6 ms·

We Have No Reason to Believe 5G Is Safe

27 points by papito 5y ago

papito 5y ago
"Since the FCC adopted these limits based largely on research from the 1980s, the preponderance of peer-reviewed research, more than 500 studies, have found harmful biologic or health effects from exposure to RFR at intensities too low to cause significant heating." And... "The research suggests that long-term exposure may pose health risks to the skin (e.g., melanoma), the eyes (e.g., ocular melanoma) and the testes (e.g., sterility)." What I see is the "small government" striking again. These federal agencies that are there to protect the public from irresponsible capitalism (e.g. Boeing) have been gutted to the point where they are effectively subsidiaries of the businesses. Lord forbid they affect shareholder value.
- edmcnulty101 5y ago
  education > regulation. We don't even know if 5g is dangerous! We're going on data from the 80's? They could protect the public by doing research and actually finding out what's going on. Isn't the fed the number one in research grant amounts? Can't it award something to look into this?
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > education > regulation Not really. There's always going to be a significant fraction of the public that will be irresponsible, either through ignorance, intransigence, or greed. And then there's the fact that the amount personal education and effort required to substitute for regulation in the modern world is so high to be entirely impractical (sure you could reasonably take up one or two areas, but not all areas).
    - edmcnulty101 5y ago
      Yes agreed. However, a free society is not about mandating people to be safe, it's about providing the information and allowing them to make their own decisions. Smoking is the perfect example of this and a great example of how the government should act. Don't regulate but educate people on the harms and allow them to make their own decisions. Marijuana is the perfect example of how the federal gov't got 'mandates' wrong, and only by breaking the law have people changed it.
      - tablespoon 5y ago
        > However, a free society is not about mandating people to be safe, it's about providing the information and allowing them to make their own decisions. I don't think it's that simple, and I think presenting things as a binary like this leads false choices. I think the right way to think about it is more along the lines of optimizing the choices so people can make good ones with a reasonable amount of total effort. And there we're really only talking about decisions whose impact is limited to the individual making them. When there are externalities involved that's a different thing. > Don't regulate but educate people on the harms and allow them to make their own decisions. While that sounds reasonable in the abstract, I don't think it meets my criteria above, because the amount of education required quickly becomes far more than any individual can reasonably juggle with other responsibilities, and then there's the question of how much time most people actually want to spend on stuff like that.
      - dekhn 5y ago
        No. What you are describing (not mandating, just providing information) is known as "libertarian anarchy". A "free society" still places constraints on people in the form of public health policy, if and when the risk of not doing it greatly exceeds the risk of doing it. I do agree that marijuana represents a situation where the government failed to make a legitimate public health case, and now has to undo decades of policy.
  - papito 5y ago
    I don't really see how this applies. First of all, the whole point is that the agency is NOT doing it, because it does not have the public's interest in mind. Secondly, how would education help here? Am I supposed to walk around with a detailed map of 5G towers, spaced every 200 meters? Or what if Boeing decides to make a vital redundant piece of equipment optional - a thing that actually happened - killing hundreds of people. The regulation was flawed. How does education help?
NikolaeVarius 5y ago
> However, we have considerable evidence about the harmful effects of 2G and 3G. Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research. Ok, well if this is the stance that this article is taking, its a +1 to the notion that Scientific American has gone the way of the History Channel, pure trash.
- Miner49er 5y ago
  I'm curious what is wrong with this statement? Is it false or something?
  - NikolaeVarius 5y ago
    > we have considerable evidence about the harmful effects of 2G and 3G This is false. > Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology Also false.
    - qnsi 5y ago
      would be good if you could at least point/explain how this is false. Other than that we can choose: should we trust newspaper or a anonymous HN user
      - dekhn 5y ago
        In short, there are a number of low quality studies (blared endlessly by newspapers that have no idea how to evaluate the studies) about how cell phone radiation is dangerous, but none of those studies has withstood extensive attacks by skeptics. There simply isn't any high quality study showing some measurable damage from cellphone radiation that has a detectable impact on human health. In the meantime, absent any realistic mechanism or data showing it's dangerous, the default position is "not dangerous". You should absolutely not trust "newspaper articles" (and in this case, Scientific American is a popular science magazine) about science. Even the best newspapers routinely mislead (intentionally or otherwise) in their science reporting.
