
High exposure to radio frequency radiation associated with cancer in male rats - swebs
https://factor.niehs.nih.gov/2018/11/feature/1-feature-radiation/index.htm
======
hwillis
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355680](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355680)

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smohare
I’ve been following these studies for awhile. The biggest red flag for me is
that the effect is constrained to _male_ rates. This is exactly the sort of
result you expect to see when not sufficiently controlling for multiple
statistical analyses (i.e., unintentional p-hacking). I suspect a Bayesian
approach with an appropriate prior on sex-sensitive biological cancer effects
would not yield statistically significant results.

Some other broad concerns are outlined here:
[https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/that-rat-
cellp...](https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/that-rat-cellphone-
study-im-still-not-impressed/)

~~~
buboard
clinical and research studies typically use male rats to control for the
effects of hormonal changes etc.

~~~
learc83
They used female rats as well in this study. That's not what happened here.

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sathackr
Here we go again.

"The RFR exposure was intermittent, 10 minutes on and 10 minutes off, totaling
about nine hours each day. RFR levels ranged from 1.5 to 6 watts per kilogram
in rats, and 2.5 to 10 watts per kilogram in mice."

Even the lowest amount cited, 1.5w/kg, is far above what a human would receive
standing directly in front of a cell tower transmitting antenna.

They basically cooked(because RF _does_ cause heating) the mice alive for two
years, and they developed cancer.

Interesting that the rats, who appear to have been exposed to lower amounts of
RF, were the group identified as developing cancer.

Would be nice if articles like this actually linked to the study.

~~~
gruez
>1.5w/kg, is far below what a

don't you mean "far above"?

~~~
sathackr
Yes...will fix

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mchannon
The original Radarange (microwave) cooked at either 500 or 800 watts, the
upper number of which is the upper range in the study (10W/kg), where a human
might weigh 80kg, = 800 watts.

My late uncle was in the US Army in Desert Storm. During that period, it was
always hot, even at night, and the most comfortable place to sleep at night
was on top of the humvee's hood.

But one night the radar got left on overnight, and he literally got cooked
from the inside out (when it's 100 degrees outside, it's hard to pick up on
that sort of thing).

He had health problems for the remainder of his life and died young (never
found out how, but cancer would be my first guess). I really liked him.

~~~
prolikewh0a
Radar would be quite a lot of RF radiation!

~~~
jcims
I don’t know anything about the system in question but if it was mounted on a
humvee it would have to be low power to avoid cooking people in the beam. Plus
there will be so many reflections in an urban environment and the ranges are
so short that you’d likely do better with a low power system. Maybe on the
order of 5-25 watts.

That said, sinking say 10W of heat into your organs overnight is going to do
serious damage.

~~~
ac29
>That said, sinking say 10W of heat into your organs overnight is going to do
serious damage.

Is it? Electric heating pads and electric blankets are certainly a thing, and
they're around 10W (the one I have says 50W).

~~~
jcims
I had a 5W CB radio a few years ago and bought one of those 'through the
windshield' antennas. It basically operates by sticking two panels of tuned
copper plates on each side of the glass and they just pass the RF energy
between them.

I made the mistake of trying to see if I could feel the 5 watts of RF energy
coming from the radio side of the plate. I stuck the panel to my palm, keyed
the mic, and instantly felt a searing, stabbing pain in my hand. It felt like
a hot nail was jammed into the meat of my palm and was very surprisingly
painful.

As blattimwind said above, the distribution of RF energy in the body is going
to be very unpredictable at that distance and you could have hot spots deep in
the tissue that are not innervated. If you got a hot spot anywhere near what I
experienced with that CB antenna I'm absolutely confident there would be
tissue damage.

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jcims
Whenever this topic comes up, there are inevitably scores of commenters
shitting on the ‘scientifically ignorant’ because cell phones emit non-
ionizing radiation and therefore are not carcinogenic.

To me the important outcome of this study is to demonstrate that there is a
spectrum (har har) of dosage and that there is now a fleck of evidence that
non-ionizing radiation can cause cancer at higher levels.

The fact that humans are 50-100x the body mass of a rat is important
obviously, but if most of the RF is being absorbed by the first few inches of
brain matter by your ear maybe the effective difference isn’t so great.

~~~
daveFNbuck
Body mass isn't the only difference between humans and male rats. Humans are
more different from male rats than female rats are, and these studies didn't
produce evidence that RF causes cancer in female rats. It didn't produce this
evidence in male or female mice either. They also only say that the evidence
is clear for heart tissue.

Human brains aren't made of male rat heart tissue, so we should be safe even
if this conclusion is valid. More importantly, hundreds of millions of people
have been using cell phones for decades now and no one has noticed a spike of
brain cancer near the ears.

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jacquesm
"He also noted the unexpected finding of longer lifespans among the exposed
male rats. “This may be explained by an observed decrease in chronic kidney
problems that are often the cause of death in older rats,” said Wyde."

Some well known Dutch soccer pro long ago observed that 'every downside has
its upside', this seems to be one of those.

