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Science Technology

Study Links Cell Phones and Eye Cancer 162

Posted by michael from the you'll-put-your-eye-out dept.
Sara Chan writes "There have been lots of claims that cell phones might cause cancer. The Sunday Times of London reports that there now seems to be real evidence to show these claims are true, at least for cancer of the eye. A study found a strong statistical link and a feasible mechanism is known: microwave radiation is absorbed by certain cells (melanocytes) in the uveal layer of the eye (which affects their growing/dividing). The study appeared in the journal Epidemiology and the abstract is available here."
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Study Links Cell Phones and Eye Cancer More

Study Links Cell Phones and Eye Cancer

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  • Point-blank microwave radiation from personal communication devices is not a problem if you use an earpiece and microphone that plug into the side of the cellphone.
    Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them? [pineight.com]
  • Most cell phones these days have an "off" button.

    --
  • I've seen quite a few posts mentioning this "ionizing radiation" thing. Shall I assume that it's only possible to cause uncontrolled cell division (e.g. Cancer) through damaging DNA directly, and not through indirect molecular mechanisms, such as causing RNA molecules to be built improperly? Is there a biologist out there who can confirm this, since it seems to be a common complaint about this article.

    Nope, you don't have to damage DNA to cause uncontrollable mitosis. Increased production of growth factors and/or signal transduction elements can cause neoplasias as well (look what happens in the case of goiter, for example) While a neoplasia might not necessarily be cancerous, I'd imagine it would be rather problematic to have even a benign tumor in your eye.

    Who knows what sort of effects even just a slight local temperature increase can cause. Perhaps it might stimulate cells to release autocrine growth factors. Perhaps it is enough to significantly speed up the delivery of growth factors via blood or the diffusion of signal transduction elements intracellularly. Of course, the key thing needed to cause a panic is to find the exact mechanism.

    But I really can't see why thermal effects alone can't destabilize DNA or RNA. While the molecules themselves are stabilized by covalent bonds (albeit weakly) and very regular hydrogen bonds (in the case of dsDNA), both of which take a lot of energy to break, their interactions with other molecules, such as those responsible for DNA replication or RNA translation, are much more tenuous and don't necessarily need ionizing radiation to be broken.

  • This leather case [goaegis.com] claims to reflect all radiation back out the backside of the phone and cut down 99% of the radiation. They have all sorts of 'proof'. Any know if these things are bogus?

  • In fact, the back-to-nature-and-avoid-all-technology hermit types tend to have SHORTER lifespans than city dwellers.

    Well, yes. And I'm not anti-tech in general. You're right that some people are of the 'romantic' notion that "before we got civilised, we lived in harmony with nature", but there are those who argue (and I humbly agree), that primitive societies appeared 'in harmony' only because their tech was limited. You can't genocide with bows and arrows... but primitive cultures, it seems, certainly had their tyrants who would have nuked other tribes if only they had had the bomb.

    But as for, "we're living longer anyway"... are we? It depends on the perspective... a pig may feel really well fed... just before the slaughter. The trouble with the greenhouse effect, GM, contaminants in the food chain etc. is that their prescence is very subtle, and they accumulate gradually...

    Are we heading, with stomachs full, for a disaster?

  • If you had bothered to actually look at the article, you'd realize that it was written by Germans ;-)
  • I'd actually be completely willing to stick my head in the microwave for 7 seconds straight on a daily basis. I really don't think that it would have any significant effect on me. I'm basing this on my experience with heating scrambled eggs in a microwave oven (scrambled eggs being the closest food item to brains that I can think of). When heating a small quantity of eggs (2-3 eggs worth at the most) in the microwave I've found that it takes significantly more than 7 seconds to produce any noticable heating. My head on the other hand is much larger than a typical serving of eggs (I'd estimate that it would take about 5 dozen eggs to make up the approximate weight of my head [based on 7 lb head and 50g chicken eggs]). Therefore I suspect that the heating effect of a full 1000W of microwave energy continuously applied to my head for 7 seconds on a daily basis would be minimal. Furthermore, my head has a built in liquid cooling system which would help to quickly dissapate any extra heat from my head and this energy is not being applied to my head all at once but rather spread over the course of 2 hours.

