This is a better study than previous ones, in that it used "environmental" levels of radiation, rather than blasting subjects with an amount of radiation equivalent to laying your head on top of a cell tower for 22 hours a day.
However: out of 817 individuals in the control group, 2 had benign tumors, 2 had malignant tumors, 1 had glial cell hyperplasia, and 2 had malignant glial tumors. Out of 409 individuals in the highest-dosed group, 4 had benign tumors, 0 had malignant tumors, 0 had glial cell hyperplasia, and 3 had malignant glial tumors.
Rates are elevated, but given the differences in population sizes and the relatively very small differences in rates involved, this study looks like a very good candidate for the decline effect that's been plaguing similar studies for a while now. (e.g. a regression to the mean; that the effect numbers, being small, would disappear in subsequent studies.)
Any potential link between cell phones, or wifi, and cancer, still has the fundamental problem that we should have seen cancer rates rise dramatically over the last 15 years in populations all over the world, and ... we haven't. While there have been more and more findings on other causes for cancer (and preventable mortality, like heart disease), glial cancers aren't increasing in any manner suggestive of a link to ubiquitous environmental microwave radiation.
Right. We already did this experiment, as a society. In the old analog days, people were beaming an actual watt straight into their heads, Bluetooth still being a decade in the future. Now the max is something like an eighth of that (.125 watts), and the towers are much closer so the actual power involved is probably another order of magnitude lower. You would have seen a spike in brain cancer and then a drop, and it would be obvious.
Jacquesm has it right, just an ordinary radio. There was a reason the brick-sized Motorola DynaTAC had only a 30 minute talk time, and it wasn't that the battery was small. Thus the popularity of the carphone, as noted elsewhere. It's hard to get a straight up comparison of transmission strength, because it's highly dependent on how close you are to the tower, but even if you assume max power all the time, it's about an order of magnitude less on digital.
The numbers I can find on Google are the classic Motorola 8000X "Brick phone" (AMPS technology) transmitted at up to 1.5W when handheld, and a modern LTE phone transmits at up to 0.2W.
According to this[1] LTE macrocells range from 20-69W "at the antenna connector." When they operate at the high end of that range, however, they're serving wide, sparely populated areas from atop large towers; you can't usually operate that much power where cell density is high.
And the GP is correct; both the e-field strengths and the exposure intervals in this study are far beyond what people actually experience.
Huh? The ambient e-field is about 50-300 V/m, depending on <all conditions> and can be much stronger during a thunderstorm. However, those are essentially static fields.
Hmm. RF power density in free space is a function of V/m: W/m^2 = (V/m)^2 / 377. The constant at the end is the impedance of free space. If you wish to compute the power absorbed by a rat you'd need to know its impedance, or perhaps the impedance of some specific organ.
That's probably a tough thing to calculate in a definitive manner given the number of conceivable variables. And does it add anything to the conclusion? All rats are likely to impede about the same at some frequency, so whatever the answer is it's effectively a constant; one that a rat can't do much about while remaining a conventional rat. Why not simply rely on the easily measured/reproduced V/m and assume that all such rats are experiencing the same power flux?
If I remember correctly, this rammazini institute is also the one place that found a link between cancer and aspartame, when everyone else found no link. Just checked and, yep, it is. It seems from what I've read about their studies that they are just gonna figure out how to say there is a link, even when the evidence is not very good.
Moreover, the journalistic source link tried to make shwannomas seem dangerous, but a quick reading about the tumor via google suggests that the vast majority of shwannomas are non-cancerous or benign.
Well, even if shwannomas are a relatively minor health risk, it would be pretty big news if low-level microwave radiation was causing them.
At present -- as far as I know -- there's no credible hypothetical mechanism by which microwave radiation at those levels can affect human biological tissue in that way. So, if it turns out that it is having that effect after all, then scientists have got a very interesting problem to investigate, and it would make for a much stronger argument in favor of restricting cellular technology just in case it had other health effects we're unaware of.
(I specified human here because it's an important difference. People have much thicker skulls and chest cavities than rodents, so we would expect that we'd need significantly higher doses of radiation to induce the same effects that are being studied in rodents.)
