Cellphone radiation is harmful, but few want to believe it: researcher
publichealth.berkeley.edu
publichealth.berkeley.edu
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/dont-fall-...
I'm not saying that means it's dangerous, just trying to clarify.
If you assume that people use their 5G phones to transmit a terabyte per month because the speed is so convenient, while they used their EDGE phones for a kilobyte per month, that'a a higher total load, so you can reasonably say that 5G involves higher radiation. Or you can compare for the same transmission, and find that it's lower.
You may also assume that the damage done isn't linear with the transmission power or operating frequency, which complicates matters even more. But generally, 5G uses less power to do the same work than 4G, which in turn uses less… because in each new generation, there's a little better error correction and 64QAM is replaced by 128QAM or so, and so they reduce transmission power a little until the reduced power is again just enough for the better error correction and denser codec.
IMO, a lot of this comes down to "doing things is more dangerous than not", which is nearly always true. Sports may keep you fit but your risk of breaking a leg is higher than if you were sitting in front of a TV. Transmitting data is riskier than not. But also more useful, because not watching youtube in HD is clearly useless, while watching them is worth some risk.
With that in mind, what's the relative transmission power for 4G vs 5G if both are using all their respective maximum bandwidth?
Or the same if you want to compare early 5G with late 4G, because this is really the same thing. They deploy improvements all the time, and after some number of improvements they rename.
> Many biologists and electromagnetic field scientists believe the modulation of wireless devices makes the energy more biologically active, which interferes with our cellular mechanisms, opening up calcium channels, for example, and allowing calcium to flow into the cell and into the mitochondria within the cell, interfering with our natural cellular processes and leading to the creation of stress proteins and free radicals and, possibly, DNA damage. And, in other cases, it may lead to cell death.
If cell phones caused even a small increase in cancer rates we would be seeing a massive epidemic, what we see instead is a steady decline in overall cancer rates: https://www.statista.com/statistics/184566/deaths-by-cancer-...
It's not hard to believe that there's pressure from the telecom industry to not find out these kinds of things. However, it seems quite feasible for a lab today to rigorously measure the effect of cellphone radiation on voltage-gated calcium channels to verify these claims.
nor would I expect them to. if we are talking about cell damage, i'm not wanting to hear from an electrical engineer. i want to hear from a medical professional specializing in cellular activity. a cancer doctor, some sort of micro biologist, or something in that realm would be much more credible when discussing the damage of cells due to whatever cause.
Show me studies where these doctors are working with physicists to setup the RF in controlled environments to study the effects of the radio waves on cellular activity, then I'll be much more interested. There's just too much fringe people pushing this that my natrual inclinations is to not believe it. However, that's not to say that I am unwilling to change my mind if shown actual evidence versus what's there now. I'm just saying I haven't seen any.
Edit: some additional thoughts. There is a controversial treatment using EMF to treat glial blastomas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternating_electric_field_the...), the proposed mechanism is that it interrupts mitosis. This method is unlike the one put forward by Dr. Moskowitz which relies on an increase in necrosis/apoptosis.
The only time I have ever seen anyone consider biology has been work outsourcing modelling hands for antenna design for handsets.
Are they really claiming that cell-phone radiation is dangerous because it's like rainbows?
> After reading many animal toxicology studies that found that this radiation could increase oxidative stress — free radicals, stress proteins and DNA damage
Not knowing enough about chemistry, I could imagine the radiation being able to affect some of the weaker bonds in certain chemicals, breaking them, and creating more energetic new compounds. This could be damaging to among other things, DNA.
I know the photo-voltaic effect means there is a certain threshold frequency needed to be able to affect such bonds. I have no idea whether there are any chemical bonds that can be affected by say 5.8Ghz radiation. (Highest frequency non 5G phones should be emitting)
Nope. Unless those bonds could break due to localised heating, that's not going to happen. Radio waves have lower per-photon energies than are required to break bonds (except really really weak ones, but those can barely be called bonds in the first place).