~~~
superpermutat0r
Such a shame that hormesis is very visible in rats, yet nothing happens to
humans.

~~~
EForEndeavour
Hormesis has been observed in humans.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis#Ionizing_radiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis#Ionizing_radiation)

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all2
There is some indication that RF can alter cellular function.

Function of Voltage Gated Calcium channels [0] (in ~human~ cells) has been
shown to be altered by incident RF [1][2].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltage-
gated_calcium_channel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltage-
gated_calcium_channel)

[1]
[https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2017/09/...](https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2017/09/03/electromagnetic-
fields-harmful-effects.aspx)

[2] [http://www.eurekaselect.com/141390](http://www.eurekaselect.com/141390)

[edit] Got information wrong, not human cells, animal cells. [/edit]

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DiabloD3
"RFR levels ranged from 1.5 to 6 watts per kilogram in rats, and 2.5 to 10
watts per kilogram in mice."

So, they put them in a microwave.

~~~
hu3
> "RFR levels ranged from 1.5 to 6 watts per kilogram in rats, and 2.5 to 10
> watts per kilogram in mice.". So, they put them in a microwave.

Not sure how you reached that conclusion. Microwave ovens often range from
600w to 1200w. So no, that's not anything close to that. Not to mention the
animals would die quite quickly and there would be no experiment to be done.

~~~
mbell
Some napkin math:

It looks like mouse/rat weight varies widely, I'm going to be lazy and just
pick 400g and from what I can tell, that also means about 400cm^2 body volume.
Ultimately all that matters is the density though, which is unsurprisingly
pretty close to water, close enough I'm not going to bother with it.

microwave power density = 1200W * 0.75 (efficiency estimate) / 22500cm^3
(interior volume) = 0.04W/cm^3

So in this experiment we have 1.5w to 10w * 0.4kg = 0.6W to 4W

In a 1200W microwave: 400cm^2 * 0.04W = 16W

In an 600W microwave: 8W (tho a 600W microwave is probably smaller so this may
be low)

So a microwave would be 2-4 times more radiation than what they were exposed
to in this experiment. Likely my power-to-rat-delivery estimate is a bit low
for the microwave since I didn't take into account any sort of chamber
resonance / reflection in the microwave enclosure, just it's baseline power
density. Though, it would still get no where near dumping all it's power into
something the size of a rat.

~~~
blattimwind
You're assuming that the interior of the microwave behaves like an uniform
field, so if you occupy 50 % of the volume, only 50 % of the power can be
coupled to that object. This is not the case. There are some (big) losses in
how power is coupled to the object in the microwave, but it's not 98 %. Also
note that the power is coupled through the surface, so for power transfer it's
mostly important that you have (1) big surface (2) surface depth exceeding
penetration depth. The exact coupling is "dirty" (near field), so it doesn't
just depend on surface area, but also surface structure, precise alignment
etc.

E.g. a ball of mashed potatoes takes longer to heat up than a ring/donut-
shaped arrangement of the same mashed potatoes.

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rossdavidh
So, I'm not saying they shouldn't be investigating this, but widespread cell
phone usage has been here for a while now. Can't we just look at the actual
rate of death from brain cancer (death rates not diagnosis rates since this
reduces the bias from changes in how often it is detected), and see if there's
been an increase in brain cancer? From what I've found, there has not. The
frequency of people holding the cell phone right next to their head while
talking on it has actually been going down in recent years, as texting and
other ways of using the phone have replaced audio phone calls. If this was
going to be a problem, it seems like we would have seen it by now?

~~~
freefolks
My father recently died from a brain cancer. It was a tumor originally so he
had surgery to get the 6cm tumor removed. After the removal of the tumor it
immediately started to grow back and was diagnosed stage 4. When he asked the
surgeon how did he get cancer. The surgeon replied with "Sometimes we have bad
luck". Within a Month the cancer grew back to the original 6cm. He decided to
try chemotherapy but after doing it once he decided to not go through that
again. He seemed fine for the next 3 months, coherent eating then he
deteriorated very quickly and died exactly within the timeframe he was told.

Cancer does not run on either side of my parents families. During the last few
years up until he passed, he used to go hours everyday wearing wireless
headphones, falling asleep with them on, watching tv, listening to music.

That is the only thing that I can think of that could possibly make any remote
sense. I refuse to believe "bad luck" is the only reason.

