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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.
who keeps buying cell phones for rats!?
not quite true, heating sufficiently can break chemical bonds. For example, a well known consequence of working around military radar equipment is higher than average rate of tumors in eye and testicles.
Cell phones obviously can heat tissue, a little.
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.
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.
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
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.
That's proof that cell phones cause Deja Vu.
Never happened. True story.
In fact I am assured that my comment, that a superset beyond already-proven carcinogens in our scientific knowledge base will in fact be proven harmful to human life in my lifetime, is true. I only need one.
Well, yes, you only need one, because you're not saying anything of value. Your claim is "there's something dangerous out there", and the response to that is "yeah, no shit". Come back when you figure out which things are dangerous and can prove it.
If you swallow an entire hot tub's worth of water, you may drown.
Yes. There is clear evidence that research causes cancer in rats.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Hot tubs kill people via hundreds of actual vectors none of which are cancer.
My damn hot tub has never killed anybody. My gun is sitting on the table in the same room as the hot tub and it has never killed anybody, either.
I assume they are keeping a murderous eye on each other!
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