cl42 5y ago
The article made me curious about the incidence of head and neck cancers over time. I only found a UK graph ending in 2018, but it does show a significant increase from 1993 to 2018[1]... 33% and 50% for men and women, respectively. That sounds... high... but this is also pre-5G. [1] https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/statistics-by-cancer-type/head-and-neck-cancers/incidence#heading-Two https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-...
- sunbum 5y ago
  Which can entirely be explained by the fact that we have gotten way way better at detecting cancers since 1993.
  - cl42 5y ago
    Beautiful point! I remember reading about this a few years ago, and it is a fantastic confounding factor. I wonder -- do cancer studies take cancer detection rates into account?
    - OJFord 5y ago
      Not GP and I don't know, and this suffers the same problem (but in a way it doesn't matter) but for what you're interested in here you can just look at mortality (per general population, not patients): https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/statistics-by-cancer-type/head-and-neck-cancers/mortality#heading-Two https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-... which is roughly stable over the same period. Which must mean treatment (or early detection) got better, and you can say 'oh it would be even better if it weren't for ~5G~ detecting it in more people', but I say in a way it doesn't matter because it shows we're sort of.. 'coping with it', and wanting it to be better is a different conversation than whether we're making it worse.
      - cl42 5y ago
        Thanks, this is really helpful and I like how you're looking at it.
OJFord 5y ago
We Also Have No Reason To Believe <Latest Launch HN> Is Safe (*and no, also no reason to believe the contrary..)
unmole 5y ago
Cancer causes cellphones: https://xkcd.com/925/ https://xkcd.com/925/
newbamboo 5y ago
You can’t see it, therefore it doesn’t exist.
Aloha 5y ago
We have little reason to believe it's dangerous either. Look, I've known dozens of RF engineers who died of cancer (mostly lung) - people who had much higher than common exposure to both low frequency and microwave RF, but they all had one thread in common - they all smoked like chimneys. As an aside, they also used carcinogenic solvents with regularity for most of their careers. It's best not to confuse correlation with causation. There is no evidence to indicate that exposure to RF at 5G frequencies is different than exposure to any other kind of higher frequency RF, 800, 1900, 2.6 and the other cellular bands behave similarly around the human body. If anything I'd expect lower effects, because the field strength is so low. There is an enormous body of work that indicates that field strength not frequency is the relevant thing here. Articles like this are little more than opinion articles.
- qorrect 5y ago
  > We have little reason to believe it's dangerous either. I took that as the point of the article, we don't know enough to say whether it's safe or dangerous, so let's pause and study it "for real this time". > Articles like this are little more than opinion articles. This article sounds like it's the opinion of the 240 scientists that are calling for the study though, not an uninformed journalists opinion.
  - Aloha 5y ago
    We have a pretty enormous body of work that was used to set safe field exposure limits for RF. No one seems to be making a rational argument why that work isnt relevent.
  - RobertRoberts 5y ago
    Look at the documentation of many industrial strength radio systems that include health regulations for exposure to RF. (sometimes on the outside of the box in stores even) A hand-wavy sort of dismissal of health issues around many forms of radiation seem to be common in the tech world.
- hammyhavoc 5y ago
  I know plenty of RF engineers who haven't died, or have lived very long lives. They also don't smoke.
blakesterz 5y ago
I have NO idea if the author knows what he's talking about, I've never heard of him before, but he at least has a background in this area. This is his website: https://www.saferemr.com/ https://www.saferemr.com/ He points to a bunch of studies on this topic. Seems like there's enough there for you to make up your own mind on how reliable he can be. He's from University of California, Berkeley and seems to study this stuff.
zhrvoj 5y ago
Reminds me of this: https://history.aip.org/exhibits/curie/radinst3.htm https://history.aip.org/exhibits/curie/radinst3.htm They were wrong, now we know. But today we are much more clever, are we? Now, when big investments are backing up 5G development...
el_don_almighty 5y ago
7.7B people and you found 240 of them who said, "This is scary. Pay us and we will scare you some more!" The most poignant thing I learned in 1990 came from my electromagnetics & digital communications professor at Iowa State, Dr. Mani Mina who used to say, "The more you scare people, the more they will pay you." He's still there and still brilliant. As Omicron winds down the pandemic, the media needs a new boogeyman to drive clicks and scientists need funding for apparition research It's almost Spring and time for NASA/NOAA to regale us with their latest scary tales requiring money as part of the annual Federal budgeting process. Happens every year and coincides with new swimsuit fashion releases. Dang, I am getting to old for this...

