Slashdot Mirror
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.
I've just been in this place before
Just because its ionizing does not mean its not harmful. Otherwise the effect of UV from sunlight would not be harmful. But evidence has shown RF burns to be harmful even though they are not ionizing in nature. The reality is these waves can interact with the body even though its not ionizing. The whole mantra that "if its not ionizing, its safe" is contradicted by numerous studies and evidence and is certainly not based on a good understanding of things.
finds out the truth ;) lol Oh well to late now ;) ;)
;)
Can you imagine the world wide withdrawal epidemic
Just my 2 cents
who keeps buying cell phones for rats!?
This is how we know cell phones are safe: they emit the radio energy of a standard flashlight, 0.6 watts to 3 watts. Radio towers, buried in the heart of cities, emit up to 50,000 watts. Even miles away, that's vastly more photons going through your body. And there is absolutely no indication whatsoever of any increase in cancer around such radio towers as you live nearer to them.
The same thing goes for cell-phone towers, which emit a minimum of 500 watts, and can go up to thousands of watts of radio waves to reach your little phone. Absolutely zero evidence whatsoever of any increased cancer risk.
Long term epidemiological studies have shown that non-ionizing radiation has no observable health hazard. It makes perfect sense why. The tiny amount of interactions warm the body to such a small degree, you get ten thousand times the warming effect in a hot shower. (Need I mention natural ground radiation, which actually can do chromosomal damage?)
I can understand why non-scientific BS might be acceptable on Pinterest. But slashdot? What has this site become? News for Luddites?
Looking at the data they released, I think the "equivocal" conclusion was more honest. It doesn't look like the tumor incidence results would survive correction for multiple comparisons.
The findings that do look like they remain significant are that the male rats exposed to RF survived longer. It doesn't appear that the study was long enough to see significance in the female rats, but they were also showing that tendency.
The tumor results are complicated by that longer survival as well. They don't look like they were corrected for that effect.
We know that since around 1994 ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I can't afford a friends and family account for all the rats around my neighborhood. /s
Every time this subject comes up, somebody says the same foolish things. Looking at studies like this does not make one a Luddite. On the contrary, it seems that there are those with a rabid zealous passion to defend the technology whatever the cost, science be damned.
First common mistake - "blah blah blah, it's not ionizing". True. High frequency, high energy bands, UV and gamma, cause ionization and they damage DNA and cause cancer. Radar, radio, mm - they are not ionizing, but they do have other effects on cells. Mechanisms at the cytosolic, nucleosomic, and cytoskeletal levels are not well characterized, but the gross effects are well known, even used therapeutically and as research tools on cell cultures. There are many causes of malignant transformation in cells, including non-biological vectors such as chemicals and even direct physical energy transfer (trauma - momentum & kinetic energy). Low frequency EM might not be unequivocally proven to cause cancer, but it does unequivocally stimulate cell proliferation and migration, necessary prodromes of malignant transformation.
Two - do the math. Remember, the inverse square law. Watts by themselves do not mean much. Field or flux must be known. So, using your examples, and knowing that surface of a sphere is 4 x pi x r-squared, and doing some rough rounded off calculations:
Cell phone, 0.6 watts at your ear, 4 inches or 10 cm from center of your brain - that is a flux of about 0.6 w / 1200 cm-sq = 0.0005 or half a milliwatt per cm-sq.
Radio tower, 50K watts 500 feet away from your house (in which is the center of your brain) - that is a flux of about 50K w / 2.7B cm-sq = 0.00002 milliwatt per cm-sq.
You cell phone thus has about 25 times more exposure per given time than that radio tower.
If you spent one hour talking on your cell phone, it would impart the same energy exposure to your pituitary or pons as living 500 feet away from the tower for a whole day.
"Long term epidemiological studies have shown that non-ionizing radiation has no observable health hazard . . ." You might be correct about that, and that ultimately is what matters for public health, but that does not negate that there are biological effects of radio frequency. Hot water burns and can kill, but that does not mean we shoudn't have hot water heaters and take baths or cook food. It just means that hot water at home must be used responsibly and safely. That is what research like this ultimately gets at. Do not derogate something as "quack science" until you actually know the full "spectrum" of the science.
Simple, stop putting rats in your pockets.
Table-ized A.I.
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
The reality is these waves can interact with the body even though its not ionizing.
Any EM wave will interact with the body because, being made of matter, a human body consists of charged particles. That is not the issue, the issue is whether this interaction is dangerous. The problem is that, as yet, there is no understood mechanism as to how EM waves which have too little energy to break chemical bonds could cause cancer and without this the warning that "correlation does not imply causation" is very important to remember.
