Honestly, after a glance at the links, they don't inspire confidence in me either. There are papers about very small changes on very rare types of cancer, measured by proxy on a species where it's common; papers criticizing the critics claiming association with interested parties (what is a perfectly fine thing to claim, but what is it doing in a scientific paper?); and the only wide review I could find claims that the literature has very weak conclusions that are not sufficient to claim any danger.
As usual, it's not the scientists that are wackos, it's the press that is claiming things completely different from what they say. There are proposals for better test equipment that should be taken, but I don't see any other claim for change there.
> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women.
The wildest of the claims anywhere on the linked papers is a ~10% increase on the rate of one of the rarest types of cancer, so this line of research won't give you the answers you are looking for.
The thing that concerns me about millimeter wave tech and 5G is that it seems like a solution looking for a problem. My city just had a wave of poles dropped in a few neighborhoods, and they seem to me to be an expensive boondoggle. IMO, we would be better served by the heavy hand of the FCC allowing fiber providers to run telephone poles and trenches without any accountability (as the wireless carriers can with 5G).
These radio bands have been in military use for a long time. I’m surprised that no health studies have been done or released to the public.
It's not a solution looking for a problem. The problem is that the existing infrastructure does not support network slicing. Without network slicing the telcos are severely limited in their pricing models. "5G" is just them trying to convince consumers that this is for their benefit.
"The "one-size-fits-all" network paradigm employed in the past mobile networks (2G, 3G and 4G) is no longer suited to efficiently address a market model composed by very different applications like machine-type communication, ultra reliable low latency communication and enhanced mobile broadband content delivery.[2][11]"
"to address a market model" in the sentence seems to support your claim.
True! Right now telcos loathe being locked in as fixed-price dumb bit-pipes for the content providers, the netflix'es, facebooks & amazon's, who are making all the money.
"These radio bands have been in military use for a long time. I’m surprised that no health studies have been done or released to the public."
I wouldn't be. To a good first-order approximation, the military doesn't give a hoot about long term health consequences and wouldn't release any such studies, if any were made, unless they indicated a requirement for the military usage to change.
>allowing fiber providers to run telephone poles and trenches without any accountability (as the wireless carriers can with 5G)
That would definitely invert the value calculations. I work in the industry and there's no question that the savings from 5G are regulatory in nature. Ironic that it's the less regulated tech that has the more questionable health effects.
This comment is utterly false. Just after a brief glance at the paper, I found a study on showing a 2x increase in cancer on a sample size of over 1,000,000 humans.
it's a single paper by a single author (itself a proxy measure of low quality) about a single population (military), based on indirectly (not-measured) exposures. I don't think you can really conclude anything at all about that paper.
Having read it, the paper itself is much more balanced than how the biased persons (in any direction) would like to talk about it. It ends with (emphasis mine):
"The main results obtained in the present study
were a doubled incidence of all neoplasms with a
threefold increase of cancers of the alimentary
tract and a sixfold increase of malignancies of the
haemopoietic system and lymphatic organs in 20-
to 59-year-old career military servicemen exposed
occupationally to pulse-modulated 150- to 3500-
MHz RF/MW radiation. However, this does not
prove a causal link between development of neoplastic
diseases and direct interaction of EM
fields, since retrospective analysis cannot provide
convincing evidence for such links. Nevertheless,
the high incidence of certain forms of neoplasms
in personnel exposed to pulse-modulated
RF/MW radiation clearly shows a need for urgent
identification of causal factors present in the
occupational environment."
Two other quotes from the paper showing author's awareness of what can and what can't be claimed as proven:
"The highest difference in morbidity rate
between RF/MW-exposed and non-exposed personnel
was found for malignancies of the haemopoietic
system and lymphatic organs (Table 2)
with the odds ratio exceeding 6 and the incidence
of above 40 new cases per 100000 of exposed
subjects annually.
Neoplasms of the haemopoietic system
and lymphatic organs are among the malignancies
that are to a considerable degree related to multiple
environmental and occupational factors, including
ionising radiation, organic solvents, some
synthetic stains, resins, higher alcohols and
numerous other substances [l]. Therefore, many
industrial occupations, including e.g. aluminium
production, petroleum refining, painting, mining,
driving and car servicing, are considered to increase
the risk of development of leukaemias and
lymphomas. Electric and electronic industry
workers have also considerable possibilities for
exposure to potential leukaemiogenic factors and
substances during their routine or additional duties.
This may strongly influence and bias the
morbidity rates of haemopoietic and lymphatic
malignancies occurring in these populations and
their relation to EM fields."
Also some technical details are provided:
"Although assessment of
the individual exposure levels (‘dose’) was not
possible, it is known from measurement of field
power density at working posts that about 80% of
the investigated personnel were exposed to
RF/MW fields of 0.1-2 W/cm2 and 15% to
mean power densities of 2-6 W/m2"
and earlier, showing that the cm2 above is a typo:
"Evaluation of the exposure intensities
revealed that at 80-85% of posts, the fields
(mostly pulse-modulated RF/MWs at 150-3500
MHz) do not exceed 2 W/m2 (0.2 mW/cm2),
while the others have intensities 2-6 W/m2"
It seems that those were the people being exposed to the radar beams during their work hours (or maybe even outside of these). We should for the start compare that amount of exposure to that of humans in the cities due to the cell phones to know which orders of magnitude is the difference.
TL;DR: the correlation is high flux EM (ie radar) exposure being linked with significantly higher rates of [cancer]. The cause may be something environmental also correlated with EM exposure such as industrial solvents (such as those typically used in the manufacture and maintenance of electrical systems like radar) which we already know to be carcinogens.
This is not at all a counterpoint. This review basically says "We need more data" and says the reason not to draw conclusions yet is that we don't even know how much exposure we experience in daily life.
They cite some issues with the study. One of them is that the confidence intervals don't seem to add up and the incidence numbers don't look like the general populace for the control group.
I skimmed the article (it's quite long) found the criticisms weak.
> No data published; for Szmigielski (1996) it is implied that there were two to three brain tumors in the exposed group, in which case we imply that the 95% CI for brain tumor is incorrect.
> Several of these studies did not follow workers after they left the job of interest (Garland et al. 1990; Grayson 1996; Szmigielski 1996), with the potential for bias if individuals left employment because of health problems that later turned out to be due to cancer; this might especially be a problem for some types of brain tumor, which can be present for long periods before diagnosis.
The above two criticisms are only regarding the brain tumor incidence data, which is not the most significant finding in the paper.
> “Expected” rates in Szmigielski (1996) paper appear to be incorrect, according to the Royal Society of Canada (1999).
Link is broken, and why Canadian cancer incidence rates are assumed to be equal to Polish ones is not explained.
> Significant excesses were reported for several cancer sites not seen in other studies, and for cancer overall, suggesting possible bias.
Not sure why reporting what you found suggests that you're biased, but okay.
Agreed. The "correlation != causation" mantra does not match the context here.
It's true that correlation studies are not as conclusive as laboratory experiments in general, but when we're talking about negative long-term health effects on humans, you can't establish causation without doing something unethical. But does that mean science becomes useless? I don't think so.
There are times when it's appropriate to infer causation from a correlation and act on that conclusion. For example, the famous lead toxicity studies are correlation studies. One such study, cited over 1000 times, [0] meets only 6 out of 9 criteria for inferring causation [1], and people are comfortable making that inference.
A good next step would be to go through the PowerWatch list of studies [2] and evaluate these studies based on these criteria (or a similar list).
Never implied that. The study of radar operators in the military specifically states that the cancer could be caused by anything, calling out industrial solvents often used when servicing radar equipment. But the “5G is cancer” people use the study to support their claim that millimetre saves cause cancer.
The radar operators surely don’t wash them every day with “industrial solvents”. It’s nowhere said that there’s any basis that the operators are consistently exposed to them. The study also doesn’t claim what you claim, it is written much more carefully.
Where did I claim that servicing equipment means washing the equipment with industrial solvents?
Why do you feel the need to “scare quote” industrial solvents which is a common term used to refer to toxic and carcinogenic chemicals used in industrial processes?
Agree - there's shouldn't be any place for ad hominem attacks in a scientific paper. To me, this is a strong indicator of bias and/or journalistic incompetence.
Maybe it's initially counter-intiutitve, but the rise in the rate of cancer should be expected as lifespans are increased and deaths from other diseases decline. E.g. every male will get prostrate cancer "if" they live long enough.
I'm amazed at how many people here actually decline to click on the links in the article, which would guide one to a large list of scientific publications, with links to the original publications themselves.
Yet they are very ready to call "more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields" "wackos" or "cranks with a PhD", call their research "bullshit" or "impossible", call the people "thruthers" or claiming "Russian troll farms" are behind this story.
I don't think I've ever seen so much non-scientific HN comments on a science article.
At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really.
> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really.
Plentiful nutrition which has led to 90% of the population of the USA being overweight, obese, or overfat is another potential culprit. Women suffering from anorexia developed fewer tumors. Similar experiments on lab animals in a controlled setting have the same result. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11246846 I believe there are other changing risk factors in behavior as well, for instance women who have never had a child are more likely to develop breast cancer and fertility rates have dropped dramatically over the last 100 years.
Cell phones have only been widely deployed in the last two decades, and I don’t think those trends in cancer rates you’re referencing correlate very well to cellular deployment.
I’d still be curious to see more research happening in the field of millimeter waves, personally I don’t see this technology as very useful right now either compared to traditional cellular due to its lack of penetration.
It's anecdotal, but a friend of mine with cancer switched to a keto diet and he had one tumor shrink, to the point where his doctor said they could (and should) now operate on it.
The large increase in sugar and starch in our diet does contribute to fast growing cancer cells and there are studies that link being overweight/obesity with cancer.
We weren't this fat decades ago. Some may blame more office work, but the biggest factor is the amount of sugar/carbs in our diets. It's grown tremendously and yet no one seems to take it seriously, discrediting things like Adkins/Keto as "fad diets" when they were closer/more consistent with American and Western European diets for several decades.
I know a few people who have lost a lot of weight on Atkins/keto. I think they are successful diets because they provide bright-line rules for people to follow, but they are also extreme and potentially dangerous. None of them could maintain those diets long-term because they developed things like kidney pain. Caloric restriction, eating a good balance of fat/carbs/protein, laying off saturated fats, sugar, and booze, will fix 95% of people's dietary problems, but for people with weight/eating issues the middle ground is often just too difficult a path to tread.
I've had trouble finding good studies on this. I don't think it's true. I've been on pretty hard keto for over two years at a time. I know other friends who have and have never heard of kidney trouble.
You occasionally have a day or two where you eat out with friends or have some fried chicken every month, and initially there is a period where you feel sick for a week as your body withdraws from sugar, but other than that I've never had kidney issues and my blood work has always come back fine.
With Adkins you do start reintroducing some carbs eventually, but you still keep it under a limit, and go back down if you start getting unhealthy.
Anecdotally: my father did have kidney issues when he went Keto, but that's because he had too high a proportion of his calories from protein. He switched to more leaves and fats and that seems to have cleared up.
I don't think you can say that they are dangerous more than you can say that for example vegan diets are extreme and dangerous. They CAN be dangerous but there are many who are successfully are eating that way and it is even a treatment against epilepsy seizures for some.
My (very limited) understanding is that tumours need glucose to survive and grow, so presumably a keto diet or fasting could potentially stop a tumour from growing.
I don't understand why people are downvoting me when I'm literally quoting the stats from the agency that defines this. If you're downvoting, can you at least reply to provide some technical signal so I can update my knowledge?
EDIT: I misread the original message and thought it was referring to just obesity, not obesity/overweight.
The article says, "more than 500 studies, have found harmful biologic or health effects from exposure to RFR at intensities too low to cause significant heating." The link to the 500 articles is https://drive.google.com/file/d/19CbWmdGTnnW1iZ9pxlxq1ssAdYl....
Conclusion of 1) Despite the improved exposure assessment approach used in this study, no clear associations were identified. However, the results obtained for recent exposure to RF electric and magnetic fields are suggestive of a potential role in brain tumor promotion/progression and should be further investigated.
Conclusion of 2) Ever use of wireless phones was not significantly associated with risk of adult glioma, but there could be increased risk in long-term users.
They both read as, "we found no significant effect".
Careful, you’re misinterpreting the document. The two studies you’ve picked are listed as “neither evidence of an effect or a null finding”, they are not included in the “more than 500 studies” finding harmful effects. Those studies are prefixed by “P” in the document and, although I haven’t counted, a rough estimate based on the number of pages makes it plausible that there are > 500.
That said, given the scientific consensus from rigorous meta-analyses, I expect that these “positive” studies are mostly of low quality and/or limited sample size. And scepticism is generally warranted when advocates start listing large numbers of studies instead of referring to a few meta-studies. As it happens, the best available meta-studies come to the opposite conclusion (namely, that there’s probably no harm from mobile EMF), so this long list is essentially bogus.
The first didn't have a conclusion and the results were just the measured RF power in an apartment.
The conclusion of the second is, "A total of 900-MHz EMF applied in middle and late adolescence may cause changes in the morphology and biochemistry of the rat ovarium.", which makes no sense. "A total of 900-MHz EMF" is gibberish. The complete text is not freely available.
>> P This study reported effects from the exposure or radiation category (effects can be either positive or
negative and may be primary or secondary outcomes)
>> N This study reported no effects from the exposure or radiation category
>> - This study offered important insights or findings but is neither evidence of an effect or a null finding
I'll be honest, this ordering seems dubious to me. P (for positive?) can show either positive or negative effects. N (for negative) shows no effects. - (for neither?) shows neither evidence of an effect or a null finding. I would think that P needs to be subdivided better to show which papers show a positive or negative effect.
Can someone do a count on the number of each category?
At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why.
Because life expectancy has also risen; people who used to be dying of other things are now living long enough that cancer is more common.
Unfortunately the hunch you have just spendt 30 seconds thinking about is sadly incorrect. The increase in life expectancy doesn't account for the increased incidence of cancers. There are other factors at play, which need to be investigated (some that we know: obesity, pollution, cigarettes).
You are looking at cancer deaths, which indeed have gone down from better treatments and better screening. This does not imply less incidence of cancer.
It leads to in increase in cancers detected before the person dies of non-cancer causes.
Situation: person has an almost undetectable cancer. They see a doctor, no cancer detected, later that week they are shot by police at a routine road stop.
We get in our time machine, go back a week and a bit, and supply the doctor with a better detection kit.
Situation 2: person has an almost undetectable cancer. They see a doctor who refers them to a specialist, cancer detected, another notch on the cancer tally board. Later that week they are shot by police at a routine road stop.
Nothing has changed except in the second case there’s another cancer detected. The person is still dead from non-cancer causes, just in one scenario they died as a haver-of-cancer and in the other they didn’t.
Better/earlier detection will necessarily lead to a decrease in cancers that are never detected (which I interpret as an increase in cancers detected before mortality from other causes), otherwise it’s not better/earlier detection.
Agreed, but there are plenty of factors with a better-explained causal mechanism than non-ionizing radiation. Like the three you listed.
My money is on diet and pesticides/preservatives/etc. being another big one. With this, too, there is little official evidence that, say, Roundup, causes cancer, but there is, imo, a stronger lobby against a positive outcome in those studies, and they don't necessarily control for interactions such as Roundup combined with the surfactant that it is typically mixed with that increases cell penetration.
I agree with your comment in principle but the specific example of Roundup is rather weak. Yes, glyphosate is usually studied in isolation rather than as a commercial formulation including surfactants etc., but we have decades’ worth of epidemiological studies showing that proper use of Roundup has, at most, a marginal effect on tumour incidence. Conversely, the most-discussed studies that purport to show Roundup’s carcinogenicity have well-known, glaring methodological flaws (including some that formed the basis of the IARC report). The case of Roundup is made more complicated by the fact that Monsanto/Bayer has been caught red-handed skewing the publication record without disclosure of conflict of interest, and lobbying scientific journals. But the same is true for the opposition: for instance, the now-retracted 2012 Séralini study also failed to disclose the authors’ conflict of interest. And beyond improper publication practices (which, yes, is serious), there’s no evidence that Monsanto/Bayer actually falsified information.
In sum, I’d rank the risk of Roundup being carcinogenic on roughly the same level as that of 5G: possible but unlikely, given the best available evidence.
Ok, fair enough. I have enough other reasons to be against roundup without needing to cling to believing it's carcinogenic. Thanks!
For the record, the other reasons are to do with the larger ecological impact of roundup-based practices, such as harm to soil fungi and bacteria, and collateral damage from runoff or wind. Plus, there were some studies finding it may cause harm to intestinal lining and such, even if it's not actually a carcinogen.
Agroindustrial farming practices have led to most of our produce in stores becoming more caloric but less nutritionally dense. Interesting idea that perhaps our food plants are becoming more "obese-yet-malnourished" and this change in food plants could be at the root of a number of health risks.
I checked this for you, and what appears to be the best meta study I could find shows that the only correlation found was that long sleep duration increases the risk of one type of cancer:
The present meta-analysis suggested that neither short nor long sleep duration was significantly associated with risk of cancer, although long sleep duration increased risk of with colorectal cancer.
"After just one night of only four or five hours’ sleep," Walker tells The Guardian, "your natural killer cells—the ones that attack the cancer cells that appear in your body every day—drop by 70%." Sleep deprivation has such serious outcomes that "the World Health Organisation has classed any form of night-time shift work as a probable carcinogen."
^Matthew Walker, presumably the 70% drop is from work at his Berkeley lab
Cigarette smoking has fallen a LOT in the US in the past few decades, though there does seem to be a resurgence lately with "vaping".
