WHO-backed meta-study finds no evidence that cellphone radiation causes brain cancer Time to take off the tin foil hat: A review of 28 years of research into the health effects of radio wave exposure from cellphones has found no evidence to link the handhelds to brain cancer, or negative effects on health more generally. The findings, published recently in Environment International and commissioned and …
or sufficiently endowed with common sense and an ability to do our own fact finding, such that we're less inclined to swallow any conspiracy theory rubbish put forward by those who *think* they alone have been blessed with sufficient enlightenment as to be able to see "The Truth", whilst the rest of us are mere sheep at the mercy of the WHO, the WEF, the global elite Illuminati cabal running the show behind the scenes etc. etc.
I carried on like nothing was happening... went to work, ran, cycled, got coffees... met a mate in the park a few times a week and we'd sit and drink beer. Damn they were happy times.
Was aware lots of idiots were locking themselves in their houses and turning on people who were capable of a bit of independent thought, but, well, you never got to see them.
Funnily enough, got chatting to a lot of people, especially old people, who'd come out desperate for company. We kept our distance - just incase - but had some real nice chats. I reckon I helped a lot.
There is a difference between what works for you when you are the only person doing it. If the majority followed your pattern, things might've turned out differently.
Usually in these type of discussions someone will mention Sweden. Sweden had no official lockdown, but... I live in Sweden. People kept their distance. When Norway closed their borders, the local shopping center here almost shut down. There were maybe a dozen cars in the parking lot that on a normal day would've been packed full (thousands of cars). In schools they made sure kids would wash their hands with alcohol before meals. Of course that had an impact. My kids have never been that healthy, nor me for that matter. In the big cities restaurants suffered because officials advised people to stay home. People with a cough were told to stay home from work. Heck, perfectly healthy people were encouraged to work from home if at all practically possible.
If my observation is correct, namely that other diseases were put on a hiatus, would that not also apply to covid-19? (once schools around here relaxed a bit we experienced a return of the usual diseases so common in the past)
It was claimed that emergency rooms in the beginning struggled to map out a good way to treat covid-patients. Later it was claimed that a covid-patient would occupy a bed for much longer than other similar respiratory diseases. If that is true, it made sense to try to slow the spread down as much as possible.
Bully for you, YOU personally survived the pandemic whilst ignoring whatever recommendations or legal restrictions were in place in your part of the world at the time. Others in your same position did not, but as they're no longer with us to post their similarly scathing of the masses anecdotes, we don't get to hear their stories. Survivor bias at work there.
And no, lots of us weren't locking ourselves away and turning into spies for the state - we were simply following the guidance/restrictions of the time and living our lives accordingly. We did still leave the house to go to work, or walk through the park, do a bit of shopping, or any of the other things that weren't subject to the relatively few absolute restrictions and which could still therefore be done without having to break the rules in any way. Really, most of us were just too damned busy trying to get on with things as best we could, adapting to this weird new world we found ourselves in and wondering WTF tomorrow was going to bring, to turn into curtain-twitching Stasi-wannabes just itching to dob in a neighbour for daring to open their front door and step outside.
Should add, last winter was the first time since 2019 that I had a cold. Everybody keeping apart, wearing our silly little masks, and actually bothering to wash hands properly put the kibosh on the seasonal colds and flus for a couple of years. Just goes to show what it might be like if more people gave a shit about others rather than thinking only about themselves.
"Was aware lots of idiots were locking themselves in their houses"
Fun fact - as a hardcore introvert, pretty much the only thing that changed for me was the need to have a stupid permission slip to drive to work. So it really didn't bother me to follow lockdown.
Recently had my summer holiday. Three weeks and the only people I interacted with was the postie a few times and a couple of checkout girls when I went shopping. BLISS!
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Well, I got my information from an AI chatbot, possibly a foolhardy move, so I'm not going to defend it :|
However, I suspect like many things, the overall picture is complicated, and the citations provided by said chatbot did seem to support its assertion, for example this one - Burden and trends of brain and central nervous system cancer from 1990 to 2019 at the global, regional, and country levels, which concludes "The global incidence, deaths and DALYs (disability-adjusted life years) of brain and CNS cancers were shown to have increased significantly from 1990 to 2019. The global ASIR (age-standardised incidence rate) kept rising steadily, while the ASMR (age-standardised mortality rate) and age-standardized DALY rate declined over the past three decades."
An increase in DALYs means people diagnosed with the condition are surviving for longer, in better condition.