~~~
nonbel
"Luck" just means we don't have enough information to say why so you use a
statistical model instead. In the same way we treat winning a coin flip as due
to luck but you could devise a situation where you know exactly what will
happen given all the right parameters are known. In the past people called the
same thing "god's will".

That said, it doesn't mean the cancer needed to be heavily influenced by any
conscious choice/behavior made by your father.

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robocat
A rat generates 2W per hour (total daily energy budget is 172kJ for a rat
[1]).

The highest level of radio-frequency-radiation was 3W per hour [2].

That seems like a significant extra load on their system, although obviously
depends on cage temperature and ability to regulate internal temperature.

[1]
[https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1113/eph88...](https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1113/eph8802521)

[2] From article: "The RFR exposure was intermittent, 10 minutes on and 10
minutes off, totaling about nine hours each day. RFR levels ranged from 1.5 to
6 watts per kilogram in rats".

------
apo
_He also noted the unexpected finding of longer lifespans among the exposed
male rats. “This may be explained by an observed decrease in chronic kidney
problems that are often the cause of death in older rats,” said Wyde._

Looking at the source data in the report for male rate survival probability
([https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/htdocs/lt_rpts/tr595_508.pdf](https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/htdocs/lt_rpts/tr595_508.pdf),
page 66), the increase in survival appears to be dose-dependent. In other
words, the higher the dose of radiation, the better the survival rate after 76
weeks. This is what I'd expect to see for a real effect as opposed to an
artifact.

The lack of error bars makes it hard to give significance to the finding,
though.

The female group (second graph on page) show no clear difference.

Looking at the table on the preceding page, the main effect appears to be
reduction of moribund state. There might be multiple explanations here. For
example, an animal that can't move can't feed itself properly and so will
succumb to malnutrition sooner.

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carbocation
I'm just skimming so I might have missed a better link, but this seems to be
the biorxiv of the actual study:
[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/02/01/055699](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/02/01/055699)

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nicodds
When I was in academia, I was involved in experiments consisting in the
exposure of flies (drosophila melanogaster) to 900 MHz controlled
electromagnetic fields.

I participated to the design of the exposure chamber, essentially a bi-planar
transmission line, with a peak electric field near 220 V/m.

We were able to find evidence of an effect only after 7 days of continuous
exposure to the field.

The effect was an up-regulation of the genes encoding for a stress-response
protein (Hsp70, aka heat-shock protein).

We tried also exposure to pulsed high intensity magnetic field (~1T for 2
usec) for 3 hours, 1 pulse per second. Same effect.

My opinion is that, as long as fields are at low intensity and for short
periods, we can consider such exposures as moderately safe

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i_am_proteus
Seemingly missing from the article, but present in the paper: the RF was at
900 MHz and 1900 MHz. Both frequencies are in the range in which water absorbs
RF. Checks with "these scientists slow-cooked the mice with radio waves."

~~~
etatoby
Both frequencies are also exactly the same used by cell phones and—more
importantly—high power cell phone towers.

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YeGoblynQueenne
>> He also noted the unexpected finding of longer lifespans among the exposed
male rats. “This may be explained by an observed decrease in chronic kidney
problems that are often the cause of death in older rats,” said Wyde.

Excuse me, what? Their exposure to RFR _prevented kidney problems_? Won't
anyone follow up on that?

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foxhop
Want to read some scary stuff, checkout how 5G "topology" works. Essentially
everything (including living things) become antenna for the network. It is
quiet different tech than 3 and 4G.

~~~
sathackr
You're not an antenna, you're a reflector.

Just like you are a reflector for RFR at much greater power levels and much
higher frequencies (light), yet only the highest energy ones(UV and above)
cause cancer, and that is because they are of a sufficiently high energy that
they are able to knock electrons away from atoms, turning them into
ions(ionizing radiation).

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choot
Why would it be surprising when proteins offer life form and function. If
Radio frequency radiation can alter form of a protein then we might develop
cancer?

You only have to alter few proteins, so the duplication of cell become
errrorneous and all subsequent cells are affected.

You can prove this in testube, simply bombard a protein with Radio waves.

Edit: i don't understand the downvotes, please educate.

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ahmedyounes
that's why you should ground yourself for good time on daily bases many
youtube videos can explain how to ground your office space even your bed
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wPqh4DNfwg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wPqh4DNfwg)

~~~
anonuser123456
Don't forget to wrap your blanket in tinfoil.

~~~
Redoubts
You're thinking too small. Why not have a conductive blanket.

[http://www.lessemf.com/bedding.html](http://www.lessemf.com/bedding.html)

Or just paint your walls and make your home a Faraday's cage?

[http://www.lessemf.com/paint.html](http://www.lessemf.com/paint.html)

