Cellphone Radiation Is Harmful, but Few Want to Believe It | Hacker News Reader

Cellphone Radiation Is Harmful, but Few Want to Believe It

neurosciencenews.com

28 pointsbogle48 comments

From the abstract of the latest meta-analysis the author published:

"In a meta-analysis of 46 case-control studies, compared with never or rarely having used a cellular phone, regular use was not associated with tumor risk in the random-effects meta-analysis. However, in the subgroup meta-analysis by research group, there was a statistically significant positive association (harmful effect) in the Hardell et al. studies (OR, 1.15—95% CI, 1.00 to 1.33— n = 10), a statistically significant negative association (beneficial effect) in the INTERPHONE-related studies (case-control studies from 13 countries coordinated by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC); (OR, 0.81—95% CI, 0.75 to 0.89—n = 9), and no statistically significant association in other research groups’ studies. Further, cellular phone use with cumulative call time more than 1000 h statistically significantly increased the risk of tumors."

I'm far from an expert in the statistical interpretation of such statements, but to me, these results look all over the place. Furthermore, it seems that ALL the studies in the meta-analysis that found harmful effects originated from teams led by the same researcher (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Hardell), which, to be sure, is an interesting insight, but not one that should necessarily strengthen the belief in the hypothesis.

>> meta-analysis of 46 case-control studies

A meta-analysis draws data from other studies. It does not (and should never) support conclusive evidence.

There was another "claim" regarding PPI and dementia possible link [1] which was a meta-study as well. At least their sample (N > 5000) was large enough to cause interest, but as I like to mention, correlation does not infer causation.

[1] https://n.neurology.org/content/early/2023/08/09/WNL.0000000...

It's not just Hardell. It's also Martin Pall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Pall), though that Wikipedia page does not do him justice. Any time you see "EMF interferes with calcium channels", that's Pall. The linked article avoids naming him by using the Trump-esque "lots of people are saying" phrasing regarding calcium channels.

Pall has written numerous "research" papers about how smart electric meters, cell phones (especially 5g), and Wifi will lead to the imminent extinction of the human race[0].

His 2018 paper[1] found that "oxidative stress, sperm/testicular damage, neuropsychiatric effects including changes in the encephalogram (EEG), apoptosis, cellular DNA damage, endocrine changes, and calcium overload are established effects of WiFi exposure". Which sounds pretty bad!

However, as a meta study noted[2] in referencing that 2018 paper, "this review was heavily criticized for selective reporting, for ignoring the quality of the studies, for ignoring the level of exposure, for including studies that did not apply WiFi signals, and for inadequate description of the study results"

That's typical; every time Pall publishes, the journal is flooded with rebuttals from misquoted sources and readers who note things like (regarding Pall's claims that 5G causes mass sterilization): "In the case of the effects on sperm and infertility, effects should exclusively be included in humans (or human cells), but of the 8 articles cited in this section, only 1 was in humans (Yildirim et al., 2015) based on anonymous questionnaires. It is not an adequate study to conclude any possible effect of exposure to Wi-Fi in humans since no other variables were controlled (food, air pollution, antecedents, previous pathologies ...). Even, the sample was obtained from an infertility clinic and there was no control group and the authors claim that no differences were found."[3]

Pall's game is a long con -- he's been at it so long that he can cite his own body of work as "massive literature, providing a high level of scientific certainty, for each of eight pathophysiological effects caused by non-thermal microwave frequency EMF exposures"[4]

Not coincidentally, Pall runs the non-profit 5G Free Oregon[5], where you are invited to contribute funds to combat the scourge of EMF that is always just on the verge of causing total societal collapse.

0. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/how-basel...

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393511...

2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/10643389.2021.1...

3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393511...

4. https://www.icnirp.org/cms/upload/consultation_upload/Respon...

5. https://5gfreeoregon.org/

"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."

So, brain cancer is on the rise? (Or better diagnosed?)

"the chance that a person will develop a malignant tumor of the brain or spinal cord in their lifetime is less than 1%." https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/brain-spinal-cord-tumors...

It's a 60% of increase of that 1%. So still a low overall risk, while being statistically significant.