What you are describing is ionizing radiation, which RF and microwave is not.
Light from the sun is more powerful than cell phone radiation. Being outside, or by a window, is far more dangerous.
> modulation of wireless devices
> makes the energy more biologically active
> our cellular mechanisms
> natural cellular processes
> stress proteins and free radicals
Define any of the above, and point to a reputable source when any of the above phrases are used. It's a collection of phrases which are all "off", like a foreign person with broken english.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulation
• No clue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_activity doesn't apply. (This is a crank warning sign.)
• This is too generic to answer out of context.
• Same as the above, perhaps with the naturalistic fallacy thrown in (also a crank warning sign).
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_hormone and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-radical_theory_of_aging
Of your six quotes, only two (maybe three) of them are crank warning signs, and two have clear, well-defined meanings.
Free radicals: It's very difficult to create free radicals with photons that has less energy than UV rays. And the photons of cell phones has a few order of magnitude less energy. The term is well defined, but it's almost impossible that it's relevant.
Stress hormone: Your link is about hormones produced by glands, and in the sentence it looks like some modification of each cell. Again, the term is well defined, but I'm not sure they are talking about the same thing, and it's not very probable that it's relevant.
I doubt he's right, but I'm not confident enough to laugh at him. Even relatively low-intensity radio waves affect neurons, so it's not like they have no effect on the body.
Except the Sun generates a tremendous mish-mash of modulated EM radiation, so "modulation" is also a nonsense argument.
What's next for the Gish gallop crowd?
> The period in which the Sun passes behind a geostationary satellite is brief — about 10 minutes at most according to Dr Carter — but the noise is enough to degrade or completely disrupt radio and television broadcasts, as well as satellite internet.
Is this correct? I'm not much more than a layman in physics, but I thought RF, being below the visible spectrum, is non-ionizing thus unable to cause any cell damage.
Edit: Besides from microwaves or similar oscillating fields.
I'm sceptical that low levels of non-ionising radiation can do damage, but it's not physically impossible. (I know of no biological mechanism by which it could cause harm, but I'm no biologist.)
a) individual rays/particles have enough energy to knock electrons off ("ionizing radiation"). This is dependent on wavelength/frequency, not the amount of radiation, so even small amounts can be possibly problematic.
b) quantity of radiation brings enough energy to heat things up, cause damage through heating.
Cell phones have neither problem.
Yes. Otherwise a microwave oven would just sear stuff. Radio frequency penetrates meat. It doesn't do it well, because meat has high impedance, but it does penetrate.
Disclaimer: I don't believe cell phones are causing cancer; there just isn't enough power involved. It's all bunk.
Remember that cells are stateful biochemical machines, so it's not just instantaneous damage from radiation as the only possible pathway. If the authors are right and the cells are in some way receptive to the modulated emissions, some bio-structures might be like antenna and demodulators, stimulating the cells at many lower frequency scales. An analogy here could be a crystal radio which demodulates AM broadcasts into an audible frequency, or the way old GSM call negotiation patterns would induce an audible pattern in computer speakers.
This summary of occupational safety concerns for mechanical vibration covers a topic I found interesting when it first appeared as a news item years ago: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6415671/
I know you might say this is vastly different scales of energy between whole body vibration from an industrial job and emissions from a battery-powered cell phone. My observation is merely that there are many ways that we might naively think that our bodies are robust, while with repeated exposure to seemingly harmless conditions, subtle damage accumulates.
This gives me tinfoil-hat vibes to be honest. Why would millimeter waves specifically promote the growth of drug-resistant pathogens? What's the overlap?
> Second, distance is your friend. Keeping your cellphone 10 inches away from your body, as compared to one-tenth of an inch, results in a 10,000-fold reduction in exposure.
So logically if there was a correlation of any kind between cell phone use and brain cancer we could virtually eliminate the effect by all using headsets which sounds less dramatic and interesting than cell phone usage is the new smoking.
It doesn't help that the person calling out the dangers is in psych as opposed to medicine or physics.