    If you are actually concerned that the heating effects of microwave radiation from your cell phone are going to be dangerous to you, you should seek to remove other heat sources from near your head. The following may be reasonable precautions for you to take:

    • Never wear a hat
    • Carry a parasol
    • Keep your curtians closed at all times
    • Set your thermostat no higher than 55F
    • Avoid physical activity
    • Eat all your food cold
    I could go on with other ways in which to prevent your head from being heated, but it's getting a little silly. If there is anything about cell phones that warms your head, it's simple conductive heating from the power amp and battery discharge. If your cell phone gets too warm for your comfort, talk less and/or use a headset. I just ask that you remember that this is a comfort recommendation and not a saftey requirement unless you're operating a motor vehicle.
    _____________
  • though Stang cautions that his study needs confirmation

    Good for him. It sounds like he's a responsible scientist who's found a correlation worthy of further increase. He also has at least the beginnings of a mechanism to explain the correlation. Unfortunately, the Sunday Times has done the usual media thing, and overreacted. One study does not a fact make.

    Early epidemiological studies of breast cancer indicated that multiple pregnancies had a protective effect. Women with many children were less likely to get breast cancer than women with only one or two kids, and women with no children had the highest risk. Additional studies confirmed this. Then someone noted that women with larger families usually start having kids at a younger age than women with smaller families, and researched that connection. They learned that the preventive effects were not tied to family size, but the woman's age at the time of her first pregnancy. Pregnancy before age 20 reduces the risk of breast cancer, regardless of the number of pregnancies that follow.

    The early studies were carefully done, peer reviewed, widely accepted, and wrong. The correlation did not prove causation. An overlooked confounder caused the effect.

    If you can only remember one fact from about epidemiology, remember this one, as it is the most important: Correlation Does Not Prove Causation.

  • HAM radio operators have been concerned about the affects of rf radiation for a long time. Look through some of the older mags and you will find a lot of articles dealing with transmitter power and how far away the antenna should be from the operator. Talk to rf engineering profs and you will get the same story. The reason HAM's weren't all dying from cancer is that they generally did not hold the antenna up to their head.

    The affects of large ammounts of rf radiation have been well known since WWII and the advent of radar. The question today now is not: "Does rf radiation cause cancer?" but rather "Do cellphones produce enough radiation (enough power) to cause cancer?"

  • How far away from the cell phone does the effect of microwave radiation reach? I'm betting it could go all the way across the universe (given billions of years) if it's not blocked by anything. Like a previous post mentioned, the power of electromagnetic waves diminishes with the inverse square of the distance, so it would be very faint by the time it travels through the universe.

  • Since centi (c), in the SI means 10^-1, this means that 5 cm = 0.05 m

    Since radiation intensity (e.g. W/m^2) is inversly proportional to the square of distance from the source, this means that;

    P1 = (r0/r1)^2 * P0

    P0, P1 are radiation intensities at r0, r1 respectively distances from source.

    Doing some algebra, we get;

    N= P1/P0= (r0/r1)^2 . I have used N to represent the power ratio of the two points (P1/P0)

    Using the above data we have;

    N=([0.05m]/[1m])^2 = (0.05)^2 = 0.0025

    This means that at one meter (r1) from the source, the radiation is 0.0025 (ie. 0.25%) as intense as it is at 5cm=0.05m (r0)

  • Even more likely than the production of microwaves is just that battery discharge causes heat and so does the operation of a power amp. Amazingly enough when you hold a warm object near to your ear, your ear begins to feel warm. See my previous post [slashdot.org] for a complete discussion.
    _____________
  • but who cares?

    When you add up all the exposure to different cancer enhancing products you can end up with the possibility of dying of cancer at forty as opposed to dying of old age at ninety.