In the United States, the overall cancer death rate has declined since the early 1990s. The most recent SEER Cancer Statistics Review, updated in September 2016, shows that cancer death rates decreased by:
1.8% per year among men from 2004 to 2013
1.4% per year among women from 2004 to 2013
1.4% per year among children ages 0–19 from 2009 to 2013
There are many many causes of cancer. Even if cellphones are a significant source of cancer, any effect would be almost entirely lost in the noise. Demographic change and frequency of smoking alone explain much of the variation in cancer. That doesn't mean other things don't cause cancer.
Also weird that your statistics start in the mid 2000's when cellphones were widely adopted.
Eh, at that level, an actual effect from mobile phones could have been masked by a bigger decrease in some other effect. Besides, cancer diagnosis is often delayed relative to exposure to carcinogens. I'm keeping my tinfoil hat firmly in place, thank you.
Which you're free to do. But you can't cite cancer rates as the cause for your tinfoil hat. (And should perhaps raise the question of what is causing your tinfoil hat?)
Another study spanning 13 countries found some correlation with the highest use cases, but was cautiously worded that the effects may not be causative: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20483835
An Australian study similarly found no increase in brain cancer rates over its 30-year study period: https://theconversation.com/new-study-no-increase-in-brain-c... (sorry, can't get the original source for this one -- had to dig it out of Google from memory).
The CDC has a cool dataviz tool that compiles a bunch of data from 1999 to 2014 (the most recent year for which it's available): https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/USCS/DataViz.html (click on the "Trends" button near the top). The trend line for annual rates for all new cancers for that period is flat; brain cancers are flat too, although thyroid cancers increase over that period at an unsettling rate. The articles I can find on that suggest that some (though maybe not all) of that increase is due to changes in diagnostic techniques, e.g. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/878030
There have been studies with rodents that did find statistically significant increases, but -- as far as I know -- those have all had some pretty serious methodological issues, like unrealistically massive amounts of exposure or not controlling for the tissue temperature increases that can be caused by exposure to powerful microwave radiation.
All of the big human population studies that I know of have found either no correlation at all, or some correlation but at such small numbers that it could also be statistical noise.
If any large studies have found conclusive statistical correlation in humans between cell phones and cancer, I'm not aware of it. (And would like to be.)
edit: which is not to say btw that cell phones aren't dangerous. They kill people every year -- just not with cancer, but by being a distraction while driving. http://www.nsc.org/learn/NSC-Initiatives/Pages/priorities-ce... . "A Deadly Wandering" is also a pretty okay book about this. Multiple studies described in that book found that, with very very rare exception, people could not safely drive and operate a cell phone at the same time, no matter how good they thought they were at multi-tasking. This is my PSA for the day.
A basic issue that I am not clear on regarding statistics - do we say that 400 or 800 is a pretty good size sample, and therefore our results should be accurate and repeatable, or do we say that the control group's cases of cancer (population x incidence) were not several hundred, and therefore a difference of a few cases is obviously meaningless?
My intuition is that if you did the control portion a hundred times, you would not get exactly the same incidence of cancer, but I never took a statistics course.
Maybe I'm reading something wrong but in your image it shows 19 total malignant brain tumors (Meningeal/Glial) across all exposure groups (n=1631) versus 4 across the control group (n=817).
4/817 = .004
19/1631 = .011
Malignant tumors in rats exposed from 5-50 RFR appear to be 2.75x more likely to have some kind of malignant brain cancer than the control group. That hardly seems inconsequential.
I'm not sure you can compare the groups in that way without distorting the answer to the question being asked.
In a previous study, a side-effect was discovered in which the gender of the researchers handling the rodents had some impact on their tumor rates. They have a more acute sense of smell and male hormones induced a higher level of stress which caused a higher rate of tumors.
So, let's suppose that approximately 1 member of each group will develop a tumor for some reason unrelated to the effect being studied.
If you have 5 groups, one control and 4 experiments, then potentially you'll see a 4x effect increase if you lump the experiment groups together.