Pollution is lower too (again, in the US): cars used to pollute a LOT more. Smog used to be far, far worse in the LA area decades ago, so even with more people and more cars, pollution is lower, particularly localized pollution that affects people more. Of course, global warming pollution is certainly higher, but that isn't localized and shouldn't have any effect on you (it's just CO2).
Well, if you could point me to a good scientific study that makes a link between higher life expectancy and cancer, I'd be inclined to believe it. Until then, I think the cancer incidence rise is shocking, and can't be explained by rise in life expectancy alone.
cancer incidence rising strongly correlates with our ability to detect as well as the push to look for it.
I also believe many of the cancers we successfully treat would be non issues if left alone. (all the young women who found lumps and become breast cancer survivors)
Before we go any further, are you a scientist or a doctor? You're arguing on a thread where there are a bunch of scientists who have fairly deep knowledge in this area (it's still an area that a lot of people who come from external areas, like physics, struggle with frequently).
Cancer rates are strongly driven by age- cancer incidence increases exponentially as people age (stochastically, of course).
from where does this increase in cancer probability statistic come from? anyone have a link to a paper? tried googling but found nothing reliable sadly
A big confounder in studies based on diagnosis numbers is that you can confuse better diagnosis with higher incidence, and earlier diagnosis with longer survival. No room for confusion with Death though, it's very cut and dried.
Suppose that today the average person tells their doctor about a symptom of Example Cancer (which is incurable) six months before it kills them. 1 million people per year in Standard Country die of Example Cancer, with an average of six months between diagnosis and death.
Now, let's imagine I invent a machine, it can scan seemingly healthy people and tell them if they've got Example Cancer on average 12 months earlier. Nothing changed in terms of whether people get Example Cancer, it's still incurable, but now we've improved time between Diagnosis and Death by 200% but even scarier the incidence of Example Cancer, the number of people who know they have it, has also increased by 200%. It's an epidemic!
That machine is pretty unrealistic. A more realistic machine also gives false positives for Example Cancer. Now the number of people living with Example Cancer has increased by 500% but good news, most of those people don't die of it, because they had what medics would call "Sub-clinical incidence" meaning, sure, you had the disease but it didn't actually affect your life so who cares?
A big confounding factor in counting incidence based on cancer deaths would be improved treatment. Whether by medical advances or simple earlier diagnosis having better cure rates.
The article writer is a known "truther" of the field. But I like his view, I believe we need opinions from his end of the spectrum, but I've also read a few times comments such as this:
>"Academia: Where Crazy People Can't Get Fired - Dr. Moskowitz disgraces the University of California-Berkeley in precisely the same way Dr. Oz and Mark Bittman disgrace Columbia University: They are charlatans who wrap themselves in the prestige of academia to peddle foolishness to anxious parents."
To be honest, I'm somewhat surprised (in a good way!!) that Moskowitz got published on Scientific American at all.
Anyway, I have my fair share of worries on large density mmwave equipment environments, mostly focused on other things, as in, not on its effects on us, but on microbial life, bacterial life, not the focus of this article, so I won't derail, but at least for me, Moskowitz isn't this zero sum game as he may be to some field agents.
As a biochemist, I just want to chime in that I think part of the reason for an apparent increase rise in cancer rates is that we have eliminated many other causes of death already - we have to die of something, and cancer is something that is not "curable" in the sense of other disorders.
After looking at the list of publications purported to be evidence, I have to agree with the other comments here casting doubt. Most, if not all, of these publications are in no-name journals with few citations. I found one paper where the author listed a gmail email address (are they unaffiliated with any institution?)
> I think part of the reason for an apparent increase rise in cancer rates is that we have eliminated many other causes of death already
Where did you read "an apparrent increase rise in cancer rates" ? in this article or in one of the articles it references? which one?
I am not a biochemist, but I would assume academics are referring to incidence rates, not causes of deaths... If you did actually witness such a confusion in the papers, it's important to point it out, but if you didn't it would be equivalent to a physicist suspecting a colleague of confusing mu (the reduced mass of a binary system) with mu (a muon)... rather incredulous if you ask me...
Every academic discipline expects its disciples to be at least proficient in disambiguating words from context, so when one refers to a "cancer rate" in the context of causation, that it would refer to "incidence rates" i.e. the transition probability per surviving individual per unit time. This is independent of deaths by other causes.
> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women.
Which suggests that there is an apparent increase in cancer rates. So yes, I was referring to an incident rate. Regardless, the semantics here don't change the meaning of my statement. We have solved (for lack of a better word) many of the lower hanging fruits of human disorders. As such, we can't effectively control for incidence rates over time
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I have worked with world-class scientists where the author only had a gmail address (untill we gave them an appointment at Berkeley).
Of course, a gmail address in and of itself is not an indicator of quality, however on a single author paper it certainly makes me wary.
Just out of curiosity, what field was that in? I could certainly see some scientific disciplines having unaffiliated world-class scientists, but others it would be virtually impossible to do high quality research outside of a lab
bioinformatics/computational biology. Specifically, multiple sequence alignment and HMMs for protein recognition. The author was previously a physicist (PhD) who left physics due to the low number of jobs in the 70s-80s, founded a database company, sold it to Intel, and then visited Berkeley and saw a cool talk and volunteered.
There were already a few codes in the area and plenty of papers, and he was mathematically inclined, so it didn't take long for him to become an expert. Once he was an expert, he pointed out major problems in existing codes (both functional and performance).
This is an area where you're working with fairly straightforward data and math (linear strings from a chosen alphabet, probabilistic model is well-established). You don't need to understand the underlying biology in detail to contribute.
Thanks for the answer - I figured it would be some bioinformatics/mathematics/statistics leaning field - you can definitely do more as a lone wolf there than say, biology.
I think this take is a little unfair. Sure, calling scientists “wackos” with reviewing the publications is extreme, we also know there is a massive body of scientific evidence looking at the link between RF waves and cancer that has pretty much found zilch at this point.
Clearly? The actual article (here's a full text: http://www.fraw.org.uk/data/esmog/lerchl_2015.pdf) doesn't seem to show that clear link. First, there's no dose-response effect, mice with higher doses didn't present higher rates of cancer (sometimes lower). Also, Table 1 with the actual findings is just crazy. For example, the group with no radiation has the second-highest incidence of lung carcinoma. The rate of lymphoma is the same at 0W/kg and 2W/kg, but doubles at 0.4W/kg.
I'm not going to say that the article is trash because it doesn't seem to be, but it is definitely not a clear link, there is a lot unanswered there. There is no mechanism proposed, there are a lot of carcinomas studied (high probability of finding something with a correlation) and there is no dose-response effect.
the best explanation for why more people get cancer is fewer people are dying of other diseases. Also, more people are surviving cancer. Note: I'm a scientist, and one of the reasons I'm not clicking on links in the article is that I've already done my own looking into IARC and I've concluded they are non-scientific.
Note: I'm a biophysicist who has studied cancer and RF at the graduate level, and postdoctorate level, I can read the literature, and also make reasoned efforts at evaluating whether the literature provides any useful information that would affect the roll out of 5G from health perspectives. I am unable to find any reliable evidence that would indicate that this rollout will actually have "crisis" levels of health impact.
Now. On to the next step: I completely support high quality research done by high quality scientists on non-ionizing radiation. I would, like many other scientists, to see convincing evidence about the nature of damage that could be done by 5G. So far, nearly everything has been indirect in a way that does not inspire enough confidence to propose policy changes.
Doesn't help that the article is written in a kind of exaggerated, fear mongering way. E.g.:
"
5G also employs new technologies (e.g., active antennas capable of beam-forming; phased arrays; massive inputs and outputs, known as MIMO)
"
MIMO is multiple inputs, multiple outputs, not massive. If the author is bending terminology to enhance his case, that makes the case look weaker...
Yeah. If an average person thinks MIMO stands for Massive Inputs and Outputs that's not a bad mistake. If someone purporting to speak with authority on the subject of RF radiation thinks that, it's grounds to suspect them of being a blithering fool.
>At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women.
Annual invasive cancer incidence rates have been declining in the U.S. for over two decades.
Don't fight a knee jerk reaction with one from your own.
> Cancer have risen to 1 in 5 in women and 1 in 3 in men, and nobody knows why
'Nobody knows why', seriously? Did we not establish that the likelihood of cancer increase with lifespan? When you only gets to live to 50 of course you don't die of cancer and heart disease nearly as easily. Your risk of cancer increase each year of age lived after a certain age, and any increase in life expectancy will result in more people eventually dying in cancer.
To be fair, there’s also quite a few published studies showing a positive effect for various pseudoscientific medical practices. Those studies just tend to be very poorly designed, executed, controlled, and don’t represent the actual literature trend.
You really do have to spend significant time investigating the literature to actually.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29268055 Can't get the full article, but I only see mentions of a 900MHz source (inside 3G frequency band) and no mention of power. Also it's a biochemical study on rats. Slim evidence.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26017559 This study talks about the effect of intensive radiation (3x the FCC limit for mobile phones, during 8 months) and it looks like it's actually beneficial for Alzheimer's disease. Funnily enough, it links in the abstract a lot of studies showing either inconsistent or no association between RF and cancer.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4427287/ An study from the department of ¿Psychology and Psychiatry? that finds changes in EEG activity due to mobile phone use, only when the phone is placed near the ear. Little mention of whether the RF radiation can interfere in the EEG measurement.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25738972 Mentions the CERENAT study, which shows increased risk with really heavy mobile phone usage (as in calls). The only one with actual positive effects and looking like a serious study.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25918601 Finds decreased sperm quality, but also discusses other studies finding no effect, and also says "A point of limitation in this study is the inability to assess [...] whether sperm affections are time related or not".
That's just off the first page and a half. Probably someone should do a more thorough review, but it does not give me any assurance that most of the studies with reported positive effects are done by people not in the related fields, have no relation to the problem or do not answer the actual important questions.
> And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really.
Mobile phones are not the only thing that has changed radically in the last years.
People don’t click the link because they already know better.
We are bathed in radiation everyday.
So guess what, the people who say 5G is unsafe, are also the same people that will say flying is unsafe, or using a microwave is unsafe, or eating a banana is unsafe, or being in your car is unsafe, or using your phone is unsafe. Because all these things emit radiation.
Do people care about that though? No. The effects of radiation are grossly exaggerated, and frankly any negligible effects we feel are just the price we pay for living in high tech times. I doubt anyone wants to go back to a tech free lifestyle just so they can live maybe a few more years only to die of something else anyway.
So yes, it’s quackery to say 5G is unsafe and the only reason an article like this would rise to the top is so people could come out and trash it. You want to see scientific comments then go to more interesting articles.
You conflated ionising and non-ionising radiation (flying/banana/chest x-ray vs. radio waves, wifi, light from lightbulbs).
Just so you know.
Your point still stands though, although i would say we're bathed in more intense radiation than 5G and have been bathing in it for millenias - sunlight is radiation as well!
Better live underground, i guess.
Oh, oh, but what about skin cancer you say? That's caused by sunlight, right, so radiowaves could harm you, right? Yeah, but skin cancer is caused by ultraviolet, high energy, high frequency EM radiation (3-30PHz). Petahertz, Coral! That's several orders of magnitude less than most extreme 5G!
Don't even get me started on the power levels of sun vs a base station!
So yeah, the claims of health impact are bullshit.
Other points: while excessive radiation is bad, below a certain point it is not harmful, and in fact is beneficial. There's some good reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model
Most scientists today would say that below a threshold, there is no negative effect to radiation (or rather, you can't predict the effect in a stochastic way as a function of dose) and also that within certain regimes, radiation is beneficial (mutations leading to evolution).
> Most scientists today would say that below a threshold, there is no negative effect to radiation
Every time I was enticed to look up more about hormesis, I see the same issue: an intrinsically linear effect of a factor is studied, with a precise linear generator of the factor, but outside of the generator there is a background component to the factor which is ignored, which causes a misinterpretation of non-linearity.
A concrete example, suppose you have a light sensor in a "dark" enclosure, then at large enough intensities the current through the photodiode is linear with the incident illumination, but if there is some light leaking (or alternatively thermal radiation, and hence temperature, and hence dark current) then as the light generator is set to lower and lower levels, the light sensor will no longer linearly approach 0, since the signal starts to delve below the noise floor (so it will allways be measurable, but require more and more oversampling to decrease the noise floor). To confuse this effect which has nothing to do with photons getting converted to electron hole pairs, it is a misinterpretation to consider the effect "non-linear" close to the noise floor, and an even bigger misinterpretation to consider it "beneficial". Sure even high levels of ionizing radiation can be beneficial to the offspring of a colony of bacteria, fungi, or plants as a group, but it most certainly is harmful to the the individual bacteria, fungi or plants individually.
In the case of the light sensor, the current through the reverse biased photodiode will still be ideally linear with the total incident illumination, just no longer linear with the illumination of the non-dominant light source.
Humans kinda need sunlight to generate enough vitamin D. So if you live in a cave, that's not going to be good for you either. But sunlight causes cancer too, so what should you do?
I think it should be pretty obvious that we can't avoid radiation, and we were evolved to handle a certain amount of it.
Really, complete bullshit for 100% of the population no questions asked? With all the wrong information Science has helped spread when it comes to Diet (example: eating fat makes you fat) is it really fair to say a study that says we need more studies is automatically bullshit?
Really, complete bullshit, just like "vaccines cause autism" or "MSG causes chinese restaurant syndrome". Do we need more studies to again disprove what already has been disproven? Bad bullshit science exists and "we need more studies" is its lifeline that keeps the gullible populace feeding it.
Oh and also. To make a scientific claim, you have to make a hypothesis. Not just a claim "5G causes cancer", but "5G causes cancer by this and this method". Without method of action best you can do is a corelational study, which is jus one step higher a case study, which is basically an anecdote.
>At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why.
There is a clear and well known pair of reasons for this. First people are living longer and the longer you live the more prone to cancer you are. People who died of small pox did not die of cancer.
Second, more controversially, atmospheric bomb testing in the 50's and 60's.
People live too long, and don't die of stuff like pneumonia or tuberculosis or syphilis or yellow fever much anymore.
Over a long enough time span, your probability of getting some form of cancer goes to 100%. Probably more like 200% or 300%, since there are so many types that they can cut out or beat back relatively successfully these days, at least until you get too old and decrepit.
I think the title of the link is phrased badly. "We have no reason to believe 5G is safe" makes me want to comment that "we have no reason to believe 5G is unsafe" without even reading it. Maybe the title should be more specific. For example: pointing out that millimeter waves are not present in <=4G.
To be fair, it doesn't seem unreasonable to start with the assumption that something is unsafe and work to prove that it is safe. Seems safer ;)
If this was some technology where not having it would be a major impediment to society, then maybe it would be a different story. But 5G just doesn't seem that important to me.
If we were to do this, it would cause large numbers of techologies to never ever reach the public because people couldn't do the work to "prove" that something is safe. I would only recommend this policy towards things that we could reasonably expect to have catastrophic outcomes.
Like I said, the reason it seems reasonable in this case is because 5G really just doesn't seem like it's super important. The telcos just need a new thing to market, and it seems totally reasonable for us to expect them to ensure it's safe, especially give the ubiquity of cell phones and the fact that most people will probably eventually be upgraded to 5G without even needing to opt in.
Frankly, that's SOP on Hacker News. Half the people are commenting on something they haven't read, and the other half are complaining that news from reputable sources isn't free and/or complain that they can't read it with NoScript in Lynx on Arch Linux.
>At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why.
> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why.
Couldn't it simply be that we are curing/reducing the incidence of most other diseases? Cancer is something that typically doesn't occur until the later years of life. By reducing the number of people who die of other causes, you are increasing the potential population of people who end up getting cancer.
I actually read the article as I'm unsure this is about safe-for-human-body or safe-for-network-security.
What about the cell-phone-radiation-for-brain-cancer concern? Haven't heard about it for a while.
5G will work better in populated cities and I don't think it is a good fit for most areas in USA. Likely we will have 5G for very dense areas while 4G for the rest.
I will absolutely not live or work in close vicinity of any 5G towers.
> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why.
I'm not sure exactly what time interval you're making that claim over, but isn't a large part of it people not dying from plague and flu and having good medical care to live into old age in the first place?
>>Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research.
One thing's for sure: there _is_ paucity of research on this topic - judging by a brief search on scholar.google.com for "4G technology health effects humans".
The dissonance runs high here on the subject of 5G, the only thing I can think of that comes close is vaccinations.
Once religion is out as a guide to navigate the world, there's really not much left except science to cling to.
Despite plenty of evidence that everyone and everything can be bought, despite plenty of respected researchers raising their voices against, despite all the proof you could want of how these situations tend to play out long term.
Once you give up blind belief in science, there's nothing left to hold on to; and that's obviously a scary thought for many.
I find the HN community to be bi-modal with respect to technology: either they are very distrusting (luddites), or blindly in love with it (techno-utopians).
5G gets the techno-utopians in HN all excited about the possibilities of [INSERT THE POINT OF 5G] and they'll get mad at anything that threatens its introduction.
As a contrary data-point, I'm an increasingly luddite programmer who doesn't care at all about 5G, but I live in a town that is kind of a hotbed for conspiracy stuff and I tire of the latest scare always going round without a plausible causal mechanism.
You can find PHDs who believe just about anything (I saw one recently with a sign saying "sunspots cause global warming"), and PHDs publish papers. So you have to look at whether they were peer reviewed, in what journal, and what the findings and methods really were.