    The little things add up, look at whats happening to overall cancer rates(not cancer deaths): up, up, up
  • Ooops, I should have said centi means 10^-2, or in a form that computer people will recognise, 1e-2

  • Re:Don't believe everything you read (Score:3)

    by tested metal ( 239445 ) on Sunday January 14, 2001 @04:47PM (#507816) Homepage
    they found a correlation. That's not the same as cause-and-effect. One strong factor that many people overlook is socio-economic effects.

    I agree with this but don't you think that the people carrying out the research thought about it ? The research was done by reputable scientists, I know that doesn't mean that they don't make mistakes but it would surprise me if they overlook stuff like that.

    You haven't read many research papers, have you?

    Check out the last two lines of the paper's abstract:

    This is the first study describing an association between radiofrequency radiation exposure and uveal melanoma. Several methodologic limitations prevent our results from providing clear evidence on the hypothesized association.

    In a nutshell, this says (1) we're the first ones to do the research and (2) we couldn't prove our hypothesis to begin with.

    In other words, No valid conclusions may be drawn from the experiment!

    This is a perfect example of the unfortunately common method of gathering a sizeable amount of data, performing some flashy statistical analysis, and publishing, ignoring the fact that there is little signal amongst the noise.

    An unfortunate trend in science, primarily in this country, but apparently also found in Germany, is the lack of attention paid to research methodology. At the same time, the quality of scientific journals is decreasing more and more, so poorly done research is getting published more and more.

    Add in incompetent and irresponsible journalism, and the end result is a bad article, a headline that is even worse and misleading Slashdot stories....

  • You can prove something is true to someone, if they're willing to accept it as truth.

    You can't prove it to those who will not accept it as truth though.

    That's my definition of proof, anyways.

  • Is it the only thing? (Score:4)

    by SlashGeek ( 192010 ) <petebibbyjr AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday January 14, 2001 @12:26PM (#507818)
    It may be partly true that microwave, or near microwave, emissions from cellphone transmitters can be a contributor to things like eye cancer, etc, but there is one other device that many people spend a considerable amout of time using, perhaps more than cellular phones. Monitors. When they did this study, did they find a group of people that have never used a computer monitor and always sit a minimum of 15 feet from the TV? Use of computers has increased on an almost parallel level as use of cellular phones. Use of other modern devices, I'm sure, have to play a factor. I would believe that, as the story said, microwave radiation is absorbed by certian cells in the eye, but who is to say that a device that most people use less than 20 minutes a day is the largest contributor? Why is it that cellular phones are always under attack anyway? Are they truely dangerous unto themselves, or is it more to do with the general attitude of public use, ie: driving, resturant, etc, that somebody is always quick to bash them?

  • Wasn't it shown that using the earpiece tripled the dose?
  • What I'd like to know is whether lower radiation phones [slashdot.org] would make a difference...
  • People that are plugued 24h/day on their cell phone will probably end up having problems, human body can adapt and most studies shows that little exposure (few minutes a day) can't hurt. Anyways, we're exposed to a lot of radiation, sunshine, radio waves, etc etc.

    The technology is good, and here to stay, but like everything, abuse isn't good, well in this case. It's kinda like smoking... smoking 1 cig a day won't give you cancer unless you're really weak or prone to get cancer, but smoking a pack or more a day, well good luck :) Same applies to a cellular, and that's why I don't run my buisness on it, but rely on it for quick calls and use a pay-per-minute scheme instead of a monthly fee.

    As for the secondary exposure, it's totally lame, the energy level halves at ^2 of the distance, so a few watts becomes milliwatts only a few feets away, you get more standing near your microwave watching food cooking.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • The field of the analogue cell phone is orders of magnitude stronger than that of a digital phone.

    But it's not pulsed - which (IIRC) is one of the major reasons people use against digital cell phones. I have to admit that I don't know very much about the different modulation techniques used in the analogue or digital cell phon networks - but neither do the people who cry out loudest about those "dangerous" digital phones.


    --

  • I guess it won't be long before the GM people come out with a procedure to replace those defective genes in our melanocytes with genes that don't go cancerous when jiggled over a billion times per second by a cell phone transmitter.

