes that when the draft results were published earlier this year, all the results were labeled "equivocal," meaning the study authors felt the data weren't clear enough to determine if the radiation caused the health effects or not. "But the panel of peer reviewers (among them brain and heart pathologists, toxicologists, biostaticians, and engineers) re-evaluated the data and upgraded several of the conclusions to 'some evidence' and 'clear evidence.'"
The summary neglects to mention that the strongest result of the one study was that the rats exposed to microwave radiation had SIGNIFICANTLY longer lifepans than the ones not exposed.
Somehow I would have thought that this result was worth mentioning.
Cancer can be caused by agents that don't cause DNA damage directly. For example, agents that interfere with DNA repair, increase permeability to toxic substances, or cause an inflammatory response all can cause cancer. Microwave radiation can potentially do all of those by interfering with enzyme activity or membrane functions.
When they say "cellphones cause cancer" what exactly are they talking about? Do Bluetooth headsets cause problems? What about wifi? Is 2.4ghz safer than 5ghz? Should we tell the kids they can't have their iPads? What about wireless controllers, should kids go back to wired controllers? I sleep 2 feet from my phone, is that far enough? This article is short on details but big on fearmongering.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Simply probability outcomes like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... You alter one of those pegs and the outcome alters. Cell division is not like making a cheese sandwich, that outcome counting millions of moleculeshttps://michaelgr.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/how-many-atoms-to-encode-the-human-genome/ in the correct sequence, must replicate in the correct sequence, otherwise bad things might happen, dependent upon which part of the sequence was in error.
So damage could be routine but the bit of DNA damage is the bit that defines the shape of you nose, buried in DNA in bit of skin in your big toe and you toe does not care what the DNA instructions are for your nose. The more damage, the more pegs altered, the more likely a specific range of DNA damage is going to occur, the ones which prevent bad cell death (dysfunctional cells should self destruct) and allow unhindered cell replication (instead of just replacing a dying cell breeding out of control, sort of like those crazy religious sects, hmm, is that why they call them a cancer on human society) and of course not be rejected by the immune system (too much DNA damage and the cell no longer recognised).
In fact every single rat could have suffered genetic damage just that the cells died, the cells did not reproduce, the cells were eaten by the immune system, the damage did not impact the functionality of that cell (watch out though more errors can accumulate). The older the more likely as basically you keep rolling dice and eventually you get bad numbers. Alter the dice, induce a bias for negative outcomes and you will likely get negative outcomes sooner. Yep, cell replication is the trigger for cancer and lots of stuff can alter that probability outcome, the more antagonists to successful cell replication, the sooner you get a negative outcome.
Suck it up baby, life itself is a dice roll or at least a random variability outcome during cell reproduction, sometimes shit happens. You strive to improve those odds, rather than making them worse.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
But the majority of the examples I saw showed fewer rats with tumors at 6W of exposure than at 0W. The numbers were all pretty small, and the total number of male rats (the one study I looked at) was something like ~100.
In virtually no tumor example did the # of tumors go up with the radiation exposure.