In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limited to 2.5 milliwatts, giving it a very short range of up to 10 meters (30 feet).
If I read correctly a cell phone is using more like 1-2W so 800 times as strong. One could also use something, the horror, with a wire!
“The exposures used in the studies cannot be compared directly to the exposure that humans experience when using a cell phone,” said John Bucher, Ph.D., NTP senior scientist. “In our studies, rats and mice received radio frequency radiation across their whole bodies. By contrast, people are mostly exposed in specific local tissues close to where they hold the phone. In addition, the exposure levels and durations in our studies were greater than what people experience.”
That... kind of feels backwards. If the effect is real, it should show up more powerfully in larger studies, not smaller studies. Especially if you're crusading against purported broad environmental harm, the whole-environment studies seem the most relevant: even if some specific uses of cell phones may be harmful, that the way the average public uses it isn't one of those uses is important (that's one way to square the evidence, but I don't entirely believe it's the best way).
I do understand there can be heating effects from non-ionizing radiation but the power levels seem really, really low, <2 watts. That seems like an amount of heat that can be easily dissipated.
This article says that I'm missing something. I'm wondering what that is.
These aren't true as a rule, but generally good as guidelines. Ionizing radiation gives way to widespread, molecule agnostic damage in molecular systems; it's powerful enough to pop pieces of molecules off. Ionizing energy is the equivalent of firing a light cannon to blow chunks off molecules; the damage is immediate, consistent, widespread and dangerous.
Non-ionizing radiation, by contrast, is absorbed selectively. A given wavelength will only be absorbed if it corresponds with the specific quantum of an excitation level of the target system. This means uptake of energy will be molecule specific; chromophores are examples of molecules specifically designed to take advantage of this; it's how we see.
Microwaves, for instance, are non-ionizing radiation. We know a surplus of microwave radiation can cook people through. It does this because microwaves are the right wavelength to vibrate the bonds in water. UV radiation is also considered non-ionizing, but DNA will absorb it, and the photochemical result of that absorption is the formation of Pyrimidine dimers (TT dimers). This direct damage to our genetic codes is the primary cause of skin cancer and is so dangerous that we have evolved an extensive set of molecular machines to excise and repair this specific problem.
So no, non-ionizing radiation is not uniformly safe and biologically inert. This isn't to say 5G is unsafe - remember things are wavelength and dose specific; it's just to say the reasoning "non ionizing never causes biological harm" is very wrong.
The argument "since cell phones don't emit non-ionizing radiation, they can't cause cancer" is simply incorrect.
So less dangerous than bacon, then, and only if you appropriately exclude studies in the same manner that they did.
Maybe cell phones prevent brain cancer by exciting the immune system via whatever mechanism he proposes that it also "promotes the growth of drug-resistant pathogens" /s
> In 2001, based upon the biologic and human epidemiologic research, low-frequency fields were classified as “possibly carcinogenic” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization. In 2011, the IARC classified radiofrequency radiation as “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” based upon studies of cellphone radiation and brain tumor risk in humans. Currently, we have considerably more evidence that would warrant a stronger classification.
> Most recently, on March 1, 2021, a report was released by the former director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which concluded that there is a “high probability” that radiofrequency radiation emitted by cellphones causes gliomas and acoustic neuromas, two types of brain tumors.
And why this?
> Our government, however, stopped funding research on the health effects of radiofrequency radiation in the 1990s
In 2011 (maybe 2013?[1]), the IARC put radiofrequency electromagnetic fields in group 2B,[0] which is basically “we're a little worried there might be a problem, but we haven't actually replicated it”.
I thought I remembered them taking it off that list sometime around 2017, but apparently they didn't. Nonetheless, this isn't them agreeing with the claim.
[0]: https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E....
[1]:
https://www.publicnewsservice.org/2021-03-24/health/prominen...
https://www.saferemr.com/2021/03/expert-report-by-former-us-...
The CDC guy at least seems to think there's plenty of evidence at this point. There are also citations claiming government tests are outdated fwiw, .e.g. maybe we're not appropriately testing the health effects.