It's a lot of work to properly evaluate studies, but I think that meta-analysis is easily abused in this arena. The other big problem is the null publication bias. Have one hundred people roll dice, and if you're only interested in snake-eyes and only publish papers on where that happens, you'll get like 9 studies where they rolled snake-eyes and one responsible scientist who publishes a null result, and conclude that there's a 90% chance of snake-eyes on dice rolls...
I work around RF sources professionally. I'm intensely interested in any biological effect of the radiation I work around. I have access to journals through work and my old university, and I read primary sources with great interest (and some knowledge, being an electrical engineer). I have yet to find any credible link between gigahertz RF and health problems (except the neck problems that come from staring at a phone).
I feel like the most damning lack of evidence is the lack of correlation between cell phone adoption and the purported ill effects. In the last 20 years pretty much the whole world started holding RF transmitters up to their head, from basically zero beforehand. If there was an effect, it would be epidemic.
Then there are people like me, who are in love with technology, but work with it and science so closely we have a very good understanding of when and how technology can have risks, and when it can have benefits. And when it's impossible to predict.
Who here actually gets excited about 5G? Everything I see about 5G is just full of business buzzwords. No one can explain why [a technical person outside of the mobile telecom industry] should care. Why the hell is there a new "G" if LTE was supposed to mean "Long Term Evolution" anyway?
I've coined the term "orchard picking" for this. If the subject is climate or vaccines, most people will yell "learn the facts" and "follow the science" and generally act as though dissenters deserve every ounce of contempt we can pour on them. On those topics I generally agree, except maybe for that last part. But somehow on other topics - e.g. most discussions of programmer productivity or effects of technology - it's all "meh, here's my anecdote instead" and other forms of pseudo-skepticism. There I tend to break from the crowd. I believe science is a mode of thought, not just another rhetorical club to pick up when it's convenient and set down again when it's not.
Perhaps because everyone here knows there's very little actual, proper science on programmer productivity, and even less of that is applicable in workplace environment.
There is no break from the pattern in this thread. People still call for following the science - they just consider this article's science to be the RF engineering equivalent of Wakefield study.
> The scientists who signed this appeal arguably constitute the majority of experts on the effects of nonionizing radiation. They have published more than 2,000 papers and letters on EMF in professional journals.
The pioneers behind reverse transcriptase were ridiculed by their peers for years. As DNA could only travel in one direction. Francis Crick even called the scientist a wacko. But in the end, the 'wacko' was proven correct and won the Nobel Prize for being so. His name is Howard Temin.
Learned all about him from Malcom Gladwell's podcast this weekend. A really fascinating story of someone that wouldn't give in to peer-pressure, because he was convinced:
We have already solved all the worlds problems, unified quantum mechanics with classical physics, cured cancer and figured out how to factor primes. None of these works will ever see the light of day or be taken seriously because of the sources.
That may sound like hyperbole but somehow I doubt it's far from the mark. Tons of modern advances were from novices or unaccredited. Flight, Relativity, Baysian and Boolean logic; Two hicks, a patent clerk, a preacher, and a self-taught math nerd.
While the effects of the latter three are pretty well understood for certain kinds of radiation (ionizing and non-ionizing) ranging from "acute radiation sickness due to gamma burst" to "listening to the radio your whole life doesn't have a link to cancer", there is truth that a specific band of millimeter 5G has been less studied than others.
However, science follows patterns, and interpolating the existing data to this sub-infrared region opens a kind of wiggle room similar to, but in fact the opposite to, low dosimetry of ionizing radiation that has given the Linear No Threshold model a run for it's money. Except in this case, skeptics are typically concerned about chemical effects due to subdermal heating (not really as compelling as ionizing radiation effects), or debating the "non-ionizing-ness" (which is less common because its even less supported by evidence).
It comes down to a persons personal risk. In my opinion, the sun beats out all non ionizing radiation concerns, particularly when it comes to heating of the skin and subdermal tissues. Wear a hat and sunscreen (against the sun).
Still worth researching and acknowledging the data gap, as the EU does in its metastudy of 40+ years and X00 scientific papers [0], but there's no reason to be alarmed based on the existing corpus of evidence.
> It comes down to a persons personal risk. [..] Wear a hat and sunscreen.
What's the "hat and sunscreen" protection against millimeter wave cellphone towers, that someone else installed on their private property near you?
I'm not yet convinced the risks exist. But conceptually if there was a danger, there's no "personal risk" argument. We're blanketing the whole area around a tower with millimeter wave/5G, a person cannot opt out.
The sun is a 1000 watts per square meter exposure at your body, cell towers might be 100w if you hugged the antenna then inverse square law to distance to about 0.00000001 watt with a strong signal. Your cell device is a millwatts transmitter, equivalent to an LED light shining on you.
You don't need hat and sunscreen for street lights or flashlights nor would you need it for cellular power levels, orders of magnitude difference in exposure.
Therefore, 99.9999038793% of the energy emitted is at wavelengths shorter than 1E-4m (0.1mm).
Or, across the entire continuous spectrum (0, 1e-4m], the total energy from the Sun is 0.0009612W, or 961uW.
You might complain that 961 uW is much more than 10nW, but again, you have to consider that 961 uW is across the entire spectrum (0,1E-4]. The Sun is less powerful at narrow spectrums because otherwise it'd drown out the cell phone tower (Or rather we pump power into the antenna to overcome the "noise" from the Sun).
I'd reproduce the numbers, but unfortunately my HP48 underflows at such narrow bandwidths.
And the "LED" at your face is, of course, much more powerful than the Sun since (as you pointed out) by the inverse square law, it has to pump out a lot of power to reach the tower.
Nor do I happen to think LEDs are harmless. Using LEDs to affect biological system is a very rich area of study.
Do I think non-ionizing radiation is harmful? I doubt it. But comparing a 1000W/m^2 @ 5400K black body radiator to a cell phone tower is dishonest.
Exactly, the sun is mostly higher energy (approaching ionizing) terahertz radiation.
The concern with 5G seems to revolve around the uses of higher frequency millimeter wave radiation compared to 3G/4G which has shown no repeatable damaging results at normal power levels.
If higher frequency = bad, which is actually true, comparing 5G the sun is not dishonest IMO. I am trying to give some perspective to show how it seems odd to worry about extremely low power cellular radiation while giving little thought to the extremely powerful nuclear radiator in the sky.
Dosage matters, cellular frequency will cook you given enough power, so will visible light. The power levels we are talking about do not generate enough heat to damage our tissue, so if they do harm it would need to be through some other unknown process. Should we keep looking for possible other processes, yes of course. However I would be much more concerned about the much more powerful visible range artificial radiators around us every day, like the monitor I am staring at right now emitting a 100 times the radiation of my cellphone right at my face all day long.
Sure, ionizing vs non-ionizing but millimeter waves do do localized, penetrating, heating and the intensity of millimeter radiation from 5G is orders of magnitude stronger than that from the Sun.
Is it consequential? Probably not, but the OP's original comparison of 1000 W of Sun vs. 100W from a tower and nW from cell phone is disingenuous.
This is a tangent, but it's crazy that we've built a communications network that relies on basically LEDs shining out of our pockets (with less interference from the sun, but still).
If it were a different color, yes. If each of them were a different color, your eye would still be able to, as long as you had enough focus. So the analogy holds pretty well.
The Sun transfers orders of magnitude more heat to your body than cell towers or your phone.
The problem with every argument about radiation from cell phones being dangerous is that for every proposed mechanism, the Sun is orders of magnitude more damaging.
The obvious worries with cell phones are repeated stress injuries, insomnia and disruption of personal relationships. There's just no plausible mechanism for the radiation to be damaging, though.
You're falsely equivocating sun's wide spectrum to 5G's very narrow set of bands. Most of sun's spectrum at the surface is visible, infrared light, and a bit of UV.
5G requires far more towers than 4G or 3G before it, and if biological damage is possible accumulated risk when measured over an entire population can still be problematic.
Ultimately this isn't simply an issue of "personal risk." If there's no danger, there's no danger. But if there is and you live in a major city simply not owning a cellular device may only lower your exposure.
None of what you say is false, but without numbers it's impossible to compare to other sources of danger. And like ionising radiation, you need to compare to background levels. How does it compare to, say, the sun? Or EMC emissions from motor vehicles?
That would only apply to the phone transmitting, wouldn't it? The RX is broadcast from the nearest tower, and 5G uses beam-forming. If your device (or another device near you) is receiving from the tower then there's not much of a way to avoid getting exposure.
Not much way to avoid getting exposure to electro-magnetic waves?
You make it sound like EM waves aren’t being emitted or reflected by everything in the universe short of a black hole.
And cell phone EM exposure levels for someone who isn’t carrying a phone - hopefully this person knows better than to walk outside, or stand near a window!
A hat and sunscreen does offer some protection against millimeter wave radiation - the had will block some (smallish but non-zero) percentage of the radiation, as will the sunscreen as long as you apply a thick layer.
As far as I know the exposure is a bit like a bell curve.
Right besides the tower you're in a blind spot, then it gets more intense as you move out of the blind spot and then it gets lower as you move further away.
5G requires more towers, closer to their end users. To quote the article:
> 5G will require cell antennas every 100 to 200 meters, exposing many people to millimeter wave radiation. 5G also employs new technologies (e.g., active antennas capable of beam-forming; phased arrays; massive inputs and outputs, known as MIMO) which pose unique challenges for measuring exposures.
No it wont require, it will be able to work on the same frequencies as 4G does.
It can use more towers at higher frequencies in really really crowded areas or industrial setups, but those work at lower power outputs, and penetrate the body less (due to higher frequencies).
Isn't more cell antennas equivalent with much lower transmission power? Especially the phone needs to use way less power, so total amount of EM for humans nearby is going to be significantly lower.
Now compare to AM/FM transmitters that cover a huge geographic area. Those can be scary. FCC allows up to 50000 W transmission power. It's required because the antennas are spaced so far apart.
My City has them or they are under permitting for "towers" (of 30 feet or so) on nearly every block. Some right next to residences, daycares, schools, offices, etc.
I have a wallet with RFID protection. Could we make cell phone cases and/or glass with shielding that blocks 5G signals, limiting exposure in part of the phone that wouldn't be need to be sending and receiving signals? Basically have a naked antenna and shielded everything else. I am not a mobile phone hardware wizard :)
There is such a thing as RF shielding that uses copper or other conductive metals in a grated screen as a means to block out radio frequencies. While the application is typically used as a means to create telecommunication dead zones, i could easily see somebody capitalizing on this kind of health scare by putting copper shielding in say clothing like a hoodie.
I think when comparing this to the sun there are lots of things worth considering from many different angles.
1. To say this threat is nothing compared to the risks we face from the sun, completely ignores the fact that we have millions of years of evolutionary exposure to sunlight and because of that fact the immune system has become way more acclimated to dealing with it's carcinogenic properties. Of course, our immune systems aren't perfect but considering how much more exposure we all are to sunlight than any other carcinogen, if we didn't have a strong evolutionary tolerance to it; melanoma would obviously be the #1 leading cause of cancer. But it's not.
Now in hindsight, what we don't have evolutionary genetic tolerance for is microwave radiation. While i'm not in anyway an expert in biology or the physics of light, I do have enough insight to know that we should never underestimate the possible negative outcome of any potential problem when it's still just a mathematical theory we're playing with rather than a reality of nature we're all dying from.
I mean, we underestimate and miscalculate these kind of things all the time and it's kind of counter productive that the answer to the question of "When will we learn to stop doing this?" is always "Once, we underestimate and miscalculate, discover our error and become smarter because of it"...
2. The bigger issue this has when compared to the sun is the fact that all of us can agree while there is such a thing as getting too much sun. However, there isn't such a thing as internet that is too fast. We essentially all want to be able to download terabytes at the speed of light so that we can one day be on Mars and be able to seamlessly stream Netflix from Earth while were up there. And while of course there is a speed of light limitation of like i believe 8 minutes, that doesn't mean people aren't going to complain why they cant instantly stream from there.
This is what we need to understand about this issue. There is no limitation to how much radio wave radiation we want when we are thinking of that radiation in the language of the internet, as "Content".
3. When it comes to protecting ourselves from this, if it actually does turn out to be a substantial problem. All the solutions suck.
The radio wave EM shielding for example protects you from the potentially harmful waves. But it also creates like I said, a deadzone.
So putting it in your walls of your home, because you don't want you and your entire family constantly being exposed to the cell tower that might only be a football field length away from your house (as the one near my house is), also means you can't receive or make calls to and from your cell phone. This is a deal breaker for most people, and as far as i'm aware RF shielding isn't like sunscreen where it blocks out most of the harmful light while letting in the some you want. It's an all or nothing solution.
Which is why I think putting the RF shield in clothing like a hoodie would be an interesting venture idea. The shielding protects your body, while your phone is still outside of the shielded area. (although this obviously doesn't protect your face and i don't think RF shielded masks are going to find a market other than antifa)
And another reason why the implications of this would really suck, is that it means were stuck with crappy wires and the companies who own the rights to pumping internet to and fro over them. I am mostly looking forward to 5G because I view it as the primary means we are going to get ourselves out of the era of shitty slow internet and greedy cable company overlords who wouldn't know how to disrupt something if a tv with rainbow bars on the screen hit them in the face.
> Now in hindsight, what we don't have evolutionary genetic tolerance for is microwave radiation.
Nor would such a thing be possible unless we could somehow drastically reduce our water content.
But speaking of miscalculation, mentioning Mars before starting to go on about tinfoil hoodies is, well, there's a lot of actually definitely dangerous radiation on Mars and a whole lot more on the way there.
One last note, higher speed or bandwidth has not scaled linearly (or really at all, outside early 3g?) with antenna power.
But if you do want to shield your house, most telcos offer seamless wifi calling these days. Then again wifi runs on the same freq as microwave ovens.
The thing is that there's really ton of evidence that non-ionizing radiation is not significantly harmful to humans at levels that don't cook you.
If you want to counter that you can't just pile up small studies that might be hinting at possibility that there might be some other effect.
You need a smoking gun. Single study, but bulletproof and large, showing strong effect. Everything else will be dismissed as "maybe, possibly, but most likely not really".
This comment explains precisely why the dismissal from so many here. Correlational studies without a plausible causal mechanism are highly suspect.
As an illustration, people have used obviously bogus examples like, in the past 100 years, piracy has risen. So has global warming. Therefore, pirates cause global warming.
Unless a 5G study specifically addresses the mechanism, and how non-ionizing radiation can cause damage to DNA, or has a very large correlation established that does a very good job of controlling for other factors, these studies will be dismissed out of hand.
There's plenty of ways that non-ionizing radiation can result in increased cancer rates. For example, they can induce currents in the DNA (DNA is s molecular wire) which might jam the base excision repair system and prevent it from detecting DNA damage (which is a redox-driven process).
What's even scarier is that this sort of an effect will not be found in a standard Ames test and also is unlikely to be found in highly controlled lab settings, since it requires a second factor - a contaminating primary mutagen - to manifest its effect.
Maybe, possibly, but does this potential mechanism have any impact on our huge, complex, self-righting bodies, that every hour successfully defend from onslaught of scores of adversarial microorganisms and their chemical warfare targeted at us and each other and environmental factors like background ionizing radiation and completely natural toxins that we breath in and choose to ingest and our bodies own complexity that leads to many. many errors in functioning that are roughly corrected and worked around on the fly to keep us alive not for hours, which would be a feat in itself, but for decades.
Aren't some forms of cancer also overreactions by the imune system? Some kind of Leukemia comes from phagocytes, I just read in another thread this morning
alright, I'm getting downvoted, so I'll put some important references here:
Generally, the research of Jackie Barton showing that DNA is a conductor and speculating about the role fo 4Fe4S cluster in the BER mechanism was emergent in the late 2000s back when I was a biochemist and not a programmer, but they're now (last 2 years) publishing papers that are fleshing out that hypothesis:
This is quite interesting (I'm a biochemist and programmer as well), but I don't see any evidence that non-ionizing radiation could affect DNA repair pathways - that seems like a killer experiment that could (and should) be run to support or disprove this hypothesis. Induce some double strand breaks or DNA nicks, and look at how non-ionizing radiation affects repair rates
I agree that it's a killer experiment and someone should do it.
But BER doesn't sense double strand breaks. It senses changes in the curvature of the dna induced by point mutations that are solvable by extracting the base and replacing it templates by the other strand. So you'll want to induce damage with something that causes thymidine dimerization or DNA alkylation.
Wait, so a -30 dBm signal (pretty strong) will induce something like 7mV across a 5 cm antenna. Your cell nuclear is up to 10 microns wide. That's 1.4 microvolts. I'm having a really hard time believing that a 1.4 uV potential across any molecule at STP can have a measurable effect without a lot of energy going into amplifying the signal.
Energy doesn't scale with distance in that way, with quantum mechanics. A "mismatch in size" (roughly speaking) will result in a different quantum efficiency, not a lowered energy, and also keep in mind that DNA is a highly coiled molecule so the resonance frequency could be deceptive. The straightened length of DNA in a cell is on the length order of meters. (Though that doesn't mean that it will resonate with meter long waves, it will have a higher efficiency with wavelengths much longer than a micron)
Any photon is basically "something which induces motion in a charged particle". That's what it means to be electromagnetic radiation. The intensity to which that occurs has to do with the electrical potential landscape around that charged particle and the wavelength of that photon. If these two values are close to each other (coupled) then the motion of the charged particle is more likely.