1% of the population of the US is about 3million people. A 60% increase means an additional 1.8 million brain or spinal cord tumors. Now multiply that by about 10 to cover the global urban population. If some of the findings are real the impacts might be even worse in rural areas where network is more spotty so phones are more likely to increase intensity of radiation.

Unless I'm mistaken, it's not 1% of the American population that has brain cancer. It's that each individual has less than a 1% chance of developing brain cancer. So, if this figure of less than 1% is in fact on the order of 0.5%, a 60% increase in this figure would take it to 0.8%.

"In 2023, an estimated 24,810 adults (14,280 men and 10,530 women) in the United States will be diagnosed with primary cancerous tumors of the brain and spinal cord." https://www.cancer.net/cancer-types/brain-tumor/statistics#:...

24810 is 0.0074751431153962% of 331900000

60% more than 0.0074751431153962 is 0.01196022898463392

Nope. Brain cancer has declined slightly since 1992. https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/brain.html

The possibility of non-ionizing radiation having a significant biological effect beyond simple heating used to be dismissed… but that came from not knowing much about molecular biology.

Electric fields can rotate charged molecules, e.g. switching proteins between states which can alter signaling cascades, open ion channels, etc. This provides a pretty well understood mechanism for negative effects.

It's even used to actually treat cancer:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5035531/

These are electric fields not RF right? That strikes me as a big difference. The paper discusses using electrodes pretty early on so one would think if just radio waves worked they’d use them?

Electric fields in this context are different from the RF associated with cellular phone technology. The RF frequencies and power levels use by cell phones are not able to penetrate the human body more than one or two millimeters.

What I want to see in a claim like this, and I don't (or missed it) is that cases of cancer for parts of the body where cellphones are commonly places (head, hip/groin) are increasing. Otherwise it seems like the external view of this theory proves it false.

On the author, Moskowitz's website: https://www.saferemr.com/

He references a study: "Incidence and Mortality of Malignant Brain Tumors after 20 Years of Mobile Use" which also states:

>> While this study suggests a weak association between mobile phone users and MNB incidence and mortality, it is important to acknowledge that conclusive results cannot be drawn at this stage.

Should be apparent in tumor location too. Most of us are right handed and hold our phones up to the right ear. Should be a bigger increase in tumors on the right side of brains than the left. And it should be correlated strongly with the handedness of the person.

For how long do people make phone calls though? Most of the time is spent holding it in front of you, or keeping it in your pocket.

We've been exposed to artifically-generated EM radiation for well over a century. The effects should've been very visible by now.

I'm very suprised to find there is some science to this. I'd assumed the radiation was just too weak.

I think due to the 1/4 falloff don't put it to your ear, don't put it in your bra ladies!

I continue to remain skeptical, honestly, of any effect beyond thermal heating. But I've never totally written it off. Very small amounts of EMR can create cascade effects in biological systems. Our vision system is perhaps an example, where the power of the radiation cast on the retina in low light is measured in microwatts or even picowatts, yet our nervous systems are very much affected by it.

Tangential trivia: if move your head inside a very strong radio field (far beyond anything put out by a cellphone -- and far beyond anything generally considered safe) it can induce currents directly in the optic nerve/retina, which I've read described as flashing dots of light.

It seems pretty obviously bunk. Cell phone usage went from ~0% to 100% over the course of a couple decades. If they were a significant health risk the impact would have been obvious.

Why do you think it would be “obvious”? What if health issues did go up but were never attributed to cell phone usage till now?

If cell phones caused brain tumors in 1/1000 users we'd have millions of more brain tumors around the world than we did before. That's why it would be obvious.

The per capita cigarettes smoked in the US went from nearly 0 in 1910 to about 1500 per year per capita in 1930, and yet following those 2 decades despite far more obvious negative impacts of smoking smoking continued to rise peaking at about 4500 cigarettes per capita in the 1960s, and was even being promoted by doctors at this point.

So we already have evidence that something with long term negative impacts (and smoking has some pretty immediate easily noticeable negative impacts as well), can persist without this being obvious for a while.