This would only hold of course if the effect isn't directly proportional to the population size -- if it's proportional to the number of groups instead. So, I dunno, maybe. But I'd be reluctant to draw any conclusions from numbers for "all experimental groups" vs "one control group".
And while the percentages and ratios involved can look conclusive (varying from 0% to 2.2% -- that's an infinite percentage increase!), the effects in absolute numbers are still quite small.
I mean I'm just working with the data as presented. We can and should look for confounding influences - hence why reproducability is so important. However a mean 2.7x rate increase is not trivial if we start thinking about possible epidemiological impacts.
Based on the evidence available right now, I don't think there's a link between cellular technology and cancer. If there was about one more study like this one -- from an overall reputable research outfit, with a good population size -- I'd start to reconsider.
And if another study is done and doesn't find the same effects, then that's still another interesting case of the decline effect. So, either way, it's a win.
I haven’t run the numbers (but I did download the article), but with that low a level of incidence, I’d worry that we are still in the range of Poisson noise.
I just wanted to offer some related story on cancer.
A long time ago I had the experience to join a alternative medicine (TCM : Traditional Chinese Medicine) group relating to cancer. They said human body is an extremely complex, despite our advance in science we still can not fully understand and explain it. Just like how little we know about our brain, and hormones.
We went to a rural village in China, where they are one of the most heavy smokers. Well not really heavy, but like minimum 2 packs per day. Most of them have been smoking for more then 40 years, so this is no small amount of consumption. There were once a study trying to find links between smoking an cancer. They went to this place and discover their age of dying are mostly past 80, and no one had been treated or diagnosed with cancer.
So the results were against the evidence that heavy smoking results in higher rate of cancer of early death. They wrote down Chinese may not subjected to this rule in their report.
Which we know is bogus, Chinese are no different to any other humans, so what make this village so "special". What we then see is their day in day out routine, all of them are farmers, they get up early, they work ( exercises ), they eat very clean, all food and veg are fresh. As well as fish, they smile and sing while they work. And they are all happy being there. After dinner it is early sleep. Along with the unpolluted air, all these is basically a very healthy life style that most people in City or developed countries failed to achieve.
What the leader then said, we dont have a cure for cancer, or we have. But what we offer is something that most of you wont be able to do. Cancer is an reaction of your body that were caused by multiple factors, and mainly and mostly by you, yourself. Your energy and mind dictates many things. Just like there are many many cases where Western medicine or treatment has said you only have maximum 6 months to live while the patients, with their will power were able to go 3 or 5 years more. Your negative energy and stress are your biggest link to cancer. All other factors were mostly there as multipliers. The whole starting point of TCM is that you should try and not get sick in the first place, and in the case you do, instead of trying to kill off whatever symptoms you have, TCM try to tune your body to better accommodate it and hopefully would self repair it.
There were many other details and little story, but I try to keep it short. I know this may be an unpopular thing, and I wouldn't normally have share it. Until I read about Steve Jobs saved Scott Forstall with Acupuncture in the news, then I realise may be not everyone in the west are against TCM.
I was tempted to ignore this comment, because it's off-topic, but I'm not sure that that's a very good way to handle misinformation on important topics, either.
> They went to this place and discover their age of dying are mostly past 80, and no one had been treated or diagnosed with cancer.
Even if I were to believe this story -- and I don't -- there are many confounding factors in cancer and other biological systems. There are other places where residents have been found to live abnormally long (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/italy-acciaroli-s...). There is some evidence that cancer is common but rarely becomes dangerous because of immune responses, which brings along with it all the usual confounding factors related to immune system health (sleep, diet, exercise, and all the other advice that nobody likes following).
But regardless, there are things which reliably and directly cause an increase in cancer risk, and the question here is whether certain amounts of microwave radiation is one of them.
> Until I read about Steve Jobs saved Scott Forstall with Acupuncture in the news, then I realise may be not everyone in the west are against TCM.
Steve Jobs died of a specific form of pancreatic cancer (initially, a neuroendocrine tumor) that is very treatable and could have been removed surgically when it was discovered, before it advanced into the state that eventually killed him. Had he opted for conventional medicine instead of letting his head be filled with nonsense, he'd probably still be alive.