All mostly new to me.
Regulatory capture?
Among many sentences that made me chuckle, "Millimeter waves can ... promote the growth of drug-resistant pathogens." What? How?
You don't have to tell me it's a bad idea to stand on top of an FM radio tower emitting kilowatts of RF energy in the VHF spectrum. That's gonna burn pretty bad.
But I'm going to need some more serious scientific analysis of how a <5W transmitter in my pocket or home is doing anything more serious than my yearly dental X-Ray's.
Sanity check:
If that study would be correct, it should show up national statistics. Brain cancers rates have decreased from the 90s. https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/brain.html
Also stressors are does dependent, e.g. despite earth's atmosphere being 78% by volume Nitrogen: the marginal effect on your health of marginally more nitrogen isn't stable/linear. I wouldn't recommend you increase it so much, so to some degree we need to discount opinions that "we exist in a EM/RF soup ergo an iota more isn't hazardous).
Let's also not confuse the ensemble and individual components. As RF electronics, protocols improveve, so does the minimum necessary energy. That is "the minimum necessary energy for 5G radios" <= "the minimum necessary energy 4G" isn't the comparison we should be making. What we should be assessing is going from effectsOf(2G,3G,4G) < Safelevels to effectsOf(2G,3G,4G,*5G*) < Safelevels. e.g. adding another layer of EM energy
I have no idea if the health assertions in this article are true or not but rather than unjustifiably upgrade an opinion of "I don't see how that could be the case" to "that *can't* be the case" I'll stick with the skeptics response of "I don't know".
The commenters are factually wrong. This is based on a assumption made by physicists about biology which is completely unsupported. It happened back when people claimed living near power lines caused cancer (they don't- people who live near power lines tend to be poorer and have worse health outcomes) and the physicists "proved" it was impossible.
Unfortunately for the physicists, they didn't actually understand medical biology and now research indicates there are other mechanisms which lead to cancer that don't require ionizing radiation.
If there’s a tower in your neighborhood the. Your kid’s phone will emit less power than it would to reach a farther away tower.
> Our main takeaway from the current review is that approximately 1,000 hours of lifetime cellphone use, or about 17 minutes per day over a 10-year period, is associated with a statistically significant 60% increase in brain cancer.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mind-control-by-c...
In short - if the effect is real, should there also be an observable increase in (forgive me) butt cancers?
We know that non-ionizing radiation can be harmful at a high enough dose (like sticking your hand in a microwave.)
This research suggests that non-ionizing radiation might not have a safe upper limit, either, only that we haven't totally quantified the damage it causes.
And heat itself is carcinogenic, yes -- drinking hot beverages is independently associated with a higher risk of mouth, throat, esophageal, and stomach cancer.
> First, minimize your use of cellphones or cordless phones — use a landline whenever possible. If you do use a cellphone, turn off the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth if you’re not using them. However, when near a Wi-Fi router, you would be better off using your cellphone on Wi-Fi and turning off the cellular because this will likely result in less radiation exposure than using the cellular network.
> Second, distance is your friend. Keeping your cellphone 10 inches away from your body, as compared to one-tenth of an inch, results in a 10,000-fold reduction in exposure. So, keep your phone away from your head and body. Store your phone in a purse or backpack. If you have to put it in your pocket, put it on airplane mode. Text, use wired headphones or speakerphone for calls. Don’t sleep with it next to your head — turn it off or put it in another room.
> Third, use your phone only when the signal is strong. Cellphones are programmed to increase radiation when the signal is poor, that is when one or two bars are displayed on your phone. For example, don’t use your phone in an elevator or in a car, as metal structures interfere with the signal.
Is there any science to this at all? However tenuous it may be I’m curious about the underlying rational for these recommendations. Particularly the first and third. They come across as a bit... superstitious? And unfortunately the article make no attempt at explaining the “why” behind the “what”.
he's a known crank; he's been on this for years; you'd think he'd see a reasonable effect size by now!
How so?