An increase in incidence means it's being diagnosed more often. That could be more people are getting it, or that people are actually diagnosed and getting treatment instead of simply dropping dead.
Of course, it's Gen AI which means the whole page is utter bollocks with no basis in evidence, just random comments on Reddit.
This is a field fraught with lies and corruption. If cancer was erradicated the pharma industry would lose billions.
There has been cases of doctors struck off for curing cancer using novel methods, even with patients testifying the treatment worked. Any solution that does not involve expensive drugs be it to cure or support pathways is quashed, ridiculed and suppressed BEFORE examination and study. People need to understand medicine is big, big business now.
The earlier hypotheses related to an increased risk of cancer from tissue heating.
RF can heat tissue, but the transmit power of your phone is not particularly high, at most around 2W. There are already SAR limits for phones (specific absorption rate), Apple got in trouble with the French authorities for exceeding these limits. The question is whether the SAR figures are too high or not.
So far, the evidence is no, they are fine where they are.
There is no plausible explanation for RF at a distance causing cancer since once you are more than 1-2m away from a phone the signal is on the order of milliwatts.
I once suggested a possible mechanism, which was published as a letter in New Scientist magazine. Nature is able to capture multiple low-energy non-ionizing photons and use them to initiate a high-energy chemical reaction, in a process known as photosynthesis. That metabolism must have been pretty shit and arbitrary when it first began to evolve, and would have appeared in the first place because it was useful for something else entirely. Maybe, just maybe, such a precursor setup is present, and busy doing something else, in human biology, and too much cellphone radiation can occasionally stack up enough beans to kickstart something bad?
Just because Head Honcho can't think of a reason doesn't mean that none exists.
Equally, just because some commentard like me thinks one up, doesn't mean it does.
And, speaking as a sometime electromagnetics test professional, for whom duct tape is the food of the Gods, that is always the trouble. As soon as someone plays with say biology, the biologists can't do practical electromagnetics, and the physicist next door, who does the equations and the setup, is no better. 99% of EM sensitivity studies are utter shite, on both sides of the fence. Neither the gullible nor the sceptics realise just how bad their science is.
You need a thoroughly experienced EMC test professional in charge of the experimental programme - but who the fuck will ever allow that?
I'd suggest doing some further reading on how photosynthesis works, specifically how the chromophore in chlorophyll manages to essentially capture, store, and "add together" photons to raise the energy level enough to do what it does. It's a fairly complex molecule, and it evolved that way because it is the most efficient way for directionless evolution to provide something that does that job. There's no way an analogue would evolve by chance in organisms that don't have chlorophyll (the evolutionary path of plants and animals diverged a few billion years ago) purely in order to capture, amplify, and then waste the energy from RF photons.
Sure, you could engineer something that does that, but the thing about evolution is that it tends to discard traits that have no functional use over a relatively short number of generations, and traits that could only be harmful, with no benefit, even quicker. Biosynthesis of any bio-molecule has a cost in both energy and materials (chlorophyll has a magnesium atom in it, which necessitates a source of that element in a plant's growth medium), and even if you bio-engineered such a trait into an organism, if it wasn't necessary for survival, and didn't convey some advantage, random mutations would remove it in a few generations, conveying a survival advantage to those offspring that didn't conserve it. That's called natural selection.
Which all goes to show that new Scientist has really gone down the pan since it was acquired by DMG.
Rather, it all goes to show that you missed the frikkin' point when I tol' you that the proto-mechanism was shit at photosynthesis because it had originally evolved to do something else. I mean, God didn't sit down and say "Gabriel, make these algae photosynthesise will ya - an' make it complicated while ye're at it". Sheesh!
The point is, proto-photosynthesis turned out useful, so it forked the code and got better. On the other hand proto-brain damage is not good, so it hangs on the edge because that edge is as useful as it ever was for something else.
That's good to learn. When the 5G mind control nanobots in the COVID vaccines I've had finally get activated I won't have to worry about cancer as I help Bill Gates take over the world from his volcano lair.
Come on Bill; it's been four years now. When are you going to push the button on your cyborg army?
So where I live, 5G is synonymous with 'no internet' - the base station connected with a lovely strong signal but the backhaul must be run off a 36k modem or something. I was _entirely_ unprepared for what would happen if I asked the question 'how do I disable 5G on my phone' :-O Blimey, people are weird.
No, no. Look, it's perfectly understandable.
Wind turbines kill birds. Sometimes birds kill people, by striking a vehicle, spreading bird flu, etc. Bird deaths from wind turbines means fewer birds means fewer people deaths from birds. Fewer people deaths from birds means more people around to develop cancer.