This certainly seems to be interesting but medical research has huge problems with contradictory and unreproducible results. So until there have been considerably more independent studies confirming this result or someone comes up with a cancer-causing mechanism that can be tested and confirmed I'm going to remain highly sceptical.
It also seems extremely bizarre that they appear to be using an elaborate system of code words about "equivocal evidence" vs "clear evidence" vs "some evidence" etc. Normally in science we give a p-value or a number of standard deviations - it's far easier to understand this than to try and figure out how "clear evidence" maps to a p-value range.
True, fair enough, well said.
They were testing with 5W per kg of rat/mice for 9 hours a day. This means 250-500W strong mobile phone for human. Is it realistic?
We already talked about this last month
Don't
Do
Don't
Do
Don't
Do
Rabbit Season
Duck Season!
*KABLAM!*
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you'd only studied your EE from this one...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Far-field E (electric) and B (magnetic) field strength decreases inversely with distance from the source, resulting in an inverse-square law for the radiated power intensity of electromagnetic radiation. By contrast, near-field E and B strength decrease more rapidly with distance: part decreases by the inverse-distance squared, the other part by an inverse cubed law, resulting in a diminished power in the parts of the electric field by an inverse fourth-power and sixth-power, respectively. The rapid drop in power contained in the near-field ensures that effects due to the near-field essentially vanish a few wavelengths away from the radiating part of the antenna.
Or... you know... used common sense and gave some thought to efficiency of induction for powering and charging... stuff.
I saw a video that said placing a human hand in the beam of the Large Hadron Collider was probably bad too, but who does that?
Added benefits No Facebook; no adds (unless I'm on hold)
Any second now we'll have rich people sleeping in sarcophaguses made of powered-on cell phones, Peter Thiel is probably finishing his up by now...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
There's always evidence on both sides of a question in science, particularly when it comes to yes/no questions about the behavior of complex systems.
The Sherlock Holmes model of knowledge where all the clues fall into a perfect pattern with no contradictions or loose ends is a myth -- or at very least an exaggeration. Real life is like a jigsaw puzzle where there are always pieces that don't fit anywhere, don't seem right, or are missing altogether.
And that's not even counting the effects of *chance*. 5% of the time you reject the null hypothesis when it's true. 1 in 400 times you can do it twice in a row.
I suspect by calling their results "equivocal", the researchers are showing more understanding of their significance than the writer of TFA.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I knew it. Here is the proof I posted earlier : https://slashdot.org/comments....
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The problem with this is that radio waves lack sufficient energy to affect chemical bonds. The energy of a single radio photon is far below the energy difference required to move an electron out of a molecular orbital. Indeed visible light has far more energy per photon and yet there is no evidence that light bulbs cause cancer (sunlight is different since it contains UV which does have enough energy). The same is true for infrared radiation but, as far as I am aware, there is no evidence that living in a hot country or taking lots of saunas or hot showers increases the risk of cancer.
So what you need is a mechanism that works for radio waves with their very low energy per photon but does not work for infrared or visible light with their higher energy per photon. It's certainly possible that such a mechanism exists but we don't yet understand it e.g. perhaps radio photons with their larger size affect an entire molecule in some strange way e.g. changing the folding behaviour...but it is also possible that the studies claiming links between cancer and radio waves are flawed because, as you point out, biological systems are very complex.
That's really my point. Given the lack of any plausible, testable mechanism for radio waves to cause cancer we are left with nothing but correlation and, in this case, you need many independent studies to confirm the result. This is because, without a mechanism, you have to admit that you really do not know how the cancers are caused and so you clearly have no idea what other factors might be relevant.
>> "I can't see proof of a negative ever arising from future studies," Melnick says.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
2 feet from your brain for 8 hours a night, then add on the hours it is within a feet of your brain per day.
Good news: you wont see it coming.
The rats don't need 8 hours of sleep. They drink a lot of coffee.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
By what biological mechanism?
THAT is what we fund these things for.
Failed what? To work? To limit transmit power to a more or less arbitrary value?
Your idea of confirmation is weird unless CBC did a large scale long time screening for cancer in rats exposed to radio waves.
Also: correlation does not not equal causation.
I work with my local town. We have had cell phone issues, in that we are hilly, so there are dead spots. A Tower was proposed in a location that would be optimal. Every single resident for a mile showed up to protest the State Sanctioned Crack Den, er, new cell phone tower. No one admitted it was about property values, no, they all complained it was about safety, and claimed that it would cause disease. I pointed out that every single one of them had a router in their home, transmitting 24/7, and the RF from the router was going to be much higher than a cell tower a half mile away. Eventually, the cell was put in a place where there are already a few antennas. Public outcry ? crickets....
