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Sadly my experience shows that people who believe that mobile phones ARE linked to brain cancer also don't believe in studies that show the opposite
edited for clarity
Apologies, I have to nitpick: Of course they can't both believe one thing and the opposite at the same time.
Now, believing something with zero supporting evidence or arguments, and plenty against it, is of course silly - but you still believe either/or. :)
This is a review of thousands of studies saying that there aren't high-quality studies that "show the opposite".
edited my comment for clarity - you were replying to a version where it was ambiguous which side I was referring to
I guess those who misread my comment agree with it because both sides think the other side is ignoring evidence
Correct, you can always find studies that say the opposite. My general rule: err on the side of caution for any new technology.
This is not "new technology". Cell phones have been around for 50 years and in widespread use for more than 25 years.
Non-ionizing radiation (in the range of frequencies used by mobile phones) has been used for wireless communication for more than 75 years.
This is not "new technology". Cell phones have been around for 50 years and in widespread use for more than 25 years.
Larger scales like 50k years are to be considered. Evolutionary scale.
On the side of sensible caution when presented with unknown factors, yes.
That does not apply when there is neither practical evidence nor any room for justified suspicion. At that point it might at best be silly, even if not harmful.
Depending on the subject at hand, acting out and advising caution on things that are well understood to be harmless can be very harmful. Not using a cellphone oneself is fine. Advising others to not have cellphones can lead to them not having access to emergency services when they need them. Protesting against and burning down cellphone towers takes out emergency services for an entire local population.
Non-ionizing radiation is a very well-understood topic, and we also know very well what energies are required to do harm, and what harm it does.
“Led by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (Arpansa), the systematic review examined more than 5,000 studies from which the most scientifically rigorous were identified and weak studies were excluded.”
This is not a new study. It’s a review and meta-analysis of existing studies.
It is always hard for me to believe that the decisions on which studies to exclude can be done in an unbiased way.
I haven't read the study but it appears to include studies as far back as 1994. Mobile phone technology has changed a lot in just the last few years (MIMO, 5G etc). Frequencies used are increasing meaning decreasing wavelengths and decreasing penetrating power. I would hope that means less effects on the human body...
What? E=h×freq, where h is plancks constant. So higher frequency, higher the energy. How did you come to the opposite conclusion?
Penetration power of a material, not energy. An arrow is going to have more penetrating power than a baseball bat despite the bat potentially imparting more total energy. Lower frequency waves tend to go through things more while higher frequencies tend to get attenuated and absorbed by materials.
So, if you're worried about the waves going deep through your tissues and into your brain, its less likely those waves will end up reaching very deep and will tend to be absorbed on the surface of your skin.
The other response to you is correct. It's about material blocking. Skin depth, how far electromagnetic waves can penetrate, is inversely proportional to the square root of the frequency.
How could it be? The radiation wavelength is far too high to cause any sort of chemistry. I know there are those that will still believe it does though.
It's not about the wavelength, it's about the power.
I use shorter or higher wavelengths (depends on the channel in question) to cook my food every day but my phone sure doesn't emit 700W
Getting cooked is also not cancer. There is also not evidence for a link between burn injuries and cancer anyway.
No evidence is needed. Tissue damage is damage and genetic stress. It can increase the risk of a local cancer.
In fact, when the healing occurs, keloid scars can form, which is a benign growth.
The healing of repeated damage to the body is a vector for cancer. For example, mesothelioma caused by asbestos. The asbestos is continuously damaging tissue in the body, and the healing of said damage leads to calcification of tissue and potentially cancer.
It's certainly possible that other repeated tissue damage, such as those from burns, could also be cancer causing.
I am not a doctor, but..
..let’s assume that a specific area of our inner body is “micro-cooked” constantly, the body will certainly try to repair that area with higher frequency and therefore there would be a higher risk of cancer, wouldn’t it?
What's the mechanism by which UVA and UVB radiation cause cancer?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation :
>Exposure to ionizing radiation causes cell damage to living tissue and organ damage.
>Gamma rays, X-rays, and the higher energy ultraviolet part of the electromagnetic spectrum are ionizing radiation, whereas the lower energy ultraviolet, visible light, nearly all types of laser light, infrared, microwaves, and radio waves are non-ionizing radiation
In other words, the UV causes cancer because it's in the ionizing range of the spectrum. Radio waves don't because they're not.
Aren't UVA and UVB the low energy / non-ionizing parts of the UV spectrum?
Ionization
The non-ionizing range of UV still poses a cancer risk.
I think it depends on the amount of the radiation. While non-ionizating radiation doesn't have the ability to remove electrons, it still can heat up surfaces. Microwave ovens for example use non-ionizing radiation to heat up food, but this amount of radiation could potentially be dangerous if exposed to, because it could destroy human tissue.
You're right, it is entirely possible to get RF burns at the UHF frequencies involved here. I wouldn't want to hang out near a 1kW UHF antenna!
But let's look at the scale of emissions here. A microwave oven is going to be radiating anywhere from 800 to 1600 watts of energy into a box designed to focus most of the energy where the food is. A phone is going to emit maybe 2W of power at its peak transmission power omnidirectionally. Meaning a lot of that 2W isn't going anywhere near your head.