Microwave radiation (especially in the GHz range) illuminating DNA has been long known as a phenomenon, of course it does depend on which frequency band in the GHz range you're in, too.
wouldn't all that depend on tge specific signal transmitted? If you just look at random memory access, you'll find that it's not prone to corruption. That didn't stop rowhammer for example.
> As an illustration, people have used obviously bogus examples like, in the past 100 years, piracy has risen. So has global warming. Therefore, pirates cause global warming.
Actually you got that wrong. This was related to real piracy (i.e. people with eye patches on ships robbing other ships) which went down, not software piracy. So the decline of pirates is related to global warming.
(The example came from Bobby Henderson, the founder of the flying spaghetti monster.)
(i) it seems this "non-ionizing radiation" has many parameters that can modify significantly the way it propagates in the environment (and in human bodies), so I'm not sure speaking of non-ionizing radiation in a general way is sufficient to address the problem
(ii) following this reasoning and your comment about "a single study, bulletproof and large": it does seem that it is in fact what is being asked by this group - that time be given for a meaningful and large study of the specific radiation from 5G tech
and therefore requiring that kind of large study before widespread implementation actually seems warranted.
I'd be interested in seeing signatures from people at institutions I recognize and trust. There are a lot of people with degrees FROM credible institutions, but very little in terms of currently being researchers in the field AT credible institutions.
It's not hard to find 250 wackos if you pull random scientists working in random fields at random institutions. Most have no better way to know safety of 5G than I do.
Now, there's obviously some frequency band where we get into health risks. 5G jumps us from single-digit GHz to double-digit -- I'd guess you'd have to go at least past visible light before you run into safety issues, at least barring extremely high levels of exposure. Intuitively, it seems to me like that ought to still be safe, but I'm no expert.
But an appeal to experts -- with no real experts behind it -- doesn't do it for me. Neither does an appeal to papers based on volume, without a clear description of what they found and how. Most science is junk science.
Is Harvard Medical School an institution you recognize and trust? Columbia? Monash? McGill? Can we dispense with the tired ad hominems and talk about science? A self-proclaimed guess from a self-proclaimed non-expert seems ill placed in a credentialist diatribe.
When the list of people also includes folks who claim to "customize clinical trials to support marketing claims"[0] it is hard to take even experts with solid credentials seriously.
Five out of five signers from my country are well-known EHS proponents, and at least three have financial ties to the illness. Having a Ph.D. degree from a well-known university does little to prevent later involvement in quackery.
... I found them, and that's exactly what raised flags.
If a faculty at HMS signed on, that'd be okay. If a ransom person with a degree from HMS does, that doesn't carry the same weight. I was pretty clear about "at" versus "from."
"Is Harvard Medical School an institution you recognize and trust?"
After their primary university admissions scandal? Absolutely not, not that I ever trusted them in the first place (Memphis has a far better medical program.)
Goalposts notwithstanding you have to admit the list is kind of hit or miss. Whenever their job isn't listed they're either retired or were never in a related field. For example you listed Harvard, Columbia, Monash, and McGill above. Half the people from those institutions are either unqualified, retired, or both.
Plus there's places like "ElectroSensitivity UK" which aren't scientific institutions.
PS - I fully admit that there are subject experts from trusted institutions included too. But you're being far too defensive for quite legitimate questions/criticisms.
It seemed that way to me as well, but the real point is that it's irrelevant how well or poorly we judge those people. What matters is the facts they or others present.
> you're being far too defensive
Defensive of what? I haven't even expressed a position yet, other than "logical fallacies are bad" and I'm pretty willing to stand by that one. Are you here to argue the converse? To the extent that people or motivations matter at all, why condemn me but not the one who created the digression?
> ...the real point is that it's irrelevant how well or poorly we judge those people. What matters is the facts they or others present.
This matters if your expertise are in the subject to which the facts belong, otherwise it means little, particularly in a subject which requires an incredible amount of knowledge of an an incredible array of subjects.
I can look a bunch of absolute facts regarding 5g signals and make an assumption, however, because my expertise lie far outside the realm of 5g, an expert can easily come along afterwards and show me why these facts–while accurate–mean nothing to the subject at hand and why a completely different set of facts are what one should be looking at.
Expertise absolutely matters. And this is coming from a person who is confident that a greater than zero amount of companies would happily pay people to add noise to a topic in order to poison us for a fraction of a percentage boost in their quarterly growth.
Expertise matters on complex subjects and attempting to pretend as if all ideas are equal no matter who they come from or who receives them is a recipe for disaster.
The collective We really need to get back to a place where we freely and happily say “It’s really outside my realm of expertise. You should track down an expert.” and way more often daily and regularly “I don’t know.”
This isn't about ideas. It's about data. The quality of data is independent of where it came from, so it actually is equal in that sense.
> You should track down an expert.
Yes, we should refer people to experts more often. Why? Because they have data, not because they have titles or affiliations. Information is what makes them experts, and information can be shared.
Perhaps I should have been more clear, apologies if I assumed it would be inferred.
To use your term data, with complex topics it isn’t simply having data. One must know which data is relevant to consider for which topic at which point. And even more importantly, one must understand which missing sets of information need to be considered.
There is a reason our society has come to place such a high value on experience and expertise. And it isn’t solely because someone had books of data stored on massive bookshelves. While these bookshelves are important, it is their understanding in the nuances of which books to hunt for answers.
Our new ability to store significantly more of these books and retrieve them more efficiently doesn’t remove our need for someone to use and contextualize the information contained in these books. New tech doesn’t change the fact that expertise matters.
Interestingly enough, we now face a sort of reverse of the problems we’ve faced for centuries: While we used to struggle to find enough information to feed to experts, now we face too much data and not enough experts to properly make use of it.
Again, apologies if my first post wasn’t clarifying enough.
Data doesn't speak for itself. It has to be properly contextualized and positioned for an intended audience and message. It's for that reason that you don't ever see scientific papers that are just tables of numbers alone.
If you're outside a particular area of expertise, the intellectually honest thing to do is to say "I'm not knowledgeable enough to assess these findings" and defer to someone who is. At that point, you're assessing credibility, and affiliation and track record absolutely matter.
I can think of very few science cranks I've ever seen who didn't have some kind of data. That means nothing. Data isn't a magical, pure, and perfect substance that emerges from the aether.
"I haven't even expressed a position yet, other than "logical fallacies are bad" and I'm pretty willing to stand by that one."
Your fallacy is the "Fallacy Fallacy." If you can actually stand by your words (nobody in my nearly 40 years of life has been able to) you'd explode from the sheer paradox.
Wait, did the goalposts actually move at all? The original post said:
> There are a lot of people with degrees FROM credible institutions, but very little in terms of currently being researchers in the field AT credible institutions.
You responded literally saying that the institutions are credible:
> Is Harvard Medical School an institution you recognize and trust? Columbia? Monash? McGill?
That wasn't the original objection; they even said in their objection that the institutions are credible. I don't understand how the goalposts moved.
Is criticizing an expert's qualifications an ad hominem? Particularly when they're using their expertise to argue for an idea as here.
Seems like a double standard. They can use their expertise/reputation to endorse an idea but using that same expertise/reputation to qualify that endorsement is an "ad hominem."
To me discussing their expertise is core to their position, since their whole position is: "I'm an expert, I sign a letter based on my expertise for a specific course of action." If they aren't an expert it cuts right to the core of their position.
You raise a good point. When an appeal to authority has already made credentials etc. the issue, challenging that appeal becomes valid. The problem is that OP wasn't just an appeal to authority. It did not open that door. It did make arguments other than identity, and linked to fuller expositions of those arguments. Thus, addressing only identity and ignoring any arguments in either direction remains ad hominem.
I would like to add to this that many academics who study wireless research, specifically MIMO beam forming - aren't particularly incentivized to find issue with 5G. I've spoken to a few who have dismissed health concerns whilst waving their hands about the actual Science. To them this is worth anything up to 10 years of funding and research opportunities in what can be a very competitive research area.
They receive A LOT of funding from cellular companies in particular, any research that throws doubt on 5G could lead to their funding being pulled. Not only this, but most of the interesting 5G hardware is coming from the cellular companies on loan.
My point is: You have a perfect storm for a rushed technology with potential for health risks. Almost every Country on the planet is investing lots of money into 5G and the technology itself requires a significant number more cellular towers to be built in closer proximity to people.
If there is any genuine question about 5G's safety, I would rather stay on the side of caution. It's not as if people will kill over if they don't have 5G immediately. Not only this, the technology will be more mature and the price will likely come down for infrastructure development.
This is often repeated, but I wonder if it's completely true. I'd completely understand if it was harder, and more expensive, to find such a control group, but it surprises me that it would be "impossible".
I can think of a few people I know that are much less exposed to 2/3/4g radiation, by living in the forest and not having a phone on them all the time. Isn't a control group that has been exposed to significantly less radiation still useful ?
There are large cellular areas not exposed to significant (read: detectable) levels of radiation if you're willing to travel. Third world Countries would be a good place to start.
The article explicitly calls the 200 participants the world's leading experts in non-ionizing radiation. I haven't researched their credentials or examined their research. But if all existing research points in one direction, that constitutes empirical evidence. Of course methodological and statistical problems abound across all academia. The article makes existing research seem unequivocal and argues we need to conduct further research for 4G as well as 5G health effects
Fortunately the article is wrong because the signers are almost all either: 1) long-retired and out of the game entirely, 2) not trained in the field or qualified at all, or 3) known quacks who have peddled this kind of thing for years, or some combination of the three, and the articles cited are all written by that same population (and often published in no-name journals that I could probably get published in) or don't say what the author claims they do (many of the articles explicitly state that they found no connection whatsoever).
So I guess the moral of the story is "don't believe everything you see in pop science magazines," although I would have hoped nobody did to begin with(?)
>Now, there's obviously some frequency band where we get into health risks. 5G jumps us from single-digit GHz to double-digit -- I'd guess you'd have to go at least past visible light before you run into safety issues, at least barring extremely high levels of exposure. Intuitively, it seems to me like that ought to still be safe, but I'm no expert.
I highly doubt that 26+ GHz will receive much attention. You have no range, you need line of sight otherwise it won't work. At least 3.4GHz (and the other LTE bands) don't have that issue.
Why is being below visible light a factor? Different wavelengths have different properties that don't necessarily map linearly with frequency, such as the ability to pass through your body.
I clicked on a few links and Googled a few names.
It's roughly what I'd expect: People with few publications now working in other fields, people without scientific publications, but university degrees, people who regularly speak at events from radiation critics, people who are invested in other fringe theories.
People get fooled by "large lists of peer-reviewed publications". Peer review is a lowest level quality mark for a piece of science. It means that hopefully it's not complete bullshit. Sometimes it still is, because noone can forbid you to call your journal "peer-reviewed" with your own weak standards of peer review. And sometimes credible journals make huge mistakes (remember the "Wakefield-study"...). Even with only well-performed, non-flawed studies you'll always have some studies saying that something is there that actually isn't. That's simple statistics, you'll have outliers.
"Here's a large number of studies saying X" is meaningless in a topic where a very large number of studies have been done. What you need is systematic reviews of the literature that not only count studies, but evaluate their quality and combine their results.
Also it's not true that "nobody knows why" cancer incidence has risen. It's a mixture of people getting older and diagnosis getting better. Not mysterious at all.
> People with few publications now working in other fields
I'm surprised this statement passed muster on HN where there must be some number of PhDs now working in other fields. Certainly the ones I know wouldn't take kindly to the idea that somehow, just because they left academia their research can be easily and completely dismissed.
There's nothing wrong with changing fields. But if you tell me "these are the most relevant scientists in the field" and most of them aren't actively working scientists - it looks fishy...
Being such a person is totally fine (I’m one myself). What’s damning is the fact that this list is largely composed of just such people (plus some that are less qualified).
Yeah, this is just a ridiculous way to dismiss the papers. Most authors are "people with few publications now working in other fields". One professor trains 25+ PhDs in their career, and usually all but one or two of them will end up fitting that description.
It's unfortunately common in science for someone who's an expert in one field to think they can easily be an expert in another field and get it completely wrong. Linux Pauling is the most well known example of this.
Wouldn't the difference there be that the person consuming meat is voluntarily consuming it while even people sticking to older tech phones are exposed to the newer radiation? I am no luddite but this would be my argument from a devil's advocate position
No, because you're only exposed to radiation if you actually use a phone. Google for "inverse square law". Your exposure is orders of magnitude lower from "second-hand cellphones" than from using it yourself; it's not like second-hand smoking.
Not if there's a cell tower every 100 yards putting out 30dB more power than your phone. The inverse square law also doesn't apply when you have phased arrays doing beamforming if you're directly in the path.
You get a lower exponent than the square with a beam. For a perfectly parallel beam the exponent is technically 0 (same intensity regardless of distance - like a laser pointer) For a focused beam intensity will actually increase with distance up to the focal point. Some energy can be absorbed by the medium (air/moisture/rain), but that is not covered by the inverse square law.
The cross section of the beam can be any shape, the important thing is the signal source is an area not a point. The value of the inverse square (of distance from source) is dominates power density when the signal source is effectively a point - this becomes the situation for a laser or anything at long enough distance, but at distances where it is effectively a beam, the strength of power density does not dissipate by that value. The geometry of the beam concentrates the power density at its focal point, which can be far behind the source or in front of it. For an ideal beam focused to infinity (parallel rays) its power would never dissipate with distance - as all of the power goes in the same direction.
We don't need to form an ideal beam to say its doesn't follow the inverse square rule, any focusing of rays breaks the rule (at scales where it is reasonable to treat it as a beam and not just rays emanating from a point)
I hope that helps picture the situation. My original comment that a beam can have a different exponent was incorrect except in some approximate sense. The inverse square value will still apply, but from the beams real or imaginary focal point (if it is a point) But it the case of a transmitter beaming a signal at another, that focal length can be far beyond the reciever, so the 'rule' can be completely confounded.
It depends. The inverse square law applies to spherical wavefronts. Due to diffraction, wave fronts always become spherical in the far field.
But in the near field, that's not the case.
Beamforming arrays have planar wavefronts close to the source, so the inverse square law does not apply. The wave fronts will become spherical again at a "large" distance from the emitter, where the meaning of "large" depends on wavelength and emitter size.
Focussed lasers also do not have spherical wave fronts in the near field. The distance at which the inverse square law starts to apply to lasers depends on beam width, coherence, and focus.
There is a substantial difference in my opinion. Laws rarely put forward a mechanism or seek a complete understanding of a relationship, while theories often do.
Ohm's law was a law long before the electron was discovered. It's an emperical linear relationship that just seemed to work. Since no mechanism is suggested, it's not possible to determine whether ohmic behavior is expected or not. In contrast, The Drude Model's explantion of ohmic behavior could be considered a theory. It makes an attempt to understand the underlying physics, and from this it is possible to predict whether a material will follow Ohm's Law or not.
I think modern scientists are a lot less likely to call any empirical relationship a law. Theory is still pretty widely used, and not for things that could be called laws.
You can say the "the theory of quantum chromodynamics," but not "the law of quantum chromodynamics". 'Law' implies a small number of simple equations, while theory allows for a much larger scope of complexity or rigor. The meaning is absolutely different. Modern science is pretty complex compared to what went on 200 years ago, so it's not surprising law has fallen out of favor.
no. smoke is heavily influenced by ventilation and the enclosure. there's a fair amount of modelling in the literature, for example on how much air flow you would need in confined spaces to reduce secondhand smoke cancer risks to acceptable levels.
It's not really uncommon to see "no smoking on the patio" or "no smoking within 100 feet of this door" signs. And some states have legalized smoking cannabis, except outdoors.
I've seen such limits imposed on private property, but as far as I know there aren't any laws (specifically for cigarette smoke) that extreme.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a smoker and never have been. I like these laws. I'm just being a bit pedantic. There has been a general trend of restricting smoking and I think that trend has continued outdoors. It used to be that you could smoke anywhere, then businesses started creating indoor smoking sections. Then indoor smoking sections were banned and smokers moved to the outdoor seating. Then smoking outside near exterior doors was banned, in a way that effectively banned smoking at many restaurants entirely. Beyond this, in some places like NYC you have smoking bans in public parks and beaches as well, regardless of how far you are from any exterior door. (To be clear, I support these bans because cigarette smokers are notorious for their litter.)
And in the case of cannabis the restrictions are even more severe. In Washington you cannot smoke cannabis in view of the general public or in most buildings (except residential, although many apartment buildings have smoking bans too.) California is more permissive, but even they enforce a 1000(!) foot smoking ban around schools and youth centers.
But not everyone eats barbecued meat or has barbecued meat near/next to their body 24/7 like people who use cell phones. I can opt out of eating barbecued meat though it carrying a phone close to my body.
> For example, eating barbecued meat causes cancer, but it we don't ban it.
Sure, but the absolute risk is very low and it's probably zero if you add veggies to your meal. And also causality was not established, observational studies on this topic suffering from the healthy-user bias in addition to a lot of confounding factors and in general for nutrition the evidence is very low quality, compared with medication research.
This isn't a boolean. Saying that "this or that causes cancer" is meaningless without giving the risk factor, which has to be statistically significant and in case of meat it isn't.
In other words if you want to compare the risks of 5G with anything, I think nutrition is a really poor choice due to the low standards for evidence we have and due to all the confounding factors and biases.
Not sure if assessing the safety of 5G is easier, but at the very least you can do double-blind studies. At the very least you can compare it with the placebo effect. Which in nutrition isn't possible.
Cigarettes and alcohol too. Radiowave effects, even if they do cause anything, are quite easy to mitigate in humans by wearing clothing with carefully positioned electrical conductor insertions.