If a human body radiates like a blackbody radiator at the skin temperature, 30-35 degrees Celsius, doesn't the molecules deeper inside our bodies in a 37 degrees environment, emit and absorb copious amounts of radiation?
Blackbody radiation has a long and fat tail in the region of lower frequencies than the frequency of maximium intensity. Does not our body already bath in a continuous radiation in the 1900 and 800 MHz bands?
All molecules are continuously vibrating and bouncing off each other in a random, chaotic manner. Air molecules at room temperature have typical velocities like 500 meters per second, comparable to gun bullets. Heavier molecules move more slowly, just so that the average energy per degree of freedom is the same for the same temperature. The biology must tolerate such erratic blows to the molecules trillions of times per second. Right? Relevant?
This allows enzyme molecules turn their active sites toward, and probe, a large number of neighboring molecules in a short time, which in turn is essential for the efficiency of the enzymes. Right or wrong?
The energy transfer in the typical collision is no less than the energy of the thermally radiated photons (infrared, micrometer band). The energy of mobile phone radiation is much, much lower (centimeters or decimeters).
On the other hand, Radio transmissions use polarised radiation. Thermal radiation is utterly chaotic and has a low degree of coherence. (I cannot exclude some degree of coherence because, photons being bosons, the probability of emission from a molecule is probably higher when a photon of the right frequency is passing.) Perhaps some molecules are polar and tend to orient themselves in particular directions in the electric field of polarized radiation. This could make molecules who need to mate like in a kiss, always turn like faces looking in the same direction, ie, not looking at each other. But how strong could such an effect be, given the said environment of violent blows?
Radiation absorption is associated with state transitions in the absorbing system (which may comprise more than one interacting molecule). This implies that effects of radiation of specific wavelengths can be quite specific, affecting quite select molecules and molecular interactions. If the number of photons of the relevant frequency to disrupt a particular process is high, the disruption may be quite pervasive. Is this right? E.g., could the operation of the ion pumps in the cell membranes be affected? What kind of energy levels are involved in their operation? Consider that radio transmissions have likely a quite low spread in the frequencies of its photons, so the intensity at some particular frequency can be high compared to the thermal radiation present, which spreads over a wider frequency range.
There is no substitute for common sense. Especially, no body of rules will do.
Since there is no 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear cell phones, you must turn all of your cell phones in by the end of the day. Cell towers will all be deactivated at midnight. Further, wifi will be outlawed, and all those methods of connecting computers will be required to use ethernet cables forthwith. We can't have this public health menace killing millions on a regular basis, we must act. We're going back to land lines and other wire-based solutions where these signals don't radiate through our bodies. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot, the television and radio station transmitters will be limited to 5 watts, resulting in a range of probably 2.5 miles with a poor signal. If you want TV and radio, you will have to get it through a cable, no more broadcasting. In your car? Tough, stop somewhere and get an update on a wired TV or radio. Meanwhile, play "Boston" or an audiobook on the radio, since there won't be any useful signals outside of the sight of a transmitting tower that is running... 5 watts.
That is all...
Thank Heavens somebody finally figured out a way to kill the wankers! Quick, let's issue every rat a free, high-powered cell phone!
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Non ionizing (read radio waves) can generate magnetic eddy currents in an electrolyte solution such as a living organism when the flux (power of transmitter and distance from transmitter are the factor). The magnetic eddy currents can manifest as nerve conduction issues at extreme power. The reason that hand held radio devices built to be held close to the head are limited to 300 milliWatts transmitter power is that such a power level is about a thousand times lower than any somatic biological effect can be measured. The 5 watt maximum power level for cellular phones overall is based on interference possibility with other types of transmission. This stuff has been studied to death since the introduction of microwave ovens in the 1950s. No study has ever shown a clear reproducible effect at reasonable power levels or even several times reasonable power levels. When someone is selling you Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.... follow the money. Often it is a crackpot campaigning for grant money somewhere in the brew.
NRRPT/RCT
For a drug it makes sense to normalize by weight. Does it make sense for this test? The radiation probably isn't evenly distributed in normal use. Mostly hands face and pocket areas I would guess.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes, exactly. And IR and UV exactly do that.
Which is why I said visible light. Indeed UV, not IR, has enough energy to break bonds that causes the damage. This is why you do not get sunburn from a regular light bulb and why there is no known mechanism for radio waves to give you cancer.