27 points by papito 5y ago

"Since the FCC adopted these limits based largely on research from the 1980s, the preponderance of peer-reviewed research, more than 500 studies, have found harmful biologic or health effects from exposure to RFR at intensities too low to cause significant heating." And... "The research suggests that long-term exposure may pose health risks to the skin (e.g., melanoma), the eyes (e.g., ocular melanoma) and the testes (e.g., sterility)." What I see is the "small government" striking again. These federal agencies that are there to protect the public from irresponsible capitalism (e.g. Boeing) have been gutted to the point where they are effectively subsidiaries of the businesses. Lord forbid they affect shareholder value.

edmcnulty101 5y ago
education > regulation. We don't even know if 5g is dangerous! We're going on data from the 80's? They could protect the public by doing research and actually finding out what's going on. Isn't the fed the number one in research grant amounts? Can't it award something to look into this?
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > education > regulation Not really. There's always going to be a significant fraction of the public that will be irresponsible, either through ignorance, intransigence, or greed. And then there's the fact that the amount personal education and effort required to substitute for regulation in the modern world is so high to be entirely impractical (sure you could reasonably take up one or two areas, but not all areas).
  - edmcnulty101 5y ago
    Yes agreed. However, a free society is not about mandating people to be safe, it's about providing the information and allowing them to make their own decisions. Smoking is the perfect example of this and a great example of how the government should act. Don't regulate but educate people on the harms and allow them to make their own decisions. Marijuana is the perfect example of how the federal gov't got 'mandates' wrong, and only by breaking the law have people changed it.
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > However, a free society is not about mandating people to be safe, it's about providing the information and allowing them to make their own decisions. I don't think it's that simple, and I think presenting things as a binary like this leads false choices. I think the right way to think about it is more along the lines of optimizing the choices so people can make good ones with a reasonable amount of total effort. And there we're really only talking about decisions whose impact is limited to the individual making them. When there are externalities involved that's a different thing. > Don't regulate but educate people on the harms and allow them to make their own decisions. While that sounds reasonable in the abstract, I don't think it meets my criteria above, because the amount of education required quickly becomes far more than any individual can reasonably juggle with other responsibilities, and then there's the question of how much time most people actually want to spend on stuff like that.
    - dekhn 5y ago
      No. What you are describing (not mandating, just providing information) is known as "libertarian anarchy". A "free society" still places constraints on people in the form of public health policy, if and when the risk of not doing it greatly exceeds the risk of doing it. I do agree that marijuana represents a situation where the government failed to make a legitimate public health case, and now has to undo decades of policy.
- papito 5y ago
  I don't really see how this applies. First of all, the whole point is that the agency is NOT doing it, because it does not have the public's interest in mind. Secondly, how would education help here? Am I supposed to walk around with a detailed map of 5G towers, spaced every 200 meters? Or what if Boeing decides to make a vital redundant piece of equipment optional - a thing that actually happened - killing hundreds of people. The regulation was flawed. How does education help?

NikolaeVarius 5y ago

> However, we have considerable evidence about the harmful effects of 2G and 3G. Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research. Ok, well if this is the stance that this article is taking, its a +1 to the notion that Scientific American has gone the way of the History Channel, pure trash.

Miner49er 5y ago
I'm curious what is wrong with this statement? Is it false or something?
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
  > we have considerable evidence about the harmful effects of 2G and 3G This is false. > Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology Also false.
  - qnsi 5y ago
    would be good if you could at least point/explain how this is false. Other than that we can choose: should we trust newspaper or a anonymous HN user
    - dekhn 5y ago
      In short, there are a number of low quality studies (blared endlessly by newspapers that have no idea how to evaluate the studies) about how cell phone radiation is dangerous, but none of those studies has withstood extensive attacks by skeptics. There simply isn't any high quality study showing some measurable damage from cellphone radiation that has a detectable impact on human health. In the meantime, absent any realistic mechanism or data showing it's dangerous, the default position is "not dangerous". You should absolutely not trust "newspaper articles" (and in this case, Scientific American is a popular science magazine) about science. Even the best newspapers routinely mislead (intentionally or otherwise) in their science reporting.