By the same argument, cats cause a lot of cancer.
The "true believer" whack jobs will just claim the WHO study is "part of a global conspiracy to 'hide' the 'truth'."
The real cause of brain rot is politics, religion, pro sports, and anything else that relies on your "gut instinct " and "faith." Believing in silly nonsense and lies just isn't a very smart way to live your life.
As far as I can tell, the cited study makes no particular mention of anything other than cancer and tumor impacts, and its title specifically mentions cancer as its focus. (And I accept their narrow conclusions wrt cellphones and cancer)
Yet author Brandon Vigliarolo claims the study also precludes:
...or negative effects on health more generally.
On what basis was that conclusion made?
Because if we pre-determine that of all possible negative impacts that strong nearby RF exposure over a long period of time to one of the most sensitive parts of the body could cause, we will assume that the only possible one is cancer?
We already know from the generous contributions of various layperson experts using their home microwave ovens, that microwave radiation (right smack dab in the middle of common mobile network frequency bands), when applied strongly and carefully to various living beings, tends to cause them rather severe health issues unrelated to cancer.
I myself noted around the late 1990s/very early 2000's that when I updated my previous cellphone (which used the analog NAMPS network tech) to a newer model that used the digital CDMA network tech (in the same frequency band), that if I was on a phone call for more than 5-10 minutes or so, the side of my head would often get noticeably warm and I would sometimes end up with a headache apparently catalyzed by that cell phone call. (Back in those days the vast majority of cellphone calls were done with the phone held onto your ear rather than using it with a headset)
Since then I've been disinclined to make phone calls with the phone sitting on the side of my head for that reason, and preferred using either a headset or speakerphone.
So despite the fact that I'm not one of those "5G towers are secretly reprogramming our childrens' DNA" crazies, I still have a hard time believing there are ZERO impacts from them, especially when plastered on the side of our heads for long periods. (BT headsets emit RF too, but the strength is far less than a cell signal that in some cases has to travel miles to reach the nearest cell tower)
Cowardly Person wrote:
I am right ... they are wrong ... because I am right !!!Otherwise known as 'Trumpian Logic' !!!
The study referenced in the article claimed no scope of examination or authority around any sort of health impacts beyond cancer.
So why did the author of this article decide to take it upon themselves to somehow magically proclaim in the body of the article that this CANCER study actually exonerated mobile phone usage from impacting not only human cancers, but essentially any other sort of potential health impact??
In fact, the title of the article properly just mentions cancer. Why add that embellishment in the article body? It's misleading.
My comment is titled "sloppy" because maybe that's what was going on here. It still should have at least been caught by an editor.
The side of your head got warm because you were holding a big hot slab of phone to it, and absolutely not through excitation by radio waves of negligible energy.
Microwave ovens are faraday cages, which are very well understood, and do not leak radio waves unless faulty. Do not use faulty microwave ovens.
Your decision to base your lifestyle decisions based on your own invented science sadly does put you firmly in the “those "5G towers are secretly reprogramming our childrens' DNA" crazies” camp whether you concur or not. I get being sceptical and even support it, but when science/physics utterly disproves your standpoint, then that’s the time to back down and admit you were wrong.
Microwave ovens are faraday cages, which are very well understood, and do not leak radio waves unless faulty.
I haven't checked OP's links (because, ugh, why would you), but I assumed they were related to anecdotes of putting small living creatures in microwave ovens and then activating them. (The ovens, not the creatures.)
For the record, I'm not agreeing with the OP — I understand signal strength and SAR — but I think some people may have misunderstood the bit about microwave ovens. Not that it supports his argument at all, of course. (Even a small microwave oven typically uses around 600 W. If someone's phone was emitting a 600W signal, I'd be rather concerned about the severe injuries they'd sustain as the phone combusted vigorously.)
Michael Wojcik wrote:
I haven't checked OP's links (because, ugh, why would you), but I assumed they were related to anecdotes of putting small living creatures in microwave ovens and then activating them. (The ovens, not the creatures.)
Correct. It was meant to be partially tongue in cheek. But it seems people here were too busy getting triggered and trying to 'burn the witch' to pay attention to such things.
(BTW: why *wouldn't* you at least check to see where a link someone posts in their comment points to? TheReg does allow this sort of thing, presumably for a reason. I would agree with you if the links had pointed to YT or TikTok or something.)
(Even a small microwave oven typically uses around 600 W. If someone's phone was emitting a 600W signal, I'd be rather concerned about the severe injuries they'd sustain as the phone combusted vigorously.)