Wouldn’t it then hypothetically also kill the cancer cells? And due to increased water and blood flow, in an even higher rate compared to healthy cells?
Unless you happen to be irradiating a tumor, then your going to be damaging a lot more healthy cells than cancerous ones
AFAIK "cellphone cause cancer" proponents moved to more vague mechanisms like localized heating and/or "inflammation".
Will that ever change? i.e. is 5G as undangerous as 2G?
Well, based upon some Googling, 2G's wavelength is ~33cm and 5G's is ~80mm, so that's a big increase, but the kicker is that ionizing radiation's wavelength starts at ~100nm, so we're still a huge distance away from dangerous. We're not even at visible light yet (~700nm). 5G has less potential for damage than your computer screen.
I'll let the NIMBYs know. We're still arguing about base stations.
Well, at least the base station opposition usually has a point: these things are goddamn eyesores.
In ye olde times, back when we actually raised taxes to have money to build things, we built aesthetically pleasing radio towers [1] [2] (my grandpa actually worked in construction of the latter as a crane operator) that have become a beloved part of our city landscapes. No one complained about RF despite the old analog emitters running multiple megawatts of power.
Nowadays? It's usually eyesores on already ugly roofs in urban areas or metal towers looking about as pleasing as a high-voltage transmission lines.
My two cents: Maybe if we would actually invest money into making things look good, we'd get less opposition. And that is valid for a looooot of other NIMBY-plagued infrastructure as well.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldeturm_N%C3%BCrnberg
Those towers still have ugly looking antennas on them; they're just too high to really be noticeable on the ground. [0]
But for modern cell networks, you don't really want very tall towers. Taller towers mean they pick up the UHF radios from further and further away. You can realistically only carry the same number of subscribers per cell, so to support more users you're going to want to have more but smaller cells. In even medium density areas, you want your antenna elements closer to the ground to have smaller cells.
Giant tall towers make sense when you're trying to broadcast or receive signals in a large area. They make sense for television or commercial radio or emergency services VHF/UHF radios. However, that's totally unlike modern cell networks today. And even then a lot of emergency services radio systems are going for more of a distributed network of antennas throughout the city instead of just a single giant tower.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Ol...
> Those towers still have ugly looking antennas on them; they're just too high to really be noticeable on the ground.
Yup, and unless you're standing right next to them you have absolutely no idea how huge these antennas are - but visually, they drown like flies in a swimming pool, you can't make them out any more, and that's the point.
Small cell towers can be visually hidden. Even if it's just a sheet of drywall or a fully plastic wrap/enclosure that's printed on to look like wall bricks or roof tiles, I don't care, it doesn't need to be a full fake facade like in NYC [1].
All I want is for the telcos that are robbing us dry here in Germany to have to respect the people whose space they want to use.
[1] https://roadtrippers.com/magazine/new-york-fake-facades/
> In ye olde times, back when we actually raised taxes to have money to build things, we built aesthetically pleasing radio towers
People still build this kind of stuff, it's just less common because it's way more expensive (it's labor intensive, so it doesn't get cheaper over time).
Most companies have turned to the other way of doing this, they just offer money to the buildings, and if they consider it an eyesore, they can pay for the "beautification". Most building managers won't do it though.
The funniest thing of this whole business is that a lot of residential buildings oppose the installation arguing "health issues", which ends up with the antennas built on another building. They not only don't get the cash, but most times their actual exposure goes up.
The linked article is about mobile phones, not base stations. If you're interested in base station technology (huge multiple-input and multiple-output arrays with 10s to 100s Watts RF output) Ericsson publish a lot of papers.
The inverse square law has entered the chat.
Mostly yes, but the base stations are more complicated with complex arrays etc. Ericson actually have a good paper on modeling max power output in new massive MIMO 5G base stations: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8039290
The linked article is about a study of mobile phone use, not proximity to a base station. I don’t know anything about base station technology, so can’t comment on the risks there, but I would imagine that the risk profile of holding an antenna to your head is different than the risk profile of living near an antenna that transmits to hundreds of devices.
The number of devices doesn't really matter, but it does influence something like a duty cycle. It's all about power level, distance, and duty cycle. Sure, the cell phone antenna is going to transmit at something like 1kW, but its also significantly further away from you. Inverse-square law is a hell of a thing, so something being really close to you will end up imparting more effective energy than something far away.
You can’t logic people out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.
> commissioned by the World Health Organization
The WHO was a huge advocate for contact tracing during COVID. Many countries simply accept their guidelines for public health standards. Given how corrupt the funding of medical/scientijfic studies are, this is not to be trusted.
The WHO has argued that cell phone radiation is a potential human carcinogen for quite a while now. Whatever role they played during Covid is not necessarily relevant to their position on this issue.
Well, the WHO is also an advocate of the polio vaccine. What accurate conclusions are we supposed to make using this logic really. Unless you're saying it's in its interest to advocate the use of mobile phones. But people are already using their phones without the need for WHO pushing it down their throats?
They can be right on things, wrong on others. Its a big organization. This type of research will be cited in the future, which could negate interest/developments regarding tumors related to mobile phones. Why give a researcher $50k for a study on this subject when the WHO sponsored paper already said it has null effect?
you have conspiracy brainrot