In addition, population level data is messy. For example, we know there's been a massive increase in depression amongst children, and deaths of despair in the US over the past decade. What if those are related to cell phone use? That would mean the effect is obvious but connecting it to the primary cause is not easy, despite the fact that there is indeed correlations with cell phone use (the correlations people have pointed out is to the rise of social media, which can quite easily also be a correlation to cell phone use). Sounds far fetched? Possibly. But then again, the US saw a massive unexplained drop in crime over the last 3 decades, and arguably the best explanation we have so far is the phasing out of lead from gasoline about 2 decades before the drop actually happened. When the link was first suggested it sounded equally far fetched to most.

I don't think there's enough evidence to panic yet (although it would be prudent to follow suggestions around keeping distance from your cell phone), but it's far too early to say the conclusion is settled and that there is no health risk, especially considering the limited research on this topic yet.

> 1500 per year per capita in 1930

Dear god, each US citizen smoked 5 cigs per day on average in 1930? It's mind-boggling.

> Dear god, each US citizen smoked 5 cigs per day on average in 1930? It's mind-boggling.

The US population was smaller at that time, so it was probably more. It also peaked at about 4500 in the 60s [1], so it was even higher then.

I do suspect the pareto effect applied here, and the heaviest 20% of smokers raised the mean for the entire population.

For example, about 70-80% of alcohol consumed in the US is consumed by the top 20% drinkers.

1: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/11795/chapter/4#42

>So we already have evidence that something with long term negative impacts (and smoking has some pretty immediate easily noticeable negative impacts as well), can persist without this being obvious for a while.

I didn't say that we'd stop using cell phones if they posed significant dangers. I said that the abrupt increase in usage would make those dangers obvious if they existed.

To use your example, Tobacco was seen as bad from the git go because the impact was obvious. King James wrote a book against it in 1604:

>A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.

And yet, it seemed bad but the consensus in the mid 20th century was that cigarettes were good for you. You can watch Tour De France videos of bicyclists smoking while biking because it was supposed to provide energy.

And the fact that the dangers were known to some, but yet society widely considered tobacco safe and even good for you, does not help the idea that the dangers would be obvious. If we continue the analogy, it's very possible people 50 years from now will be pointing to this paper to show that the dangers of cellphone radiation was known in the early 2020s, even though society and the scientific community broadly haven't accepted these dangers.

>And yet, it seemed bad but the consensus in the mid 20th century was that cigarettes were good for you.

That was not the consensus

I find the visual system an unconvincing example of EMR having unexpected effects on biological systems - it's an organ specifically designed to amplify tiny amounts of EMR, with a very small sensitivity bandwidth.

Vision presumably came about from a biological system that was somewhat affected by photochemical interactions, which then evolved to be useful. That is to say, a living thing must have existed at some point that didn't have vision, but which was affected by light, such that more precise and useful light sensitivity evolved.

It's very complicated but I can see why certain industries wouldn't want this idea popularized.

Well yes, but you probably don't want the idea that you're a serial killer popularized. That totally understandable position should not be used as evidence that you're a serial killer.

Comparison: Phones are up to 3 watts, sunlight is around 1.3 kilowatts per square meter.

Often much less in practice: 2G transmission was up to 2W, but 2G has been phased out in many countries. 3G I'm not very knowledgeable but IIRC was up to 800 mW (common case). LTE/4G is 200 mW maximum for sure. 5G is the same except for mmWaves, but that I don't know very well and it's not used much (not at all in Europe, where I live).

There are more powerful band classes, but for fixed wireless access. So for phone use on a modern network, you should now be most of the time at 200 mW max transmit power (same as WiFi BTW).

I'm guessing the average phone size is about 155 square centimeters, or 1.5% of a square meter. Multiply that by 3 Watts, and you get 200 Watts. That's about 15% of the suns energy per unit area. Of course it's probably a different type of radiation, and the whole phone isn't going to be radiating, so the intensity might be stronger.

You can't re-calculate a radial source into an area like that, most of the phones radiation is going into the other direction than were you are.