And in the case of Scott Forstall, if he wasn't treated with Acupuncture, all the previous 7 cases that had symptoms exactly the same as his were all died.
>There is some evidence that cancer is common but rarely becomes dangerous because of immune responses, which brings along with it all the usual confounding factors related to immune system health (sleep, diet, exercise, and all the other advice that nobody likes following).
Agree.
Look, I am not saying TCM solves every problem. It is just there are many things that we dont know. And in the cases of SJ, may be he should have gone to remove it surgically.
What’s problematic about this study is that, even though there were 90 rats in each group, that’s actually a small number to detect meaningful differences in low frequency events. Here’s what I mean. The study reports increased incidences of tumors in the brains and hearts of the male rats. ... Comparing such low frequency events between groups can be very problematic, particularly in the case low plausibility associations with multiple comparisons.
(I originally wrote something about not knowing the control group cancer rates, but
thaumaturgy has access to the paper and addressed that in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16659270)
It's a very low rate of increase, and while it may be statistically significant given the right statistical massage, I don't think I would hang my reputation on that p-value. This research group has come under fire for their numbers before, both from Congress and I believe from NIH. This is just one of hundreds of similar studies on environmental effects, and I don't want to say that these people are in the profession of making mountains over molehills, but I have not read anything about the authors or their institution which has given me any confidence in their result.
I wouldn't stake my reputation on ANY p-value. I don't want to derail the conversation, but the p- value should have been discarded (more or less) years ago.
This one seems better in that it involves an order of magnitude more rats, but it's still so small that just one rat difference makes a huge change in the results.
I also wonder (more for the NTP study due to size) just how many comparable studies have been done where the results were statistically insignificant (or where the results would indicate that cell phone radiation reduced cancer.....) that were then simply dismissed and never publicized because they were uninteresting.
Edit: Also, wouldn't 5G be more desirable because it's going to result in much lower power emissions (both tower and device) much as the change from AMPS to the various digital options drastically reduced power requirements?
The world's largest animal study on cell tower radiation is more likely one of several cohort studies on humans (often with more than a million subjects) which indicate that if there is a non-ionizing radiation link to brain cancer, it is extremely tenuous and completely overshadowed by genetic factors and other lifestyle factors. If cell tower radiation significantly increased the likelihood of malignant cancers, we would know it by all the extra dead people.
What mechanism do they think lead to this "increase". RF we use for telecommunications does not have enough energy for the photo electric effect. At worst it just heats you up. If RF causes cancer then my own body heat should cause cancer...
Also cancers rates in humans have remained pretty much unchanged from my understanding. So if there is an effect is it limited to rat physiology/biology? Like DNA that is more effected by heat ect... Also if I remember right rats have a body temperature of about 38 C or 100 F. So if it is a thermal effect larger animals should have a better buffer.
The sample size is far too low to draw any conclusions. Only a small handful of rats in each group got tumors. The authors must know this! They got a p-value <0.05 for just one of the numbers, the male rats at 50 V/m, 1.4% incidence of Schwannomas. The entire group (both female and male) was only at 1.2% and this was not considered statistically significant. By the way, the one-tenth-dose group (5 V/m) had fully 1.5% incidence of Schwannomas.
And yet the conclusion claims "These experimental studies provide sufficient evidence to call for the re-evaluation of IARC conclusions regarding the carcinogenic potential of RFR in humans." I have no words.
For people who emphasize the "non-ionizing" nature of such EMF. I remember, back in organic chemistry back... oh, some decades ago, learning how non-ionizing EMF could be used to influence reactions and reaction rates.
It may not break bonds, but it still causes them to flex, vibrate, etc. And the resulting variations in configuration, and percent of time spent in such variations, influences chemical reactions.
So, let's say you have a chemical reaction that has a certain chance of producing a malign result or a factor in an eventual malign result.
Let's say your cell phone radiation heightens the level of that reaction.
You just increased your risk. Without directly ionizing anything.
Now, it's been a LONG time since I took chemistry. But while I've seldom seen this aspect of EMF discussed WRT risk from cell phone radiation, I've never seen it refuted.