"Causes" implies that you will get cancer if you partake. Maybe you mean "increases the risk of". Agreed that your risk exposure might only be fractions of a percent and not worth abstaining or regulating.
Most people in the cancer field (I worked in a tangential one) believe that incidence of cancer is due to people living longer (cancer rates go up a lot as you age), and not dying of other diseases first. In a sense, cancer is what you get after you solved the other problems.
"Most people in the cancer field" seem to be pretty misinformed then. See [1] and [2]. At a minimum, health/diet habits have increased cancer risk in young people over the last 20 years, and probably other environmental factors/exposures as well.
Sorry, i think you misunderstood. I believe that lifestyle effects do influence cancer rates, but I don't think they influence it as much as the effects I mentioned. Note that in the papers you describe, the increase in relative risk is actually fairly small.
Ok in that case I agree. I think it’s important to recognize that lifestyle and environmental factors are a contributor to cancer rates across age groups. Thanks for clarifying.
That reminds me of one of the cell phone radiation studies that I see get bandied about sometimes. People that are skeptical of cell phones like mentioning it because they found that rats exposed to massive amounts of 2G and 3G signals were more likely to die of cancer. However, what the study also found is that the rats exposed to the signals actually lived longer than the control group.
If cell phones give me cancer because they make me live longer, then maybe I should start carrying around a second one.
Based on nothing scientific, I chalk up the increase in cancer to contaminants in our water, whether it's well or city water, and the introduction of petrochemicals/plastics.
> "Here's a large number of studies saying X" is meaningless in a topic where a very large number of studies have been done. What you need is systematic reviews of the literature that not only count studies, but evaluate their quality and combine their results.
"The present review - of results published by my group from 2006 until 2016"
Self-evaluation of quality is not quite a systemic review of literature. Neither is research on drosophila melanogaster quite in the same ballpark as research on homo sapiens.
I haven't read the article, and I'm not a party to the 5G debate, but what you're describing in your comment is a meta-analysis, which is a practice that has produced some of the most controversial findings in recent times. If anything is needed to clear up an inconclusive body of studies, it's better and more reliable studies and experiments, not meta-analyses.
Meta-analyses try to find the unknown common truth by reviewing multiple studies and their methods and weighing them accourding to their percieved (really, calculated) quality.
By combining the results of the best studies and giving us an overview of them, meta-analyses really are the best studies we have.
"In addition to providing an estimate of the unknown common truth, meta-analysis has the capacity to contrast results from different studies and identify patterns among study results, sources of disagreement among those results, or other interesting relationships that may come to light in the context of multiple studies." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-analysis
Meta-analysis is good if you assume no publication bias. The problem is that most of the times only studies with successful result get published, and in those studies only the successful (or at least interesting) parts are published. You can use meta-analysis only in areas that have pre-registered trials, and perhaps that is too optimistic.
With a potentially large # of studies on a specific subject, some of which may be contradicting, meta-analysis will be done.
Whether by accredited scientists, or institutions who do this on a professional basis with open and established criteria and consistency in approach (though there may still be flaws in the approach); and/or by individuals when confronted with large # of studies, when I feel bias would almost certainly be the primary driver.
While you absolutely cannot eliminate the latter, it feels it would be foolish to dismiss or eliminate the former.
As long as:
a) World is a bit tricky (phenomena difficult to define and isolate; limitations in equipment and measurements; limitations in humans)
b) We use statistical analysis as primary differentiator of significance
There will continue to be contradicting studies.
Not disagreeing it's always better to improve studies and experiments, but it feels like meta-analysis of multiple studies is not just a necessary evil, but a good and desirable next step.
Hmm; I don't think we fully understand each other.
Absolutely do the study; in fact, do several.
What then, though? A "study of studies", or any method of reconciling or making sense of these multiple studies, is the "meta analysis" in question. It's going to happen, in some way, somehow, by somebody. There is no way to reconcile multiple studies without doing some form of what we are calling meta-analysis. Even if it's just you or me googling it up and then deciding which of the studies to trust, that's a "meta-analysis".
My claim, therefore, is that it's far better to acknowledge this need and reality, and have dedicated teams of experienced professionals do it with an open, consistent method; then for each of us to mentally, subconsciously, "biasedly", to pick & choose and prioritize the studies.
[in the end, proper meta-analysis, and study replication, are the methods of how we discover inconsistency, contradiction, data issues, or other problems, whether in psychology or other domains. It's not a method of "fixing something", but a method of collecting, analyzing, and reporting on multiple studies and data points]
Yeah, a meta analysis is only as good as its inputs. Unfortunately many meta analysises read like "we found 20 studies on the topic, but 19 of them are crap and the one good study didn't really ask the question we're asking, so we really don't know". And yeah, there's considerable wiggle room for a meta analysis. But I don't think you'll find any serious scientist doubting the usefulness of a meta analysis per se.
I knew other grad students who'd say, "oh, it's a meta analysis" and then toss it in the bin. But in recent years I've met people who worked on boards for cities and hospitals where they dug though a lot of papers and wrote detailed meta analysis about the larger body of work. They'd comment on things that seemed consistent and inconstant, and tried to help others make well informed decisions.
With a meta-analysis, you do have to look at the whole thing. Phrased like, "when controlled for.." you can't control for some things over 10 different studies. You need to read how they attempted to control for things and why the came to their conclusions.
They are still valuable and you shouldn't just chuck them in the bin.
That's criticizing a weak interpretation of my point and seems to conclude I'm rejecting the use of meta-analyses entirely, which is not the case. The point I make is in the context of the suggestion that a meta-analysis of an inconclusive body of studies is sufficient to yield substantially stronger conclusions.
In 2010, a meta-analysis seeking to reevaluate the scientific evidence behind the prevailing view that dietary saturated fats are tied to adverse effects on cardiovascular health was published.[1]
The study's conclusion, "a meta-analysis of prospective epidemiologic [sic] studies showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD", unleashed a wave of news reports claiming dietary saturated fats were no longer considered harmful, further tilling the grounds for a movement urging the increase in consumption of saturated fats for added health benefits.
Again, I'm not a party to this particular debate on dietary saturated fats, but I am critical of the suggestion that a meta-analysis of an inconclusive body of studies will yield an actionable conclusion.
So as to help me best evaluate the validity of the article, what is your background? Are you familiar w/that field? That would help me assess the usefulness of your critique of the backgrounds of people linked to in the article.
"Lyon, France, May 31, 2011 ‐‐ The WHO/International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has
classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B),
based on an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer1
, associated with
wireless phone use."
The "possibly carcinogenic" declaration is quite weak ("evidence far from conclusive").
Even if it was "carcinogenic to humans", there's a lot of things that are vital to modern society which fall into that category. It's then up to the regulators to guess an "acceptable" limit of exposure.
“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” seems appropriate here...
"Joel M. Moskowitz, PhD, is director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been translating and disseminating the research on wireless radiation health effects since 2009 after he and his colleagues published a review paper that found long-term cell phone users were at greater risk of brain tumors. His Electromagnetic Radiation Safety website has had more than two million page views since 2013. He is an unpaid advisor to the International EMF Scientist Appeal and Physicians for Safe Technology."
This article does not represent scientific consensus. It is alarmist, linking nearly every report that supports the author's point of view and offering no opposing points of view. This is not journalism.
Should that absolve them of writing deceptive articles that feed in to a type of paranoia that is fairly harmful to society[0]?
[0]: Not that the anti-wireless people are particularly influential right now, but they're fairly close to antivacciene people in how they perceive the world with an almost complete absence of rational thought.
Well, first, I was responding to OP's complaint that the article "supports the author's point of view and offering no opposing points of view. This is not journalism." by pointing out that, in fact, it's not journalism, it's opinion.
Second, the whole reason articles like this get published and read is that, in this case, one man's "alarmism" or "deception" or "paranoia" is another man's sober scientific caution. It's the same problem with GMOs. People are rushing to market with unproven technology to make money while insisting it's all perfectly safe.
Why not wait a century, do more research, and decide then? What's the urgency to roll it out now?
>Well, first, I was responding to OP's complaint that the article "supports the author's point of view and offering no opposing points of view. This is not journalism." by pointing out that, in fact, it's not journalism, it's opinion.
I understand the distinction, but posting dubious opinion articles on news sites is still problematic. The Scientific American does not host articles espousing racist ideologies / vehemently blatant pseudoscience, by publishing this it is a form of tacit endorsement (despite it going in their opinion section).
>Second, the whole reason articles like this get published and read is that, in this case, one man's "alarmism" or "deception" or "paranoia" is another man's sober scientific caution. It's the same problem with GMOs. People are rushing to market with unproven technology to make money while insisting it's all perfectly safe.
The problem is that both the antiEMF and antiVaccine people are in fact not applying scientific principles to the issue. Cherry picking studies and opinions that support a given viewpoint is at best a rhetorical argument from authority, it is absolutely not a scientific approach to verifying a hypothesis.
>Why not wait a century, do more research, and decide then? What's the urgency to roll it out now?
The urgency comes in part from the fact that the 4G network is congested and at capacity in dense urban areas, and also from political dealings between US and Chinese telecom companies.
Cheers! I really appreciate your reply. Personally, I hate e.g. those "magic medallions" that are supposed to "absorb" EM and the like, but I'm not yet convinced that bathing our cities with EM is going to turn out to have zero health side-effects. In any event, the issue should be settled scientifically, eh? I was surprised to see this on SciAm's website, FWIW.
Likewise! I appreciate your willingness to discuss this. I was also surprised to see it on their website, surprised and disappointed. The Scientific American used to produce wonderful articles and project guides, and I credit them with having helped jumpstart my love for technology. It is sad to see them publish low quality articles.
I understand your hesitation with regard to increasing the invisible radiation flux. I would likely feel the same way if I wasn't close to the field. From my point of view I would be far more worried about the materials used to produce modern phones and the disposal of the resulting industrial waste, the volatility of their batteries (particularly from manufacturers with shoddy QC), and the ethical considerations of sourcing the materials used.
I agree, Scientific American must be feeling the hurt but I don't want them to, uh, dilute their brand.
In re: EM, I have a better-than-average layman's understanding, but I'm certainly no expert. The specific thing that concerns me is the interaction of lots of sources with the urban environment. One or a few transmitters might be safe in the lab for N years' exposure, but dozens of transmitters operating in an environment with all kinds and shapes of metal and plastic and stone/concrete could conceivably lead to transients that have (relatively) severe side-effects.
I think, with examples like lead in gasoline and asbestos in insulation, etc., that we should be more cautious than we have been in the past. Especially when a given technology is more a marginal than a vital improvement to our lives.
In any event, you bring up a very good point: "... I would be far more worried about the materials used to produce modern phones and the disposal of the resulting industrial waste, ..." Indeed, there are a lot of problems "in line" before you get to "Cellphones gave me cancer!".
With every new generation of cellular technology, this question comes up.
This started as early as CT, then DECT, GSM, 3G, 4G and now 5G.
After 30+ years of having consumer grade wireless telephony we are still debating whether the radio signals have any negative effect on living beings.
If we can't draw any conclusion from a sample size that big, then I must conclude that the effects of EM-radiation are so minimal (if any at all), that it is not something I should worry about.
On the one hand, I think your conclusion is correct, but on the other hand, it took quite some time to establish the health risks of smoking. Because there were concerted disinformation campaigns etc.
It's not like smoking is subtle. Just ask any none smoker, or how people started with their first cigarette. Coughing, dry throat, WTF is happening, I've smoke in my lungs.
None of the characteristics you mention are actually related to cancer though. If we banned everything that caused dry throat or caused you to caught because “obviously they cause cancer”, where would we be today?
I mean we could ban 80% of all Indian food because first time westerners eat it they react much stronger to the spicy ness than they would to smoking.
Stating independent of the actual science that “It was always obvious that smoking caused cancer” isn’t any better than the people stating now that “obviously EM radiation causes cancer”.
I never claimed they cause cancer. They are just not the fun harmless looking fun that the cool Marlboro man makes it look like. At least not the first few times.
That is true. However we had multiple areas in the world where we could watch the mobile market basically explode within a short amount of time, there are people using phones for hours daily across time spans upwards of a decade and yet so far I haven't heard of any health statistic correlating with this trend.
Whereas with smoking we can see over ten times higher risks for certain types of cancer-related deaths. That doesn't mean there's no effect due to mobile phones, but I think if it were remotely comparable to smoking we'd see a significant impact by now.
The trouble is, there's lots of evidence, and also lots of evidence that it isn't. The only way to draw a conclusion is by making a judgement about which evidence is better: which scientific experiments are better designed?
You can also analyze the plausibility of the arguments. Cell phones do not produce ionizing radiation.
This is similar to homeopathy. Even if the state of research is not great, we're discussing a theory that is just not physically plausible. The default assumption should be that it is wrong.
Genuine question: Is there a name for saying "past evidence hasn't shown this to be true, thus it's likely to remain untrue"?
I was debating a different technology with a friend and he made such a comment, but my response was that the frequency, scope and importance of past technological advancements won't hold a candle to those of the future.
The spectrum known as radio waves are anywhere from 10 to 100,000 meters long. 4 average size humans can fit inside the length of the smallest radio wave.
5G is also fundamentally different in one important way. We are moving a way from fewer high powered towers, to a lot more low powered cells. Yes this existed in 4G, but 5G is taking it to the next level.
What I find particularly troubling: 4G is for me already more than good enough. 5G is really not so well thought out. They require a lot more cells. The exposure is much higher... They cost more (?).
TL;DR: We poisoned ourselves for about half a century.
> The episode describes how science, in particular the work of Clair Patterson (voiced in animated sequences by Richard Gere) in the middle of the 20th century, has been able to determine the age of the Earth.
> Patterson found that his results were contaminated by lead from the ambient environment...
> Tyson goes on to explain that Patterson's work in performing lead-free experiments directed him to investigate the sources for lead. Tyson notes how lead does not naturally occur at Earth's surface but has been readily mined by humans (including the Roman Empire), and that lead is poisonous to humans. Patterson examined the levels of lead in the common environment and in deeper parts of the oceans and Antarctic ice, showing that lead had only been brought to the surface in recent times. He would discover that the higher levels of lead were from the use of tetraethyllead in leaded gasoline, despite long-established claims by Robert A. Kehoe and others that this chemical was safe. Patterson would continue to campaign against the use of lead, ultimately resulting in government-mandated restrictions on the use of lead. Tyson ends by noting that similar work by scientists continues to be used to help alert mankind to other fateful issues that can be identified by the study of nature.
A lot of cancer rates rising is pollution, but we generally believe most of it is chemical forms of pollution, not electromagnetic.
That said, I am sure there are structures in the body that can selective absorb or react to non-ionizing radiation that we may not yet know about. Our cellular mechanisms are impressively complex.
If there was an outbreak of cancers at the right side of the head (the place where we usually hold our phone while talking on it), we'd know. But there aren't.
And a rise in carcinogenic substances in air, water, and food. Maybe changes in the landscape of pathogens. You can't really rule out additional causes or contributers based on knowing some.
No, it is not acceptable, and I didn't say that it is.
It is a good thing that we spend research effort into identifying why this is happening.
All I'm saying is that I have concluded, for myself, that EM-radiation is the least of my worries when it comes to negative effects (including cancer).
I see your point but I have a hyper sensitivity to EMF (among other things) and I turn off any wireless technology wherever I can (like Bluetooth, when I don't have any paring devices at home) and many devices aren't comfortable for me to keep, despite me working in an IT industry.
The symptom isn't classified as a disease at where I live, so it's hard to get any decent medial treatments and I'm afraid 5G might harm me even harder when higher frequency typically makes me feel worse without a way to get away from it.
Have you ever tried a double blind test of your symptoms? I'm not going to be judgmental at all, but my friend's father had this ~10 years ago, and (being a scientist) decided to participate in a double-blind study. Turned out he scored no better than chance on any of the tests. That was a big enough eye opener for him that he was pretty much "cured" of EHS.
That's interesting.
I could try it but I have plenty of cases where I see clear causes that make me unnecessarily tired and this is going on with me for 2 decades now.
- Turn off wireless signals like Bluetooth (I keep WiFi with low emission setting which isn't as bad as BT but 5Ghz is worse than 2.4Ghz, so I only use 2.4Ghz frequency.)
- Many of recent phones. (Bought iPhone X, Pixel 3a and those I can't keep close to me no matter how I tweak their settings, so they're away from me kept in boxes but I still need them for testing for my work.)
- LED displays keep me uneasy. I use fluorescent ones.
- IC chips used for credit cards and passports. I keep them minimum in my wallet.
These are from what I've bought and sold just to find what might feel better for me. I wish I could just keep what I want.
(Also not EM but chemical substances, just to say I've been living with hypersensitivity.
- Keeping clothes on after coming back home from outside. So I quickly wash and take shower.
- Need to clean wall every few weeks before I feel kind of choked, maybe due to glue used for the wallpapers.
- Very small amount of mold. I have to clean my air conditioner from a professional service every season.)
> And the character's suffering was depicted as entirely mental.
That's because it is entirely mental.
Blind tests were done on people, and their ability to recognise a radiation source was the same as random picking.
Anybody claiming to be able to sense radiation can be tested simply by taking two mobile phones, turning one off (leaving one connected to the internet and doing something online), putting both in a bag/under a bucket/..., having someone else randomly swap their position and trying to guess which is the one that is radiating at the moment. I can guarantee you're guesses will be around 50% in the long run, so basically random guesses.
I haven't taken any blind tests but if the testing environment isn't causing me problems to begin with (chemically or EM), like at home where I control the environment, I can tell what's good and bad. That's how I decide what to keep and what to sell when I buy something.