cl42 5y ago

The article made me curious about the incidence of head and neck cancers over time. I only found a UK graph ending in 2018, but it does show a significant increase from 1993 to 2018[1]... 33% and 50% for men and women, respectively. That sounds... high... but this is also pre-5G. [1] https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/statistics-by-cancer-type/head-and-neck-cancers/incidence#heading-Two https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-...

sunbum 5y ago
Which can entirely be explained by the fact that we have gotten way way better at detecting cancers since 1993.
- cl42 5y ago
  Beautiful point! I remember reading about this a few years ago, and it is a fantastic confounding factor. I wonder -- do cancer studies take cancer detection rates into account?
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Not GP and I don't know, and this suffers the same problem (but in a way it doesn't matter) but for what you're interested in here you can just look at mortality (per general population, not patients): https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/statistics-by-cancer-type/head-and-neck-cancers/mortality#heading-Two https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-... which is roughly stable over the same period. Which must mean treatment (or early detection) got better, and you can say 'oh it would be even better if it weren't for ~5G~ detecting it in more people', but I say in a way it doesn't matter because it shows we're sort of.. 'coping with it', and wanting it to be better is a different conversation than whether we're making it worse.
    - cl42 5y ago
      Thanks, this is really helpful and I like how you're looking at it.

OJFord 5y ago

We Also Have No Reason To Believe <Latest Launch HN> Is Safe (*and no, also no reason to believe the contrary..)

unmole 5y ago

Cancer causes cellphones: https://xkcd.com/925/ https://xkcd.com/925/

newbamboo 5y ago

You can’t see it, therefore it doesn’t exist.

Aloha 5y ago

We have little reason to believe it's dangerous either. Look, I've known dozens of RF engineers who died of cancer (mostly lung) - people who had much higher than common exposure to both low frequency and microwave RF, but they all had one thread in common - they all smoked like chimneys. As an aside, they also used carcinogenic solvents with regularity for most of their careers. It's best not to confuse correlation with causation. There is no evidence to indicate that exposure to RF at 5G frequencies is different than exposure to any other kind of higher frequency RF, 800, 1900, 2.6 and the other cellular bands behave similarly around the human body. If anything I'd expect lower effects, because the field strength is so low. There is an enormous body of work that indicates that field strength not frequency is the relevant thing here. Articles like this are little more than opinion articles.

qorrect 5y ago
> We have little reason to believe it's dangerous either. I took that as the point of the article, we don't know enough to say whether it's safe or dangerous, so let's pause and study it "for real this time". > Articles like this are little more than opinion articles. This article sounds like it's the opinion of the 240 scientists that are calling for the study though, not an uninformed journalists opinion.
- Aloha 5y ago
  We have a pretty enormous body of work that was used to set safe field exposure limits for RF. No one seems to be making a rational argument why that work isnt relevent.
- RobertRoberts 5y ago
  Look at the documentation of many industrial strength radio systems that include health regulations for exposure to RF. (sometimes on the outside of the box in stores even) A hand-wavy sort of dismissal of health issues around many forms of radiation seem to be common in the tech world.
hammyhavoc 5y ago
I know plenty of RF engineers who haven't died, or have lived very long lives. They also don't smoke.

blakesterz 5y ago

I have NO idea if the author knows what he's talking about, I've never heard of him before, but he at least has a background in this area. This is his website: https://www.saferemr.com/ https://www.saferemr.com/ He points to a bunch of studies on this topic. Seems like there's enough there for you to make up your own mind on how reliable he can be. He's from University of California, Berkeley and seems to study this stuff.

zhrvoj 5y ago

Reminds me of this: https://history.aip.org/exhibits/curie/radinst3.htm https://history.aip.org/exhibits/curie/radinst3.htm They were wrong, now we know. But today we are much more clever, are we? Now, when big investments are backing up 5G development...

el_don_almighty 5y ago

7.7B people and you found 240 of them who said, "This is scary. Pay us and we will scare you some more!" The most poignant thing I learned in 1990 came from my electromagnetics & digital communications professor at Iowa State, Dr. Mani Mina who used to say, "The more you scare people, the more they will pay you." He's still there and still brilliant. As Omicron winds down the pandemic, the media needs a new boogeyman to drive clicks and scientists need funding for apparition research It's almost Spring and time for NASA/NOAA to regale us with their latest scary tales requiring money as part of the annual Federal budgeting process. Happens every year and coincides with new swimsuit fashion releases. Dang, I am getting to old for this...