And no one has a catalog of all the chemical reactions going on in the human body. Including those induced by transient and variable exposure to external agents. Chemicals absorbed through exposure. Drugs taken. Variable biomes. Etc. Much less how EMF might influence them.
Just food for thought.
So, studies like this continue to be warranted. Despite the radiation tacitly being "non-ionizing".
Another one: DNA is conductive. Damage to DNA disrupts this. There is some serious speculation that part of the mechanism the cell uses to detect DNA damage is to look for changes in the conductivity.
If an outside electromagnetic field could induce a current in a damaged piece of DNA, it might interfere with the damage detection mechanism finding that damage. That would not be able to cause cancer, but it could prevent the cell from stopping a cancer from some other cause that it would have otherwise been able to stop.
Can electromagnetic radiation at the frequencies we commonly use induce currents in DNA? At first is would seem unlikely. Cell phones and Wi-Fi are using wavelengths in the ballpark of 20 cm or longer. You'd expect to need an antenna of at least around 5 cm long to be effective (about 1/4 of a wavelength).
DNA is actually about 100 cm long, but it is tightly coiled up so that it fits in the cell. I've not been able to find anything definitive on what the means as far as acting as an antenna goes. There are antenna designs that take a long antenna and fold them into smaller spaces, but it is way beyond me to figure out if DNA can work that way.
I ended up skimming part of it. Doesn't quite get to what I meant, in terms of a clear explanation.
Chemical reaction rates depend in part upon the structure of the reagents (as well, potentially that of a catalyst).
RF can stimulate, without breaking, the intra-molecular chemical bonds. This in turn can produce alterations in the geometry of the molecule. This can, for example, make the site of a potential bonding (a chemical reaction) more accessible, physically and/or in terms of the field strengths of electromagnetic fields of the bonding point bond and also adjacent bonds capable of influencing the rate of reaction.
I found this harder to (quickly) google up than I expected. I guess my chemistry professors were a bit "ahead of the curve"; the department did have the reputation of being one of the top in the country for its size and the type of institution in which it resided.
Another example of this: Discussing nascent concerns in the biochemical and biology fields that rather than saturated fats, manufactured, partially-hydrogenated fats were starting to look like the real culprits in pathologies such as coronary artery disease. This was in 1985.
About 20 years later, I started reading articles in the popular press about these "bad fats".
Anyway, its been too long for me to remember a specific chemical reaction as an example, but the mechanism and explanation of same seemed pretty clear and evident, way back then.
Not "heat" pushing the whole molecule around. Radiation causing e.g. compressional and flexing vibration in the intra-molecular chemical bonds. Sometimes rotation? Transition between configurations for molecules capable of having more than one; corresponding influence on the time spent in each configuration, as the molecule transitioned between them.
P.S. I'm outside academia, and so I face the ubiquitous "paywall" with respect to most journal content and the like. And I'm NO expert in any of this. But the people who were telling me this, were, to the extent I accurately remember and represent what they said.
That linked research is discussing the effects of high energy (between 0 and 1000W, with written analyses of the 150W and 300W conditions) 2.45GHz radiation on the catalyzing properties of specific chemical reactions (CuO-Cu-ZSM-5, BaMnO3, and BaFeO3 catalysts with NO). I certainly was presuming that your vague memories from a standard class you took decades ago were about the common, statistical changes in molecular geometry as a function of heat, and it is possible that your class was discussing the bleeding edge of chemical synthesis at the time ("Since the use of MWs for synthesis reactions first appeared in 1986"). Regardless, the obvious test would be to measure the specific chemical effects on DNA under specific low energy microwave frequencies.
But I've read a lot of comments, over the years, to the effect that non-ionizing radiation simply can't be a factor, because it doesn't remove electrons and break chemical bonds.
And my own, very limited but -- for me, at least, elucidating -- educational experience has been that that is not the case. Non-ionizing radiation can affect chemical reactions.
So, if cell phone radiation is not risk factor in cancer, the argument needs to go further than, "It's non-ionizing."
Your mention of the energy level / quantity of the non-ionizing radiation involved in the link I managed to find, I find to be a pertinent difference.