My quality of sleep is much better with cell and wifi off. I live rural so there's less external sources too. It's significant enough that I turn it off every night as a habit. My issues with insomnia started back in 2000 when I first brought work into my small apartment.
Correlation is not causation. It could also be as simple as the light or vibrations from your phone at night disrupting your sleep. I've found blinking lights can make my sleep worse.
It's wifi too. I sleep with a mask and ear plugs. The very best sleep I get is with complete emf shielded and grounded clothing. The nights I don't do this are significantly worse. I'm tempted to get a sleep tracker but most are bluetooth. I've even tuned my router so it does less frequent heartbeats. If I ever build a house again I'd spend the money on shielding it entirely.
I feel better if I completely turn off WiFi or Bluetooth. I can see I'm exposed to plenty of other signals by living in a city but it doesn't mean they're nothing. It just removes the added damage being done and it makes quite a difference to quality of life which would be hard to imagine for you.
My ammature theory (5Ghz wifi feels worse than 2.4Ghz wifi) also says higher frequency for short range signals does more harm, thus it's more sensitive to turn those off than being exposed to other lower frequency used outside.
That doesn't sound like a great test since I don't think the apparatus is there to detect where signals are coming from, just (in theory) whether there are any.
I hate to admit it, but I seem to notice effects when I add wireless networks to my home. I think it's probably psychosomatic, but would like to do a blind test. I would situate myself between wireless devices, with all devices within 10 meters either being on or off, the test being to determine if any devices are on. I would feel weird asking anyone to help in this, so perhaps I'll rig something up with smart plugs or a programmable router.
It just takes away my concentration and makes me look tired (which is almost the norm now) and my thinking gets clouded. Without controlling the environment to the point I remove any devices that cause me certain uncomfort, I can't have much time productively.
This also goes for chemical matters, as if I don't clean the floor, wall and clothes often, same happens.
I think northern Europe has recognized EM hypersensitivity as a symptom but last time I checked, it's not widely recognized worldwide.
I can completely say this is not mental. Like, say I get a new phone which I wanted to buy and then if it damages me, I regretfully have to sell it.
Also I can feel better by turning off Bluetooth, so there are clear physical causes for me.
Perhaps you don't appreciate how a review looking at 100 different setups & methods and 93 of those all arriving at the same endpoint (RF leads to oxidative stress) represents FAR stronger evidence than a single study showing the opposite under very specific conditions.
These are good things to read to understand a consensus that yes, electromagnetic radiation has biological effects.
For people reading this stuff, always search for something called the Odds Ratio (OR), which is a gold standard way of comparing how clinically significant a thing is. For example, smoking has an OR of 60 for lung cancer. A well covered paper on birth control suggested its OR for developing depression is 1.26, and the massive aspirin on heart health study had 0.95 OR of cardiovascular disease in one of the surveyed counties (ie aspirin improved clinical outcome).
If error bars on measured OR contain 1.0 you can’t say if it is helpful or harmful. OR accounts for baseline incidence in a way that RR (relative risk) does not. So it lets you actually choose among behaviors instead of within diseases or outcomes. It informs why it’s possible to tell everyone they shouldn’t smoke (OR is very high), keep taking birth control (because depression outcome is better than unwanted or complicated pregnancy outcomes), and aspirin for cardiovascular disease prophylaxis (very limited side effects, very cheap so even 0.95 is worth it).
I don’t know if there’s a consensus that electromagnetic radiation from electronics has clinical significance. If there is clinical significance it will be a small OR for most outcomes. It won’t be comparable at all to e.g. smoking.
However this is still an imperfect measure. In Japan OR for lung disease from smoking is 15, 4 times better than the US. The researchers speculated this has to do with a specific filter on common Japanese cigarettes but it could be genetics or other things that they didn’t control for (ie BMI and gender matching but not Japanese ancestry). So technology can have huge effects on clinical outcomes but 4x 15 is a much bigger deal than 4x 1.015. My point is that it has its limitations but OR definitely measures something real.
This is a robust framework for evaluating how this research matters to you in a way that does not require conspiracies or investigating the researcher’s backgrounds. Additionally it is widely accepted by legitimate medical practitioners across the world.
Under this framework, the reviews posted here do not document clinical significance, although individual papers cited in them might.
A big limitation is that mice are tested with orders of magnitude higher incidence rate of the disease to quickly find RR (high RR in mice vs placebo is strong research evidence just not strong clinical evidence). So mouse OR isn’t often predicative of human OR. But this applies to chart reviews too. Still a pretty durable framework.
> A big limitation is that mice are tested with orders of magnitude higher incidence rate of the disease to quickly find RR
Do people also assume that EM radiation is a linear no threshold? Because we know it isn't true for ionizing radiation, but it is a great model to use in practice because it overestimates harm (which we'd rather over estimate than under).
I've read a few of those papers on the EM radiation on mice and they seem to assume a LNT model, which doesn't seem all that honest to me. A few of the papers I read didn't have great p-values either and had drastically differing rates of cancer development for radiation levels and sex (IIRC one big one had high cancer rates for low power, nothing for medium, and moderate cancer rates for high power. Which there was no explanation to this. But that might have just been one bad paper).
Citation for knowing it isn't true for ionizing radiation? LNT is supported by the US NRC, the EPA, and UNSCEAR. Not saying that it supports the papers on EM radiation, but it's definitely not crazy to assume LNT in your research (and given we don't know much about the effects of low radiation doses, it's definitely the more precautionary option).
To give you an intuition though, LNT would suggest that the body has no repair mechanism for healing damage from radiation (should be suspicious about this) and that all effects are accumulative (which makes sense if there is no repair, but doesn't if there is repair). We can heal from other things and have demonstrated in the lab that cells can repair from low radiation dosages.
Basically the thing is that measuring is incredibly difficult because there's a temporal component and effects are very different depending on where that dosage is received (eg. your eyes vs your hands. See equivalent dosage). So what do you do? You overestimate on the side of safety. Failure of modeling is built into the safety standards (I used to work on radiation shielding devices and I fully support the use of the LNT model in practice. Better safe than sorry).
I haven't read all of these and didn't archive what I have read so these are what I came up with quickly (I did read abstracts, of course)
(Short end is that it isn't clear how much cancer risk increases for dosages <100mSv -i.e. "low dosages" -, which is WELL above occupational standards - 5x actually)
Isn't the answer "Denver"? The city has a higher radiation dosage than average yet no more medical issues. Or at least that's something I heard once. A quick google brought up this site (which I have no idea who is sponcering)
Keep in mind that many readers here are involved in these technologies. Any safety issues would directly or indirectly harm their interests. Alternatively, some likely feel they understand radio frequency radiation and know a-priori that it is safe; "why, I have carried a phone for years and I've never been nuked like a microwave burrito."
It's an interesting comparison with the vaping thread last week or the week before, where a similar number of comments came to the conclusion that it should be heavily restricted because we don't have enough data.
Your first link was paywalled so I couldn't read it, but the potential issues with meta-analysis papers has been discussed to death already.
The article you linked second, is interesting. He makes some bad claims (The electric fields produced by muscles are strongly polarized contrary to his claim that they are unpolarized) and there is some questionable math, but what I really want to highlight is how he uses the pulse repetition interval in his section on forced oscillation. By his own math, a CW signal at mm-wave frequencies produces no biological effect being to low of intensity. The formula given is proportional to 1/(2pif) so it follows, but he then uses the PRF to set the frequency and displacement and finds that at these low frequencies, the effect is strong enough to be dangerous.
The problem with this though, is that the PRF is how often you activate the transmitter and not the frequency of the transmitted RF signal which leaves us with the perverse conclusion that, mm-wave is fine under normal circumstances but becomes more dangerous the less you are exposed to it.
"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."
This sounds like bullshit.
What were there changes between 3G and LTE that would make it more dangerous?
Different modulation techniques is the one they're claiming now. For some reason OFDM/CDMA is more dangerous than FM or amplitude modulation (AM) and there are huge biological differences, they claim.
There is even reason to think that newer modulations are safer precisely because they are more spread spectrum, with lower power and peak power at any particular frequency.
The towers are also spread more densely, with smaller cells and lower power, which also lowers peak exposure levels. For devices, just the fact they only have to transmit a short distance to a local tower tells you about the energy.
You are probably getting more cancer risk for stress hormones caused by the Instagram/Twitter on your phone than the electric field it generates, no matter how 'patterned' or polarised the field is.
"Along with the patterning and duration of exposures, certain characteristics of the signal (e.g., pulsing, polarization) increase the biologic and health impacts of the exposure."
"The latest cellular technology, 5G, will employ millimeter waves ... 5G also employs new technologies (e.g., active antennas capable of beam-forming; phased arrays; massive inputs and outputs, known as MIMO)"
Yeah, that one seemed a bit odd to me, but it's not clear that "massive" was being presented as part of the acronym. Could just be unrelated hyperbole.
FWIW, I don't have a fixed opinion on this issue one way or the other. I just really hate seeing supposedly intelligent people rely so heavily on ad hominem or similar distractions. If there really is a problem with the cited research, I'd appreciate it if somebody could point to where those are. Likewise if someone could cite sufficient contrary research to justify abandoning the precautionary principle. That's all fine. I'm willing to be persuaded, but not by appeals to or rejection of authority.
Well, I think what https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21311000 describes is the sane approach. Basically a Bayesian inference from the available data and our priors shaped by our understanding of physics, chemistry, biology, higher order effects, etc.
And yes, there are effects of 50-70 GHz EMF on biology, first one is heating, which is completely expected but might cause problems for insects. (But we already blast them with a lot of light at night, a lot of heat from the pavement and our buildings, and a lot of chemicals in the air.) Another interesting one is that cell bacterial division seems to be affected when combined with antibiotics. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21261425 )
The author of the article himself embarked in a crussade to ban limit EM emissions after publishing a meta-analysis which shown there is correlation between 10 year phone use and brain tumors. Yes. Without accounting for any other risk factor. Because the lifestyle of people who use phones and people who don't are certainly similar.
Correlation != causation. And the author does not ask for caution and research, he asks directly for limits on the technology.
In such matters, there's a strong psychological bias from tech-savvy people to dismiss evidence and side with the technology (not the science, which would include estimation of potential harm etc, but with the technological application, which is assumed as de facto good).
It's a strong self-identification with technology who instills a fear of appearing as a luddite, like the unwashed masses who fear this or that and fall for hoaxes about the dangers of safe substances (vaccines, chemicals) and harmless technologies.
But it can also be thought-stopping, and more emotional based than empirical.
Hm. Sure, some people just point to how the same thing happened with GSM, 2G, 3G, 4G, WiFi... but that's just a fallacy, because we also know that gamma rays, X-rays and UV are harmful, so deductively there must be some grey zone between 3G and hard gamma rays. Since we can't simply infer the health effects with certainty from first principles (let's say from physics/chemistry) we should demand relevant data.
But we have a lot of data (even if not as an enormous pile as about WiFi), and we know that so far the evidence points to no unexpected effects. There are interesting avenues of inquiry about
the effects of 50-70 GHz on biology (heating of insects, interference with bacterial growth), of course those effects are a lot smaller than what we already do from air pollution to manufacturing an dumping lot of chemicals everywhere, heating our cities, and so on.
Between Gamma rays and 3G is UV. Between UV and 3G is visible light. Between visible light and 3G is IR, one of which is the heat human bodies give off. Do warm blooded animals cause cancer? Because they're still a far higher frequency than 3G and the wattage of a human at rest is 100W which is roughly equivalent.
Do hugs cause cancer? If yes, then we can start narrowing it down to 3G/5G more after that. But by that stage I think we're doomed as a species anyway.
No, we can quite safely say that visible light also does not cause cancer, seeing as how we're bathed in it daily.
So any proposed grey area would in fact have to be a total surprise outlier, where EM far less energetic then visible light tripped over some biological weak spot.
Visible light is between 3G and gamma rays. Gama rays are dangerous because they can yank electrons out of atoms and thus change their chemical makeup.
It is not about technology, it's about frequency. At low frequency (i.e. less than X-ray or perhaps UV) and low power, there is a strong evidence that EM radiation is safe. And the theoretical models agree with that. So it's not about 5G or 6G or 7G, the details of the technology doesn't matter.
It's strange the relation you pointed with anti-vaxers. I think that the fear to 5G and vaccines are very similar, but it a very emotionally load topic, so mixing them is a bad idea.
For everyone genuinely worried about this: have there been any studies that specifically single out technicians who work on cellular antennas? Long hours every day, getting closer to the antennas than any of us ever do? I'm not suggesting there's a risk, but it seems that if there were a risk, then we've identified one of the highest risk populations for study.
Here's a longitudinal study on about 55,000 Polish military personnel found in the article:
"The cancer morbidity rate for RF/MW-exposed personnel for all age groups (20-59 years) reached 119.1 per 100,000 annually (57.6 in non-exposed) with an OER of 2.07, significant at P < 0.05."
5G has been paused in Brussels [1] already due to the companies inability to prove it is safe. The energy output of 5G antennas is apparently higher than 4G and higher than their current laws allow.
The normal way to do it is to conduct a long term study with control and test subjects. Carrots have been studied for a long time, as long as you consume them in moderate amounts they are safe but in large amounts you can get all sorts of issues. It's probably the same way with 5G radiation but we don't know yet.
And I don't think the government of Belgium consists entirely of youtube soccer moms but there are probably some of them :)
It seems odd to associate risk with "NG". Any risks would be more likely related to the frequency spectrum being used and the signal power than to the modulation techniques and communications protocols. 5G can be deployed in the same frequency bands that are currently in use, although higher frequency bands are also anticipated.
- More 5G towers operating in the same frequency/power range as 4G means less RF energy emitting from your Phone to the (now nearer) tower.
- The emissions from the towers to the phones should also be less, because A) they need to emit less energy to reach the (now nearer) handset, and B) the "fountain coding" in 5G means that less data packages need to be transmitted to carry the same data payload as 4G. Of course, this is counterbalanced by the probably higher data usage under 5G.
- Beam-forming millimeter-wave antennas cannot penetrate flesh, so won't try to establish links in that direction. Regular 4G frequencies do (and, use your head as an antenna element). So, transitioning from 4G frequencies to millimeter-wave should reduce the amount of your-head-is-an-antenna utilization for a set amount of data...
When I started reading about the radiation safety of 5G, I started understanding that most early operators were not interested in the safety aspects as much as the money aspects of it.
And if anything, what time has shown me is that the for-profit people will not operate these right. As regular people, we can of course choose to stop buying 5G phones, as long as we do have other sources of Internet.
My personal mobile internet usage has shown me that it is grossly expensive, underutilized and doesn't majorly solve a speed problem for me - only remote connectivity.
And no, I don't need more cancerous substances than there are. Especially after watching Chernobyl, I sure as hell don't need radiation messing around with my cellular structure.
In short, 5G is unnecessary in most cities, and the risks outweigh the benefits, IMO.
At least the EU has a very good tool for grey area scenarios like this where evidence is still lacking either way: the Precautionary Principle.
>>We conclude that, because scientific knowledge is incomplete, a precautionary approach is better suited to State obligations under international human rights law.
have you conducted a double blind test? Label two which are streaming, and two which aren’t. Ask a friend to pick two at random. Repeat many times and record results.
Many people have been studied who present with these symptoms. They are consistently unable to detect the presence of fields.
PS I can already see fault with the experiment in which the streaming devices are likely to be warmer.
I haven't done a double test, so will definitely try it.
Re: device temperature - don't even need to hold the device. It could be just very close to me if the bandwidth is high.
Once I set at the table next to my friend's open laptop and started feeling those head 'cramps' immediately as he started downloading a large ISO. Put on pause - the feeling subsides in a minute.
Doesn't feel like a pain, def. not sharp pain, but a significant discomfort, sort of a little brain earthquake.
I don't know why EMF sensitivity is not properly studied, as it's def. not a myth!
I've had someone in my flat make almost exactly that claim. They made it while unknowingly sat immediately next to a busy WiFi router. The claim did not go well for them.
Also worth noting that an iPad playing high bitrate video will be warmer than one which isn't; I could probably tell the difference too.
I agree with other suggestions: do a proper double-blind test. Others mentioned temperature difference, but I'd also suggest coil whine as an alternative hypothesis - and it's known that many electronic devices emit audible noise that's picked up (and really uncomfortable to) small subset of the population, especially when under load.
I used to get a very sharp pain in my head, above my ear, when making outbound calls, just before the recipient would pick up. Nobody seems to believe me, and I have never had the motivation to try to prove it to anyone, but it got to the point where I would hold the phone away from my head until the person answered.
It began with a Sony Ericsson, but happened across a couple of different phone brands over the years. Still happens extremely occasionally now (maybe twice a year) with my iPhone.
I'd be interested to know if the signal strength is suddenly spiked when a call is connected.
I get a sharp pain in my head above my ear from my glasses. The skin right there is very sensitive. Just rubbing things (including phones) causes the same senstation.
Not when it comes to GSM, it has consistent timeslots for active calls. The dial tone is modulated the same way as speech data and can be considered active.
I'm amazed that I scanned a bunch of comments and it seems like no one read the article and noticed that it's not actually a proper SciAm article, just an Op-Ed.
Let me repeat, this is not a proper SciAm article in which some actual academics condense their interesting research into something more easily understood by people outside the field.
This is an Op-Ed. It's an opinion. And more specifically, it's an opinion from someone who is most certainly not unbiased.
