9 ms·

Largest Animal Study on Cell Tower Radiation Confirms Cancer Link

206 points by Mononokay 9y ago

yorwba 9y ago
Original source of the press release: http://www.sbwire.com/press-releases/worlds-largest-animal-study-on-cell-tower-radiation-confirms-cancer-link-953696.htm http://www.sbwire.com/press-releases/worlds-largest-animal-s... Please don't submit mere republications. (It's in the HN guidelines.)
- web007 9y ago
  Or go straight to the source, vs the PR statement? https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2018.01.037 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2018.01.037
- johnny313 9y ago
  PDF of the full article: https://ehtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/Belpoggi-Heart-and-Brain-Tumors-Base-Station-2018.pdf https://ehtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/Belpoggi-Heart-and-Br...
- sctb 9y ago
  Thanks, we've updated the link from http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/3706604 http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/3706604 which points to this.
acangiano 9y ago
Fellow Canadians can find a map of cell towers here: http://www.ertyu.org/steven_nikkel/cancellsites.html http://www.ertyu.org/steven_nikkel/cancellsites.html
thaumaturgy 9y ago
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. https://imgur.com/a/VeEUb 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.
- ebikelaw 9y ago
  50 V/m 19h per day for your whole life is definitely not normal exposure. Edit: back of the envelope, 50 V/m is equivalent to standing 2m away from LTE base station with 60W power and 18 dBi antenna gain.
  - dfox 9y ago
    Are there even LTE base stations with 60W capable PA? IIRC for GSM the highest supported power was 30W.
    - topspin 9y ago
      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. [1] https://sites.google.com/site/lteencyclopedia/lte-radio-link-budgeting-and-rf-planning https://sites.google.com/site/lteencyclopedia/lte-radio-link...
      - blattimwind 9y ago
        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.
        topspin 9y ago
        I guess it's understood that we're discussing high frequency electromagnetic waves, as opposed to static electric fields.
        blattimwind 9y ago
        But why is the e-field strength an interesting metric for this? Power over [biological] volume/mass/surface makes more sense, no?
anotheryou 9y ago
does anyone know the pattern they emit? edit: found it, but sadly without scale. No Idea how dangerous the lobes would be: http://www.emfguru.co.uk/kumar/kumar%20figure1.JPG http://www.emfguru.co.uk/kumar/kumar%20figure1.JPG
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  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)
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- topspin 9y ago
  "does anyone know the pattern they emit?" 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.
  - anotheryou 9y ago
    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).
scott_s 9y ago
I'm remaining skeptical. The NTP study they mention had methodological problems. David Gorski of Science Based Medicine wrote about that study when it made the rounds (https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/no-a-rat-study-with-marginal-results-does-not-prove-that-cell-phones-cause-cancer-no-matter-what-mother-jones-and-consumer-reports-say/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/no-a-rat-study-with-margina...): 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16659270)
- sethrin 9y ago
  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.
  - haZard_OS 9y ago
    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.
fencepost 9y ago
The HN discussion of the NTP study discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11784160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11784160 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?
pasbesoin 9y ago
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".
- pharrington 9y ago
  You're talking about heat.
  - pasbesoin 9y ago
    Quickly: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4846869/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4846869/ 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.
ellyagg 9y ago
You can't confirm something that has very little evidence. The prior for this hypothesis is very low.
ajarmst 9y ago
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.
- ajarmst 9y ago
  Useful graph : https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/brain.html https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/brain.html
markhahn 9y ago
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.
mbreese 9y ago
Here is Ars Technica's discussion of why they aren't covering this paper, with a good critical discussion of how to look at these results. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/a-critical-analysis-of-the-latest-cellphone-safety-scare/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/a-critical-analysis-...
dzaragozar 9y ago
Mandatory xkcd about cell phones https://xkcd.com/925/ https://xkcd.com/925/
robocat 9y ago
I wonder if they just threw away data from three other control groups...
- valuearb 9y ago
  i wonder if they never publicized other studies they ran that didn’t show the effect, or actually showed the opposite effect.
pfarnsworth 9y ago
What does this mean about Wifi? Can Wifi also cause these same issue, especially if you are sleeping 1-2 rooms away from it?
- lolc 9y ago
  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.
anfilt 9y ago
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.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
yshklarov 9y ago
This is an absolute joke. Take a look at the data. https://sci-hub.hk/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935118300367 https://sci-hub.hk/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art... 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.