I figured my point should have been obvious and I guess I was assuming a minimum level of technical acumen among this crowd.
In a nutshell: clearly RF signals right in the same frequency vicinity that mobile towers use can have serious health effects on mammals unrelated to cancer, if the power is strong enough. So this dispels the notion that the ONLY possible negative impact of irradiation with RF of that frequency range can be cancer.
Also, the available evidence suggests in the pet microwaving case that the reasons the pets often die is not simply because of simple mass heating, but also because of cell-level destruction or disordering of various kinds. (Microwave radiation at that power level makes polarized molecules fly around violently, which presumably doesn't do their structures much good)
Of course cellphones do not radiate at anything close to 600 watts, more like single digit watts. On the other hand, the cumulative exposure time is much longer as well. It apparently only takes 5 minutes in a microwave to kill a cat. How many cumulative minutes do people hold their phones on their heads?
And we're not talking about killing people with cellphones, if that were happening in short order I'm sure they'd already be banned.
As it turns out, many cancer studies start out by exposing the test subject to a quantity of the compound under test that is orders of magnitude more potent than what they might encounter in daily life. If cancer is observed in response, then the next step is to reduce the exposure until no statistical impact is observed and try to figure out if there is some point where the exposure level is "cancer safe".
But in this case we don't need tumors to form to impact human health - non-cancerous degradation of certain types of neural cells in the brain for example could be another type of negative impact.
That's all I'm talking about. I don't know why we assume that if we don't see cancerous tumors then "Presto!" cellphone/microwave radiation in close proximity to one's head gets a 100% clean bill of health forever.
"and do not leak radio waves unless faulty"
Actually, some of the waves do leak because imperfections, building to cost, etc etc etc. It's a tiny amount, I think the rules are something like 5mW/cm² maximum (but I'm not a microwave tech).
Cheap and easy test - switch your phone to 2.4GHz WiFi and start playing something streaming. Put it beside your microwave (on the outside, obviously!). Put something tasty in the microwave and turn the microwave on in order to warm up whatever you're about to eat. See how long it takes for your streaming to stop, as the tiny amounts of microwave energy leaked are enough to mess with the WiFi. A metre or two so away you'll be fine, but right next to the microwave it's like trying to appreciate a delicate orchestral piece in an auditorium full of crying babies...
redpola:
The side of your head got warm because you were holding a big hot slab of phone to it,
I do believe I understand basic physics well enough to know the difference between radiant/conducted heat and heating being induced in some other way.
If the phone I was holding in my hand were actually physically hot enough on its surface to create that effect on my skull I would have never had a second thought about the observed effect. It was not.
And let's not forget the headache thing, and the different impacts between the different form of hardware and radio/RF modulation in the two devices. (Both made by the same company: Motorola. NAMPS/analog radio in device #1, CDMA/digital [technically spread-spectrum] in device #2.)
It's interesting how many people here are accusing me of doing the magical thinking/begging the question, while they merrily tell me that it's impossible for their own biases on the matter to come into question.
I'm simply sharing my experience, and I actually do generally take a logical approach to understanding mysterious effects I notice in the world. If I were an actual smug conspiracy theorist on the matter I would not label such observations as "mysterious".
1000W of radiowaves kill a pet. That is not a surprise. If you put your hand in the microwave cavity whilst it operates you will receive severe radio-frequency burns.
That does not mean 2W of phone transmit power will give you cancer or even risk burning you.
Your argument is equivalent to saying if I can cook my pizza at 200C in 20 minutes then 20C for 200 minutes will be just as effective.
On what basis was that conclusion made?
There's this little thing called the corpus of scientific knowledge. Physics, in particular, being closer to pure maths than other "hard" sciences such as chemistry or biology, allows people to be much more definitive in answers to questions such as "how does electromagnetic radiation interact with matter", "how much energy is in a photon of a known wavelength", and "how much of that energy is then imparted into matter it interacts with, and what would be its effect". In general, the boil-down of that is, that a tiny amount of energy imparted into biological tissues to cause an immeasurably small heating effect has no observable effects on health. You're actually many orders of magnitude more likely to end up with aluminium poisoning from your tin-foil helmet, especially if you sit there licking it.
Turns out that the most difficult to treat cancers are becoming more prevalent… because the other ones are getting treated more successfully and people aren’t dying of them so have a greater chance of living long enough to get something that can’t be so easily treated.
Also non-ionizing radiation is non-ionizing. And EMI regulations on mobile phones is a good thing.