"Op-ed" doesn't mean anything these days. I've seen plenty of "proper" Scientific American articles that get basic physics horribly wrong, or have a very heavy slant towards a particular point of view.
I definitely would like to avoid 5G beam forming aimed at my crotch if I wanted to have more children. But isn't that sort of close to where we all hold our phones when we are siting? Yikes.
That first article is published in a journal I’ve never heard of, studied a total of 27 mice, and has a strange study design that doesn’t consider random effects.
On the damage Wifi is shown to do here, let's say it doesn't only show up in sperm but also in other cells.
Now imagine a pregnant woman, the unborn child being a girl. She's five months into her pregnancy. The unborn girl has at this point in time, in her own ovaries, already developed fully all the egg-cells she'll have for the rest of her life. Now imagine damaging those cells. How long before that shows up? Two generations.
It pains me to see pregnant women carelessly using an iPad on their belly to watch Netflix.
This article is going to have a lot of influence in civic debates about 5G. Everyone in the US recognizes Scientific American; now the anti-5G folks can say "even Scientific American says it could be dangerous!". And they'll be right, it does say that.
The article writer is a known "truther" of the field. But I like his view, I believe we need opinions from his end of the spectrum, but I've also read a few times comments such as this:
>"Academia: Where Crazy People Can't Get Fired - Dr. Moskowitz disgraces the University of California-Berkeley in precisely the same way Dr. Oz and Mark Bittman disgrace Columbia University: They are charlatans who wrap themselves in the prestige of academia to peddle foolishness to anxious parents."
To be honest, I'm somewhat surprised (in a good way!!) that Moskowitz got published on Scientific American at all.
Anyway, I have my fair share of worries on large density mmwave equipment environments, mostly focused on other things, as in, not on its effects on us, but on microbial life, bacterial life, not the focus of this article, so I won't derail, but at least for me, Moskowitz isn't this zero sum game as he may be to some field agents.
The sun is way worse than 5G. Saddens me for the academic world to see such study / or see an argument based on a number of “scientists” instead of an argument of quality.
5G covers a huge spectral range starting at, yes, 5 GHz.
5GHz is coming out of every home router built in the last couple years. If it was unsafe, we would probably know about it. (Let’s say ‘unsafe’ as in, “it is ‘unsafe’ to drive a car” since we need some baseline risk tolerance).
> If it was unsafe, we would probably know about it.
The article claims this is in fact the case. Quote:
"We are seeing increases in certain types of head and neck tumors in tumor registries, which may be at least partially attributable to the proliferation of cell phone radiation."
I've clicked a few cited papers and they are all behind a paywall, so I can't make my own opinion how justified this claim is.
We have heard about these increases since wireless landlines were introduced.
I would be more likely to believe this risk if it was showing up as hand tumors since most people are now carrying phones far more often then holding them up to the head.
It would however be interesting if the known decrease in male sperm count worldwide was actually attributed to cellular devices in the pocket.
I'm seeing a lot of people support or dismiss these findings for bad reasons. Hilariously, some people are dismissing papers because "the authors have a history of publishing papers about this stuff". In other words, papers on X are wrong because they are about X. This is reasoning on the level of "God exists because the Bible says He does, and the Bible is true because God wrote it". It's just going in a loop and spitting back your original preconceptions, without actually processing the evidence. You can't actually learn anything that way!
I scanned through some of the mouse studies, but they all had the same problem for me: to see effects, they blasted the mice with huge powers, on the order of 1 W/kg absorbed. For reference, the human body itself, through all its metabolic activity, barely generates that much. If you were absorbing anything near 1 W/kg of power at any frequency, you would start overheating, as if you'd just stepped out into the midday sun. Increase that by a few times, and you would probably shortly die, by literally being cooked. So I think most of those studies can be safely discarded. Anything is bad for you at those crazy intensities, which are far higher than what you get from a cell phone.
Of course, this leaves a lot of other studies that may or may not be more solid -- but without more time I can't draw any solid opinions.
It seems theoretically impossible for non-ionising radiation produced by 5G or any other radio emitters to cause cancer as there's no known mechanism for it to induce carcinogenic damage, so a priori we should expect that 5G is safe until shown otherwise.
Joel Moskovitz was co-author on a meta-analysis (https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.2008.21.6366) that claimed to find a link between mobile phone use and brain tumours. However, this was a meta-analysis of case-control studies, which is the weakest form of study (worse even than a prospective observational cohort study). The problem here is they essentially had to ask people who did or not have tumours how much they used their mobile phones and trust them, which introduces the obvious issue that people with brain tumours who had heard that phones may cause cancer are probably going to report higher usage of mobile phones than those without tumours. Moskowitz even notes this in the discussion of his paper. He even notes that other, better, better, prospective cohort studies have found no evidence for a link between cellphones and cancer (https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/93/3/203/2906436), but dismisses the study because they looked at subscription data rather than examining 'actual exposure to mobile phones' (which his study didn't do either).
This fear mongering, with no a priori theoretical justification and no evidential basis from people who've checked anyway just to be safe, muddies the waters and distracts from real environmental problems like air pollution causing respiratory diseases. This isn't quite as bad as promoting antivaxxer positions, which are imbecilic because the benefits from vaccines obviously outweigh the costs even if they did cause autism, but it's getting awfully close.
Mutagenic effects can come from many sources, not just direct modification of DNA. Anything that interrupts or interferes with the replication process can easily influence the quality of the output. Tumor Treating Fields [1], for example, use ~150-200kHz alternating electrical fields to mechanically disturb microtubule formation to corrupt mitosis and destroy cells in the process of reproducing. There's nothing remotely ionizing about this process but on the fringes of effect it could result in damaged but not destroyed cells.
> his was a meta-analysis of case-control studies, which is the weakest form of study ... Moskowitz even notes this in the discussion of his paper
Sounds like he's noting that the link found is (as you say) weak to non-existent. Which supports the claim in this Scientific American article: that studies are inconclusive and as such we have no reason to believe the technology is safe.
Also worth pointing out here (as I have elsewhere) that the ACSH link is not from reputable org. It seems to be the only link people are posting and re-posting to rebut Moskowitz's research here on HN.
If the link is "weak to non-existent" and our a priori thinking is that it should be perfectly safe, shouldn't we default to it being safe? I'm not against also running studies to make sure we haven't missed something, but this seems like an unfair standard that we don't apply to other forms of things we expect to be safe a priori.
> our a priori thinking is that it should be perfectly safe
What a bizarre statement. I'm curious where you get this notion that things are perfectly safe a priori. What examples do you have where this has been the case? X-ray? Asbestos? Cigarette smoke? Freon? Lead? Certainly they're evidence of things that were accepted as such.
We are talking about a form of energy which is other than being omnipresent naturally, was studied extensively for more than 100-150 years - including health hazards when it comes to ionising radiation.
While I do think that studies should be continued for a more definitive answer, and I personally don't feel a strong need for a 5G network as of now, I am more on the defaults to safe side.
It wouldn't matter if there was direct evidence linking 5G to cancer. "Global Industry" sells us things that cause cancer. They sell us things made with things that cause cancer. There is literally no part of the planet that isn't polluted with these materials. (Just one example...https://fortune.com/longform/teflon-pollution-north-carolina...)
I wish that I weren't so cynical, but I just don't think that anything would stop the initial deployment of something like this.
The amount of money that is expected to be made by content creators, network operators, and everyone in between, just makes it incredibly unlikely that health concerns would be taken seriously.
Unless you could force these companies to account for health outcomes as a real cost of doing business and not an externality that could be fobbed off on the legal system or public budgets...I just don't see how you change it.
There are a lot of arguments for and against this, but what's not controversial is that widespread 5G is going to significantly impair our ability to forecast weather by as much as 30%.
23.8 GHz is the frequency water vapor in the atmosphere emits, which is what weather radars are looking for. A bunch fo 24 GHz signals all over the place are going to screw it up.
Maybe AT&T's stunt with 5GE (fake 5g) is a necessary tactic to get regular people comfortable with 5g so when it actually comes out the mindset is along the lines of "I've had 5g for years and haven't dropped dead so these health claims must be FUD."
When I saw the headline I thought that this might have to do with digital security, and I was both interested, and confused as to how 5G had anything to do with digital security. I'm disappointed to see that in reality it's just this tired old debate again. Low-power non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation is not dangerous to biological beings.
I'm not a scientist but have worked in the telecom industry. My understanding is that regardless of 4G/5G modulation, it's all just RF electromagnet radiation, using the same frequency allocation as old analog television transmissions. Besides, given the frequencies used, there will be difficulty having the RF get through building walls.
MIMO, active beam steering and paths with reflections. In theory. In practice, we'll see, but probably you'll have to hold your phone high to provide some clear line of sight between the antennas if you want those blazing fast speeds.
I'd recommend watching this video of a real-world 5g test https://youtu.be/_CTUs_2hq6Y - The speeds are >1gbps when you're effectively next to the 5g nodes, while it would reach <400mbps while going around walls and would jump between LTE and 5g (in an attempt to be on the fastest network).
Apart from possible health effects, is anyone else concerned about 5G eventually being used for real-time CCTV surveillance networks with centralized facial recognition?
The higher bandwidth (up to 10 Gbps) and higher cell density should support quite a few simultaneous video feeds to a central government location.
The government doesn't need to do anything. Advertisers will deploy the technology and when the government wants access, all they have to do is get a warrant or maybe even just ask nicely.
Or lease direct access. Lots of companies make bank by selling to the government access to their databases, even when said database contains information you'd think the police (or whomever) would already have access to, such as public records info.
Pretty sure anyone setting up CCTV does so on a wired network. Why the outrage now when your scenario has been possible for years (piping CCTV footage to a central location)?
Yes, I know it's been possible for years. But 5G would lower the deployment costs dramatically (assuming the operator gets a good flatrate data deal) and it enables connecting moving objects like buses and trains into the network.
You are right that the slippery slope has been started already a while ago.
This is already the case. I highly recommend you attend any physical security exhibition, CCTV vendors will happily demonstrate the capacity of their facial recognition appliances. (And that’s business grade commercial, imagine mil-spec)
Releasing things into our daily environment without adequate testing is likely why so many men are infertile now compared to a few decades ago and we don’t know why. Sperm counts are halved for example. At least there is some research in this case, which is nice
Why is this a headline? This is a title for a research paper. A headline would be "We have reason to believe 5G is unsafe." Until then this is could just be viewed as lobbying, if I were the cynical type.
I spend a lot of time in public transport, and on internet in general. I never paid for 3G or 4G on my smartphone. Only wifi. OSMAnd for maps, etc.
5G is also pretty bad for the environment (netflix, instagram, snapchat are also pretty awful). The amount of energy and resources you need to make all those electronic is gigantic, not to mention the lifespan of a smartphones is so short, smartphones vendors are now trying to add more and more features to make customers replace their phones.
I'm really dying for any electronic brand to release durable hardware, and I'm also eager to have minimal smartphone OS that consume less CPU and memory.
I can't understand that race towards higher bigger everything.
Would you prefer we revert to manufacturing plastic VHS tapes, then distribute them by diesel trucks like we used to in the good old days?
Would you prefer people get their morning news on broadsheets made from the bleached pulp of rainforest trees?
Or would you like to go back to the good old days of AM radio when the inadequacy of the receiver electronics was compensated for by sheer power at the transmitter, to the tune of megawatts of broadcast power?
You're probably one of those people who would prefer to breathe in lungfuls of woodsmoke rather than bathe your skin in the harmful rays of electric light.
One of the use cases I saw somewhere for 5G was "smart wine glasses".
Like glasses with sensors in them so the waiter at a restaurant would know where he needed to go to refill someone's glass.
This was in a context where it definitely was not an ironic jab at the overuse of technology.
I don't know if the product actually exists, but honestly. Honestly. Smart wine glasses! I think it's just like... a really, really dumb idea. And if that's the kind of thing that 5G is going to enable, I absolutely do think we should consider it a threat to the environment.
I've seen wireless thingies that would beep when your order is ready at kebab joints. Since the basic principle is the same (1-bit signaling), I'm pretty sure it could be just as well rolled out right now, unfortunately.
Constantly replacing antennas, smartphones, having large datacenters, network infrastructure that consume a lot of energy is bad for the environment. Video is a big offender. Instagram and facebook feeds also consume a lot of memory and energy.
Even storing document as PDF instead of paper might be worse after all.
If at least smartphones would be designed to last 4 or 5 years it would make a big difference.
Wirth's law is also an excellent way to describe how computer software is most often horribly designed, and it also plays a huge role in how we could have cheaper and eco-friendly devices.
Is that water destroyed beyond repair?
Is there a water shortage where silicon is purified?
What would you do with that water if it was not used to purify silicone, bring it to Sahara?
It is certainly contaminated after being used. It has to be purified before hand too. The energy cost and environmental impact of manufacturing a single phone is tremendous.
>I can't understand that race towards higher bigger everything.
I think it's called growth-economy. Solving things creates new exciting possibilities, which have problems that need solving. We're never satisfied, and that's a good thing. Otherwise we would've stayed in caves
We need to get smarter about the damage our progress does though. I am not saying we need to stop looking to better our lives. But the life we have now is at great cost to the environment and indeed our own species. The electronic gadget abundance specifically comes at a great human cost to those in third world countries. To say nothing of the environmental cost.
More like "growth-economy with massive hidden externalized costs" - from the obvious like pollution and climate disruption, to subtle ones like economic pato-incentives that distort markets and prevent them from doing their jobs...
> Otherwise we would've stayed in caves
Yeah, but we're long past that state. A cave man can safely externalize stuff like recycling, and even most of food production to NATURE. We can't.
I love growth-economy per se, but our current brand of it is messed up, and markets don't seem to be good enough at pricing all the nasty externalities. We need to invent quickly some extra devices that price this stuff in at a global scale (doing it per country CAN'T work!) IF we want to keep our beloved growth-economy!
Otherwise we'll default to the crappy solutions of ducktape-enviro-socialism + state-capitalism + islands of "free" markets here and there, dragging ourselves through a new f dark age from war to war...
Bias in research is real, and now there's a list of things that make you crazy, including:
- Evidence that cell phones might not be the best thing for you
- Evidence that a vaccine might harm some people
- Evidence that some medical convention is wrong
All of these are things that we absolutely need to know if true, but even good evidence towards these points is dismissed as noise because there's a pseudoscience culture surrounding them.
It's really frustrating to see both social and scientific progress hampered by idiots acting as such.
The mantra of radiation safety is reduce the risk.
In that sense, an improvement in the energetic profile is potentially helpful.
An xray or a plain ride is completely fine, but pilots as well as patience have some upper limits. xray is hard alpha radiation, but do you know how xrays are created?
The fact that this is in Scientific American, even in the Opinion section, is simultaneously a testament to the openmindedness of science, and quite sad.
After reading his ideas, I think we should all feel a little lucky that Trump hasn't made hime the head of the FCC.
This is the second article I've read on SciAm's _blog_ platform that has disappointed me with its pseudo-scientific tone. The previous was a rant[1] against GMO which prompted considerable dissent[2]. I get that the blogs authors have more editorial freedom, but opinions that stray so far from the scientific mainstream puts the fine magazine's reputation at risk.
> at first glance, he looks like a reputable researcher.
The man been trying that "cellphones give you cancer" since at least 2009, with his earliest attacks being closer to some new age metaphysical bullshit, and only later he started to pull some scientific argument.
He has no real science background, no medical background, he is a psychologist. His "academic network" includes people going into homeopathy, antivaxing, GMO and something bordering on new age and conspiracy cults.
Why UC Berkley still keeps him around, I have no idea.
The article is a bit suspect, the author seems to have a personal dislike on the guy. The author works for the American Council on Science and Health which is a nonprofit, but I couldn't find the sponsors.
The article uses personal insult (calling the guy a charlatan) but does not say much about why he disagrees with those positions.
I see no companies on the name of Joel M. Moskowitz, no products sold, no industry sponsors.
On the other hand, I see a guy with no industry ties being slandered online by no reason, weird.
I don't know anything about the guy, if anyone can chime in on why his opinion is not trustworthy I would like to learn more.
I'd rater people attack the argument than the person. 'Truther' and 'Denier' are weasel words designed to discredit and idea without addressing the actual argument. It's like saying "How are you?!" with nothing else to back it up.
That article is very unprofessional in tone, and quite thin on content. I'm not on any side, but if that is the best criticism of him then I'm now very wary of this technology.
I'm not an expert on this field, but I do know how to run the incidence numbers of cancer. One of his claims in the article is that for certain types of head-and-neck cancer, incidence rates are increasing. I cannot find any evidence for this:
I took the numbers from the country I'm familiar with (The Netherlands, which has excellent cell phone penetration), and no matter how I look, if I correct for age, they've only been decreasing. The Dutch registry is also one of the most complete of all European countries.
See https://imgur.com/a/FiNrVCQ, x-axis is year of diagnosis, y-axis is Incidence per 100.000. I used European Standardized Rate correction to correct for changes in age distribution, which is standard here. Top blue line is total, the other lines all denote different origins.
I don't know who Alex Berezow is any more than I know who Joel M. Moskowitz is, but openly ridiculing the entire state of California for their stance on public health and safety in your opening paragraphs isn't the best way to sell yourself as a voice of reason in a discussion about public health and safety of 5G.
Edit: I was also prompted to spend ~30 seconds researching who ACSH are since everyone critiquing Moskowitz in this HN thread seem to be posting links from that website alone. Didn't take long to discover they're a privately funded pro-industry advocacy group.
I assume you're North American and so upset mainly by the absence of an 'MD'. MBChB is an equivalent.