206 points by Mononokay 9y ago

Original source of the press release: http://www.sbwire.com/press-releases/worlds-largest-animal-study-on-cell-tower-radiation-confirms-cancer-link-953696.htm http://www.sbwire.com/press-releases/worlds-largest-animal-s... Please don't submit mere republications. (It's in the HN guidelines.)

web007 9y ago
Or go straight to the source, vs the PR statement? https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2018.01.037 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2018.01.037
johnny313 9y ago
PDF of the full article: https://ehtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/Belpoggi-Heart-and-Brain-Tumors-Base-Station-2018.pdf https://ehtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/Belpoggi-Heart-and-Br...
sctb 9y ago
Thanks, we've updated the link from http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/3706604 http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/3706604 which points to this.

acangiano 9y ago

Fellow Canadians can find a map of cell towers here: http://www.ertyu.org/steven_nikkel/cancellsites.html http://www.ertyu.org/steven_nikkel/cancellsites.html

thaumaturgy 9y ago

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. https://imgur.com/a/VeEUb 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.

ebikelaw 9y ago
50 V/m 19h per day for your whole life is definitely not normal exposure. Edit: back of the envelope, 50 V/m is equivalent to standing 2m away from LTE base station with 60W power and 18 dBi antenna gain.
- dfox 9y ago
  Are there even LTE base stations with 60W capable PA? IIRC for GSM the highest supported power was 30W.
  - topspin 9y ago
    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. [1] https://sites.google.com/site/lteencyclopedia/lte-radio-link-budgeting-and-rf-planning https://sites.google.com/site/lteencyclopedia/lte-radio-link...
    - blattimwind 9y ago
      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.
      - topspin 9y ago
        I guess it's understood that we're discussing high frequency electromagnetic waves, as opposed to static electric fields.
        blattimwind 9y ago
        But why is the e-field strength an interesting metric for this? Power over [biological] volume/mass/surface makes more sense, no?

anotheryou 9y ago

does anyone know the pattern they emit? edit: found it, but sadly without scale. No Idea how dangerous the lobes would be: http://www.emfguru.co.uk/kumar/kumar%20figure1.JPG http://www.emfguru.co.uk/kumar/kumar%20figure1.JPG

52-6F-62 9y ago
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)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
topspin 9y ago
"does anyone know the pattern they emit?" 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.
- anotheryou 9y ago
  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).

scott_s 9y ago

I'm remaining skeptical. The NTP study they mention had methodological problems. David Gorski of Science Based Medicine wrote about that study when it made the rounds (https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/no-a-rat-study-with-marginal-results-does-not-prove-that-cell-phones-cause-cancer-no-matter-what-mother-jones-and-consumer-reports-say/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/no-a-rat-study-with-margina...): 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16659270)

sethrin 9y ago
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.
- haZard_OS 9y ago
  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.

fencepost 9y ago

The HN discussion of the NTP study discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11784160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11784160 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?

pasbesoin 9y ago

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".

pharrington 9y ago
You're talking about heat.
- pasbesoin 9y ago
  Quickly: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4846869/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4846869/ 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.

ellyagg 9y ago

You can't confirm something that has very little evidence. The prior for this hypothesis is very low.

ajarmst 9y ago

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.

ajarmst 9y ago
Useful graph : https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/brain.html https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/brain.html

markhahn 9y ago

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.

mbreese 9y ago

Here is Ars Technica's discussion of why they aren't covering this paper, with a good critical discussion of how to look at these results. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/a-critical-analysis-of-the-latest-cellphone-safety-scare/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/a-critical-analysis-...

dzaragozar 9y ago

Mandatory xkcd about cell phones https://xkcd.com/925/ https://xkcd.com/925/

robocat 9y ago

I wonder if they just threw away data from three other control groups...

valuearb 9y ago
i wonder if they never publicized other studies they ran that didn’t show the effect, or actually showed the opposite effect.

pfarnsworth 9y ago

What does this mean about Wifi? Can Wifi also cause these same issue, especially if you are sleeping 1-2 rooms away from it?

lolc 9y ago
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.

anfilt 9y ago

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.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

yshklarov 9y ago

This is an absolute joke. Take a look at the data. https://sci-hub.hk/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935118300367 https://sci-hub.hk/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art... 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.