Anyway, sorry for any annoyance.
P.S. I upvoted your response, by the way. I appreciate it, and I didn't mean to come across as confrontational, if I did.
While I am highly skeptical of RF radiation as a significant cause of cancer, I sympathize with your attitude.
Quite disingenious is the ionizing vs non-ionizing radiation dichotomy. I guess this is historically rooted in the cancerous effects of gammma photons.
Consider the following dilemma: is visible red light ionizing radiation?
If not: how can the non-ionizing red light trigger chemical reactions? or are the cones that sense red light strictly thermal sensors (i.e. bolometers)?
If yes: perhaps we should ban all visible light :)
I prefer this example because
* it is not a hypothetical radiation influence, i.e. most of us can see a red strawberry, in a sense this is a benign photo-chemical reaction, even though red light is typically not classified as 'ionizing', nobody denies cones can sense red light.
* beccause it illustrates that 'ionizing-ness' is not only dependent upon the characteristics of the radiation, but also on the characteristics of the subjected reagents/cellular structures/... which would be a monumental task to verify the harmlessness for all used radio frequencies and all subject reagents/cellullar structures/...
That said, we have bigger problems with other carcinogenous things/behaviours/... so I think the antenna scares are relatively unfounded, although we should keep an open mind for when a more serious effect is ever reported, after all we are using parts of the spectrum that I suspect were virtually completely absent as potential evolution pressures in the past.
the numbers on this are much less impressive than the headline would suggest - we're talking results that depend on singletons.
the treatment is also not really properly controlled, since they don't have a condition which includes rats receiving the same SAR but in some, presumably non-threatening frequency. that is, what if the effects are simply a result of any rat that is RF heated? IMO, it's telling that although they tested a ramp of increasing SAR, they can't claim proportionate incidence, or even monotonically increasing with SAR.
Since Wifi uses other frequencies, the answer is maybe. We simply don't know enough. It looks like the effect found in this study was too faint to draw any conclusions.
The inverse square law says that a Wifi station two rooms away would expose you to very little radiation. Unless of course you mean that your base station is two rooms away but your cell phone connected to it is right next to your head. Then you should move the base station closer so the phone can connect on lower power levels. Or just turn off your phone.
Naturally you can assume the vertical cross section of the radiation pattern will focused below the horizon toward cell phone users. Gain is typically on the order of 8-10 DBi. Power is usually in the low 10's of watts. Line-of-sight to the main lobe of a 30W transmitter with 10 DBi of gain at 100 meters you see an e-field of 0.95 V/m. Anything between you an that tower will drop the e-field by orders of magnitude.
52-6F-62 writes: "We have two over top of us, and another two on the building next door."
The towers above you are radiating away from you. You "see" radiation from the building next door. At least that's the most likely arrangement.
I guess I'm in a side-lobe (~12m down, ~12m to the side), but hopefully the roof is thick enough to dampen a lot (it's flat, so there is a bunch of steel and concrete there).
So am I— in a building of thousands. We have two over top of us, and another two on the building next door. (according to the Canadian map another commentor posted)
However: out of 817 individuals in the control group, 2 had benign tumors, 2 had malignant tumors, 1 had glial cell hyperplasia, and 2 had malignant glial tumors. Out of 409 individuals in the highest-dosed group, 4 had benign tumors, 0 had malignant tumors, 0 had glial cell hyperplasia, and 3 had malignant glial tumors.
https://imgur.com/a/VeEUb
Rates are elevated, but given the differences in population sizes and the relatively very small differences in rates involved, this study looks like a very good candidate for the decline effect that's been plaguing similar studies for a while now. (e.g. a regression to the mean; that the effect numbers, being small, would disappear in subsequent studies.)
Any potential link between cell phones, or wifi, and cancer, still has the fundamental problem that we should have seen cancer rates rise dramatically over the last 15 years in populations all over the world, and ... we haven't. While there have been more and more findings on other causes for cancer (and preventable mortality, like heart disease), glial cancers aren't increasing in any manner suggestive of a link to ubiquitous environmental microwave radiation.