Having an additional 'Cert' in homeopathy would be like having a CS degree but also certifying in AWS or Azure products, for example, which wouldn't even necessarily say that I endorse them, perhaps just that I have clients that might like to see that certification.
A cert in homeopathy would not be like certifying in AWS or Azure products. It would be like having a CS degree and then getting a cert in computer shamanism where you were trained in the proper chants and symbology to fix computers just by shouting at them.
Equating certifying in a stack or methodology like AWS or Azure with homeopathy lends it 1000X more credit than it deserves.
By all means certify in herbology or natural medicine but if you are a real (equivalent or otherwise) to a medical doctor and you certify in homeopathy you are legitimizing fake bullshit and you should be judged for it. Homeopathy preys on the sick and desperate and deserves no slack.
Maybe this seems overly harsh but people I care about have paid thousands for this bullshit and the smooth talking bullshit salesmen had way to much ""science"" on their side.
Since I got my CCS (Cert Cloud Shaman) status, not only have my ritual sacrifices gone more smoothly, I have experienced greater AZ uptime, job satisfaction and expanded networking opportunities. Memorizing AWS labels and esoterica is much easier if incorporated into a ritual chant.
Also, I can now add Blood Sacrifice as an optional extra for my clients, who see the fee as a small price to pay for covering all the bases.
And so a medically sick person who insists on (or at least is very much more comfortable with) a homeopathy-certified doctor should be denied a medically (and surgically) qualified doctor?
They should not be denied anything, but no self-respecting medical doctor should get a certification in homeopathy just because there is a market for it. That just adds legitimacy to it and keeps the wheel spinning.
I would not get a certification in computer shamanism, even if it made my clients feel better about me when I mumbled the Old Tongue and clapped my hands above their laptop. If this was something people wanted, I'm sure others with more compromised morals would be happy to set up a certification board and oblige.
I have no ill feelings towards those that believe that computers or human bodies are magic. This is not their fault. I have no respect for professionals that are complicit in this. Shame on them. They are one short step away from professionally proscribing homeopathy because it "makes the client feel better, so the ends justify the means".
Hey, some people believe the placebo pill is ethical. I believe it violates the letter and spirit of informed consent. I feel the same about homeopathy. Homeopathy is bunk no matter how a sick person or salesman or doctor feels about it.
No, however a program that encourages applied homeopathy should not be legitimized by associating it with an applied standard medical degree. Homeopathy can be treated as an open area of research at any evidence based program but certification implies a step beyond academic.
A layman looking for medical attention should not be responsible for having to make that distinction. The fact that a layman conflates the two is the issue at hand.
wrong assumption, I'm from New Zealand and am aware of most of the reputable (mainstream scientific) research orgs here. The original article made a big deal about those who are supporting a call to action to give legitimacy to the concern. While I have no problem with further research, I was interested in seeing research from credible researchers that have some link to a credible research organization that I'm aware of. None of the New Zealand people meet that criteria (though they may still have done legit research).
Is 5G tech at the same Millimeter waves frequencies as those used in airport scanners? I've heard mm scanners as considerably safer than the old backscatter x-rays (although full of false positives and no better than random chance at actually detecting things).
Yes, sort of. Backscatter X-ray is ionizing (much smaller than mm - about 0.0000001 millimeters, so something like EHz - ExaHertz). While 5G new radio is 60 GHz (5 mm), like WiMax supposed to be.
So far concerns are about insects (heating) and bacterium (antibiotic resistance "could" develop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21261425 ). Though the heating effect is probably negligible compared to how cities already radiate a lot more heat and insects are loving it.
Furthermore, if there is any serious new/strange/second-order effect on biology we would have already seen it, as people blasted lab animals with every kinds of EMF and we got only the coincidental expected flukes.
I don't know about other people, but unless it's proven to be safe beyond a doubt, I'd be worried about deploying 5G. I don't think the small benefit outweighs the possible risks.
Quote from a comment that just got posted by Hannob:
"I clicked on a few links and Googled a few names. It's roughly what I'd expect: People with few publications now working in other fields, people without scientific publications, but university degrees, people who regularly speak at events from radiation critics, people who are invested in other fringe theories."
Seems to me that the people complaining about people not clicking on links in the article shouldn't believe everything they read without checking who wrote it...
aside from the cost for entry, that's the same sentiment that led to why i no longer contribute to wikipedia. zero censorship is too little; any is too much.
i'd love to hear your description of this working - you don't need to mention where it is specifically because that would of course, ruin it.
They're talking about Something Awful, which is widely regarded as having very successfully run its forums with a lot of fun, trollish behavior without losing the overall good vibe of the community, by doing exactly what he said.
This site has been online since ~1997, I think, so I think most of the oldtimers know it already. It follows the basic rule of "live by your words and be ready to do as you say". There are sub-rules, also, like "do not post if your post doesn't contribute to the thread". Unwritten rules also exist, that somehow curb the eternal september: "don't post for the first few years, just read". There is no concept of karma there, only thread rating, which IMO helps prevent karma-whoring, as it focuses not on individual, but rather a collaborative effort to make an epic thread. The mods are subject to these rules as well: I've seen mods banned by other mods and mods probating themselves for breaking their rules... i've spent my 10$ some five years ago, and, frankly, it was a good decision I would make again.
there's maybe a model that describes this because its just a casual observation i am making, not based on data.
but i believe that online meet-up spots are similar to physically hosting a party. people in-the-know show up in small numbers to a place, and now the time-and-place has turned into a 'party with the cool people'.
on a graph, y-axis is coolness and x-axis is time - typical -x^2 graph where the party hits a coolest point but as time progresses, more and more people who bring noise, low energy, cynicism, and karma grinding show up and kill the party.
but well before the maximum coolness, the original people that turned the party into a real instance, they already got bored and left for the 'after party', which is just the N+1 party instance.
if we calculate how to predict N+1, the algorithm that did it is instantly invalid, so there's no answer to where the next cool party is. i believe it generally starts off as something quasi private, but with some invariable public entry that allows it to grow enough that it eventually gets ruined.
consider all the closed door parties, like private forums, that have been stable brown dwarfs that exist for almost forever - we can't list those here because it's a violation of the rules, to admit they exist.
by the time we all realize where the next place to have these cordial, bourbon sipping, armchair style message forum posts, all the cool people will already have moved into the next room in. and this room will have a coat room full of people taking their coats off, ready to move into where the perceived cool party is happening.
it's neat. i'm not in the cool party and i never will be, but it's still fascinating to get to chat with people on here who are still serious and adhere to whatever the culture here is. i liken it to how i would act differently if i snuck into a golf resort. i have no idea what i am doing but i can fake it just enough to avoid detection.
"Joel M. Moskowitz, PhD, is director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been translating and disseminating the research on wireless radiation health effects since 2009 after he and his colleagues published a review paper that found long-term cell phone users were at greater risk of brain tumors. His Electromagnetic Radiation Safety website has had more than two million page views since 2013. He is an unpaid advisor to the International EMF Scientist Appeal and Physicians for Safe Technology."
So this is, I assume, not by a Russian troll farm.
5G will likely increase IPv6 penetration, resulting in more stuff with public IP's, resulting in more stuff with ancient unpatched software vulnerable to attack.
Why would Russia argue against technology that would allow cyber warfare on an unprecedented scale?
More specifically, I meant the ancient software of the future -- not the stuff that's ancient today. I am convinced that IOT + a large-scale acceptance of IPv6 will result in the Internet being one big battleground.
He is not arguing that 5G is dangerous. He is pointing out that there does not seem to be enough research available to state as a fact that it is safe and that, as a consequence, we might want to be cautious.
That's a very reasonable general approach. Whether his proposal to stop 5G deployments altogether is proportional to our understanding of the potential risks, if any, is debatable, to say the least.
If made in good faith, yes. I’m not convinced that this is the case here, however, given that the author is fundamentally at odds with the scientific consensus on 2G, 3G and 4G safety, without acknowledging that he’s in the clear minority. In fact, he claims that the majority of relevant experts have signed the 5G moratorium, and this seems to not actually be the case. I actually think that disagreeing with the consensus, based on limited but potentially valid evidence, is completely acceptable. But he goes further and pretends to be in the majority, and that contrary evidence only marginally exists.
In sum, he makes demonstrably false claims about the current state of the scientific consensus, which makes me sceptical of everything else he says.
I think this is a reasonable approach in general. Whether it is made in good faith or not is a red herring and does not change anything.
What's more important, since you mention the 'scientific consensus' and his claim that there isn't enough data is: What is the consensus on 5G (I suppose that means mmWave) and what are the studies it is based on? That would allow to make a factual comment on his claims about health hazards.
> * Whether it is made in good faith or not is a red herring and does not change anything.*
That’s true only if we indeed know nothing about 5G, and that’s demonstrably not the case. In fact, the pretend open-mindedness is tantamount to denialism, if we accept that findings on ≤4G translate to 5G, and there are good scientific reasons for thinking so, based on our established understanding of physics and biology. It’s possible that 5G changes the picture, and I am indeed open to the possibility. But at the same time intellectual honestly compels me to describe the chance of this happening as low, given what we generally know about the biological effects of non-ionising radiation.
Put differently: Given what we know, it’s honest to say that 5G might carry risks, but that there is currently no good reason to assume so. It is not honest to claim, as the article does, that “we have no reason to believe 5G is safe”.
You are replying beside the point when you keep focusing on that point.
This is a reasonable approach and it is a general approach. Now, about 5G, again the question is what we know or don't know about any risks.
If there are no or very few studies about the effect of mmWave then it is indeed reasonable to ask whether precautions should be taken.
You seem to suggest that there are indeed no such studies but that it can be assumed to be safe because emissions in a different part of the spectrum are safe.
Whatever the reality is, this is simply not a scientific approach and does suggest that you have no factual reason to believe that mmWaves are safe (or dangerous actually, you simply don't know).
I am not saying that he is right, but scientifically we cannot just counter his argument by "no, you're wrong".
Wow. We’ve been in denial about potential health risks of mobile for years. But now there’s a risk that Chinese tech companies might corner this market, suddenly its time to worry about the health risks?
> Cancer is not the only risk as there is considerable evidence that RFR causes neurological disorders and reproductive harm, likely due to oxidative stress.
I mean it can't be good all this radiation exposure. As far as I know, people living near large electrical wire high tension poles are at a higher risk of cancer already.
I think so much can already be done with the network bandwidth we already have available. Just using a better protocol on top of HTTP, like everything switching to HTTP2 should be a huge improvement.
How much bandwidth more do we really need, we have hit the limits in terms of video on what is noticeable by the human eye already.
> As far as I know, people living near large electrical wire high tension poles are at a higher risk of cancer already.
As far as you know from what? This might sound harsh, but this is just fearmongering.
HV power lines are, in an electrical sense, very far away from you. Even if magnetic radiation had some health effects, (which as far as we know, it doesn't, which is why MRI's are incredibly non-invasive to people without metal implants of some sort), you are not getting any of that from an HV power line.
The only people I know spouting such things are either charlatans^W salesmen trying make a buck or people that have no understanding or training in electricity. It can't "jump out at you". A power line is not a radio.
There are plenty of microwave towers and satellites and cell phones to be irrationally afraid of. But power lines? Like it just screams "I do not understand electricity or am trying to make a buck off those that don't." There's no radiation coming off that power line that gets to you.
> HV power lines are, in an electrical sense, very far away from you
I've seen family houses literally next to high tension poles (not just regular poles, I mean those huge ones many times the height of the house), for example in Portugal.
I don't see any definitive conclusion online for the link between high voltage lines proximity and cancer, but I am not an expert. Seems to me the consensus is far from general.
Yea, the huge ones, many times the height of the house, are uh, really many times the height of the house above the house. According to [0], the maximum magnetic field from 275kV-400kV overhead power line (this would be measured much closer to the line than you could possibly get to without climbing the towers) is 100uT. Standing next to a running vacuum cleaner about 800uT. A standard clinical MRI is typically 1.5T, so about 10000 times the strength of the power line if you were a lineman sitting next to a live line. Typical field under the line: 3-5 uT. That's standing right under the line. The family underneath the line gets more radiation from leaving the TV on, or god forbid, the wifi or their cell phone.
Consensus is not far from general. You don't have to be an expert. If you are really afraid of radiation, talking about power lines really weakens your case. They do almost nothing compared to normal household appliances we use all the time. The inverse square rule is real.
I think to avoid your best bet would be joining an Amish community. And don't go outside, without covering up. The sun's radiation is like, actually proven to be harmful to skin and DNA, and is many times more powerful. Too bad getting sun is also clinically associated with many health benefits! Oh what will we do...
Even if current levels of radiation are harmless, it does not mean that the same applies to 5G.
Studies funded by the 5G industry are 10 times more likely to say there are no side effects on human, which is suspect and an indication that is an attempt to manipulate science going on - https://nutritionfacts.org/video/does-cell-phone-radiation-c...
> The leading independent organization on cancer causes says that current cell phones are "possible carcinogens"
It is crucial to understand what this actually means. the IARC classifications are valid but — particularly to lay people — incredibly misleading and pretty much useless. All that “possible carcinogen” means is that we haven’t yet collected sufficient evidence to discount harm. It’s not evidence of carcinogenicity at all. If anything it’s the opposite, because it means that, despite the existence of relevant studies, there hasn’t been any consistent demonstration of carcinogenic effect.
Furthermore, IARC only classifies risk itself, not hazard [1], nor dosage effects.
For context, IARC classifies sunlight exposure and processed meat consumption as “definitely carcinogenic” [2]. Despite this, regular exposure to sunlight is crucial for your health, and regular meat consumption is known to have little absolute effect on cancer risk (in other words, although red meat does have an effect, the effect size is tiny).
> Even if current levels of radiation are harmless, it does not mean that the same applies to 5G.
Good thing I'm talking about overhead powerlines and not 5G then. Unless your reply was meant for someone else.
Although I believe the chance that 5G is harmful is basically nil, mostly due to my EE degree and a basic understanding of "non-ionizing radiation" and "ionizing radiation", it is probably about 100X more rational than complaining about overhead powerlines.
Seriously I just don't get it what problem do people have with overhead powerlines. Saying overhead powerlines cause cancer is like, on par with calling aircraft contrails "chemtrails" and saying they are part of a nefarious government plot. There are plenty of real nefarious government plots, but you hear people talking again and again about chemtrails because they don't understand aircraft engines or heat or water. Just like there are real issues in the health system, but again and again people cut off the legs of their own argument by going off about overhead powerlines.
Lastly, WTF are those sources? Is nutritionfacts.org a leading independent organization on cancer causes? That is a 5-minute long video of someone doing zoom-highlights on excerpts from studies from 2011. The first comment is someone saying the WHO is bought-out by corporate interests, although, the WHO is like the main ethos argument from the video.
Do you use a cell phone? How do you hide from the other people using their cell phones, or the Wi-Fi rays coming from your computer? If you have a new router, 802.11ad already communicates in the 60Ghz band, that's a pretty big number if big frequency numbers are scary.
The market is happy to sustain homeopathy and fake Faraday cages for your microwave-based electric and gas meters. Radium used to fetch a high price for its health "benefits"...
I am not sure pointing to random cons for sale on the marketplace really changes the fact that if high voltage power lines are next to your house, it is worth less.
> I mean it can't be good all this radiation exposure.
The light bulbs in your home spew out radiation. The heating of your home is all spewing out radiation. "Radiation exposure" is meaningless without considering whether or not radiation at a given wavelength will interact with your body in detrimental ways at the given power levels (of course, if you heat your home too much, or set fire to it, the infrared radiation/heat will kill you; but we don't for that reason conclude heat is inherently bad) or not.
Talking about "radiation exposure" without being specific about those things is as meaningless as suggesting eating is bad for you because some things are toxic.
Some radiation is very bad for you. Some is essential for you to some extent and dangerous for you if you get too much. Some just won't interact with your body in any way that matters.
> As far as I know, people living near large electrical wire high tension poles are at a higher risk of cancer already.
There is some very limited evidence that shows that strong electromagnetic fields may have some limited effect specifically for incidence rates of childhood Leukemia, but notably only at levels found at too few houses for the researchers to get a large enough sample size to be able to draw conclusions either way. In other words: We don't have any clear evidence of that. We have some research that may hint at some link under conditions to rare for us to have anything conclusive.
It's worth researching, because even a very minor increase in risk would have substantial long term effects, but it's not something that really has any relevance to the safety of 5G at all, any more than the fact that too much infrared radiation (heat) will burn you. They're different things.
[1] provides a detailed walk-through of different claims, sources of electromagnetic fields and radiation and what different studies say about this.
There was an increase in leukemia associated with proximity to electricity pylons at one point. They found that it was caused by the herbicides they were using to stop plants from growing up around them and getting in the way of maintenance. Change the herbicide and the leukemia goes away.
The last question is interesting. Our eyes create an image with ~ 1 Gigapixel resolution at frame-rate equivalent > 120 Hz.
For real VR/AR, 5G is not fast enough, would have to work in the THz regime for wireless (wow, nature has a huge bandwidth requirement...). Interesting thing about THz is that most electronic materials breakdown and stop working.
The actual resolution of the human eye is much smaller than that and a lot of our perception is based on interpolation. It's pretty interesting to read up on this.
As usual, it's not the scientists that are wackos, it's the press that is claiming things completely different from what they say. There are proposals for better test equipment that should be taken, but I don't see any other claim for change there.
> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women.
The wildest of the claims anywhere on the linked papers is a ~10% increase on the rate of one of the rarest types of cancer, so this line of research won't give you the answers you are looking for.