The way to measure this is based on distance. If say a phone emits 3 watts of RF but it’s set 1 meter away the area that 3 watts operates on is 4pi1^2. If the 3 watts is being emitted right next to you then maybe the size of the antenna stars to mater. This is why if your really worried about RF using wired headphones and never taking a call with the phone pressed up to your ear is the best thing you can do

The comparison means nothing about relative risk or biological impacts… very different frequencies interact with biological systems and penetrate tissues differently. Microwaves can rotate charged molecules, and penetrate deeply. Sunlight can ionize biological molecules, but only on the surface (skin).

I very much would like to hear it, if true. I'd also like to know about Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

Your statement, that after all these years since the smartphones have been invented, you'd like to hear something about smartphones radiation, very much like, pardon, just speaks for itself. You don't want to very much hear about smartphone radiation. Because if you did want, you would've already read something about it.

We've heard that "it might" for years. Actual evidence would be nice.

I can't tell from your writing what kind of sins you are even accusing the parent of, but personally, I have read about it and still share the parent's desires. I'm not sure why one wouldn't.

Because there's a huge amount of evidence[0] that these harms are fictional, created and promoted by a mix of new age anti-tech people, snake oil salespeople touting literal tinfoil hats, and scammers looking to make a quick buck.

The whole thing is nonsense, and there is an abundance of evidence of that. There is literally no evidence of these supposed widespread harms that are somehow both an existential threat and not measurable in thousands of studies and hundreds of meta-analyses.

So, yeah, asking for info here is like saying "gosh, maybe smoking really doesn't have any health impacts, I'd love to see some studies on it."

0. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/10643389.2021.1...

When the researcher claimed that 5g may accelerate the development of drug resistant microbes I decided I could safely dismiss them. If someone has some proposed mechanism I might reconsider, but that seems very unlikely to me. Drug resistance is expensive for cells so they only do it if they have to. RF isn’t going to lead them to spontaneously develop a trait and the rate of mutation is already optimized, speeding it up isn’t going to lead to super viruses because evolution already has all the tools it needs to speed up mutations if beneficial. He also seemed very focused on the number of individuals antennas associated with 5g which is clearly the wrong metric

From the article:

first of all, few scientists in this country can speak knowledgeably about the health effects of wireless technology.

I think this dramatically underestimates the number of scientists and engineers who work with RF at dangerous frequencies.

Dissenting opinion from someone qualified to speak on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0xwyVlqsRo

Not gonna pretend I'm an expert on EM radiation effects, but this statement:

> 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.

Is pretty misleading. He's talking about odds ratio here, not relative risk, because these were case-control studies. And because they seem to have been conducted specifically looking for people with cancer, they do not conform to the rare disease assumption (in this case, the paper says cancer = 24,717, control = 41,358, nowhere close to the typical 10% cutoff at which odds ratio is considered to reasonably estimate relative risk.

Also they found no statistically significant relationship in any direction until they did subgroup analysis. That starts getting awfully close to p-hacking. "All studies overall don't find an effect, but if we limit to the studies that find an effect, we find an effect."

Finally, this seems like an awfully hard thing to study using case controls. I'm not going to try and find these studies being meta-analyzed, but it would seem they're largely finding people with brain cancer and people without brain cancer, and surveying them on how long they've used cell phones and how much. Unless they're actually going back and consulting 10 years worth of their own phone records before answering, which I am sure they are not doing, how accurate is the recall seriously going to be? And there is no attempt to quantify the characteristics of usage relevant to the mechanistic reasons to believe a risk might present, that is, how strong was the signal, how far away from their ear do they keep the phone, are they typically going hands free, do they keep the phone or on near them when not in use? These are impossible to study using this kind of study design.

I'm not some kind of shill for big telecom. I barely even use a mobile phone. I talk to my dad maybe once a week and that's my only regular call. My diet and workout tracking apps are the only apps I use aside from banking. I almost never bother to bring it with me when going shopping and don't sleep with it within arm's reach. So I'm following the recommendations here anyway, not because I'm afraid of cancer but because I don't see a need for having a phone nearby on any regular basis.

At the same time, through no fault of their own, these researchers are studying something that is virtually impossible to prove anything about, and even what they might have found if you squint really hard at a specific subset of a non-random, non-representative scene, still wasn't a lot. I don't see how this warrants a press campaign aside from Joel Moskowitz apparently being politically active in getting California municipal governments to warn consumers about anything and everything.

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