Also some people want mobile phones to cause cancer for some reason, and also want every ‘official’ organisation to be in some way trying to deceive everyone, for some reason.
Every hazard pales to insignificance compared to....
1) The dangers of car traffic and fumes and ancillary associated risks due mainly to the sheer feckin unbeleivable crazy mad increase in quantity of them in the last few decades - especially in the last 20
2) The dangers of modern food
Hence just ignore all these studies, for last few years have ....
1) only traveled in rush hour when its an emergency
2) only eat what i cook and only eat anything with a shelf life of less then three days - pretend to eat at social occasions as people dont like a mirror placed in front of them
3) became a veggie - because the quality of mass produced meat is orrible these days, plus i like animals :)
4) Rarely eat out - keep it to needed social occassions
5) NEVER EVER EVER eat take aways
Outcome... never been happier as I never stress over these risks
I don't understand the down votes. The second set of points (1-5) seem fairly uncontentious.
Point 2 "...pretend to eat..." indicates a depth of understanding of the human creature. :)
Point 3 Most these days are marginal vegos simply because of the cost of meat.
Point 5 Learnt the hard way forty odd years ago - an extremely unpleasant means of unwittingly committing suicide.
The global increase in the incidence of adenocarcinoma of the lung is almost certainly a consequence of degraded air quality which is, at least in part, due to increased motor vehicle emissions.
I'd just point out that air quality regulations have meant that, over the last 40 years or so, pollution from car exhaust had decreased, especially from tetraethyl lead. What I'd like to see is whether there is any correlation between the generations that breathed in the most of this compound in car exhausts (baby boomers and early gen-X), and general mental degradation, tendency to uncritically accept untested pseudoscience, and other effects that could be put down to toxic heavy metal inhalation.
Obviously, there is lung damage from both particulate inhalation, and from oxides of nitrogen, and these are still generally much higher in populated places than they could be, but certainly in countries with decent air quality regulations, things are getting better, or staying the same, and not getting worse. I'm not sure the same can be said for China, India, or the US.
Yes, some actual data and analysis, from reputable sources, rather than "guy who, let's face it, is not particularly careful in his punctuation and capitalization, on some random Internet forum", might be a slightly stronger argument.
I'd also be interested, if someone wants to make this sort of claim, in a believable analysis showing motor-vehicle pollution is significantly more dangerous (to people, at the present moment) than other sorts of pollution. In places that are still using coal-fired power plants, for example, I'm not sure the cars would be my first worry. (Well, it depends on how many cars there are in my immediate environment — but that's rather my point. Absolute claims like "car traffic and fumes" and "modern food" are the greatest dangers to human health tend to fall apart when the range of conditions under which people live are taken into account.)
"Point 3 Most these days are marginal vegos simply because of the cost of meat."
Unfortunately organic produce (that which has not been doused in all manner of nasty chemicals at various points of it's life) is also pretty damned expensive.
But, yes, the price of meat these days. Correction, the price of decent meat these days. You can get a whole precooked chicken for a fiver, but, yeah, might want to ask what that actually is...
This just means the usual suspects will insist even more loudly to spend even more money on even more studies to find the link they are convinced exists, despite the conspicuous absence of evidence, between RF and cancer.
We spent most of the last century pumping millions of watts into the air. If that was going to have any ill effects, we would have seen them back then. Now there's almost nothing on the MW and LW bands (except QRM from switched-mode power supplies). FM and DAB are still broadcast on VHF, and TV on UHF; but as receivers have become more sensitive over the years, so broadcasters have reduced their transmitted power levels -- and their energy consumption -- accordingly.
It's easy to forget that until comparatively recently, the most common cause of all human deaths was one that only affected half the population.
but I fear the Aluminium might give me Alzheimers. :)
(Or if it is actually tin (Sn), a nasty allegergic skin reaction.)
The main health hazard of mobile (cell) phones is mostly the calling party who is frequently a real danger to your own mental or financial health.
The usual tin foil hat wouldn't protect the hind brain or the mid brain including the cerebellum when you open your mouth, if I recall the neuroanatomy correctly from a course from 50+ years ago. Suiting from Cybus Industries' offerings might be more effective. :)
Meta studies are mostly pointless, if they are was evidence it caused harm in any of the studies pulled into the meta studies there would be no need for a meta study!!
I am not sure you can prove something is totally safe only later to have not found it to be harmful. Just think about all the things that where consider "safe" and then had to be withdrawn later on, the list is quite long!
Not finding any evidence of something causing harm is not the same as something being safe!
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