    I just wonder if the cost of the procedure will require the selling off of my first-born, or my first- and second-born.



    I'd rather be a unix freak than a freaky eunuch
  • I think just increasing the rate of mitosis is enough to cause problems. I imagine even a benign tumor in the eye would be bad.

    Since uveal melanoma starts within such cells, there is a ready-made mechanism by which mobile phone radiation might help to initiate cancer, especially in people with a genetic predisposition to the condition.

    This isn't a poor explanation at all. Excessive mitosis alone can lead to cancer, even if one isn't exposed to ionizing radiation that causes mutations. Mutation occurs at a given rate, even in normal individuals. It's up to the DNA replication error correction machinery to catch them.

    Let's pick a random tumor suppressor protein, such as p53. It needs to be at a specific concentration in the cell to be effective at catching replication errors (which occur at a regular frequency even in normal individuals) Protein synthesis only occurs during G1 or G2 while DNA replication occurs in S phase and cell division occurs in M phase. Protein breakdown will continue at a relatively steady rate throughout the cycle, however. If the rate of DNA replication/cell division outstrips the rate at which p53 is synthesized (i.e., the length of time the cell spends in G1 and G2 phase decreases) and the breakdown rate stays constant, you've possibly effectively decreased the concentration of p53 in the cell.

    But regardless of what the actual mechanism is, anything that can cause increased rates of mitosis (growth factors, signal transduction elements, whatever) can cause cancer because of the baseline error rate. Notice that the most common cancers occur in tissue with rapidly dividing cells such as skin and the colon. And it's not necessarily because they're more exposed to ionizing radiation.

    While you're right in saying that it would take ionizing radiation to break the phosphate bonds between adjacent nucleotides, it does only take thermal energy to break the hydrogen bonds that link the base pairs. While you'd need to be at 95C to completely denature double stranded DNA, you'd only need much lower increases of temperature to just partially melt dsDNA enough. At physiological temperatures, dsDNA melts spontaneously all the time. This is why helicase can work, and that's why you need histones to stabilize dsDNA (and the hydrogen bonding between histones and DNA is much weaker than that between strands of DNA--much more easily broken by heat alone.)

    But you're right in saying that a correlation is not necessarily meaningful. Without a mechanism, there's no need to panic yet. But if you take the scientific method to the extreme, nothing is ever true, you can only determine what is false.

  • Cellphones have a power output of 600mW. Since milli (m) in the SI means 10^-3, 600mW = 0.6W. The radiation intensity (assuming isotropic radiation) at 1 meter is only;

    [0.6W]/(4 * pi * [1m]^2)=0.047 W/m^2 or if you prefer, 47mW/m^2.

    since a dipole antenna is 2.14dB above isotropic in directions of maximum radiation, the radiation intensity at 1 meter is 78 mW/m^2 or 7.8 uW/cm^2 (microwatts per square centimeter)

  • > poorly done research is getting published more and more.
    >
    > Add in incompetent and irresponsible journalism,
    > and the end result is a bad article,
    > a headline that is even worse and
    >>>>>>>>> misleading Slashdot stories....

    Misleading Slashdot Stories! That's the last straw.

    And here I thought I was getting unfiltered news. What is the world coming to?

    (Don't be-lieve, don't be-lie-ee-ee-eve, don't be-lieve.)
  • Just prior to the discovery that Polio was caused by a virus, which led to a vaccine, I say a report that used statistics to show a correlation between drinking Coke and contracting Polio, to a 95% confidence level.

    Caused all sorts of hysteria among the mommies.

    Correlation does not equal cause.
  • it says something important that most people dont know about statistics: ie cause and effect relations _CANNOT_ be determined from correllary data. this is pretty basic and one of the first things you learn in a statistics class.

    That old chestnut is only true in a theoretical sense. In practice, cause and effect relationships are determined all the time by correlations, because.common sense can also be applied in addition to mindless equations. Consider -- what would be the alternative to cell phone use causing cancer? Cancer causing cell phone use? While mathematically possible that explaination is just silly,
  • This is a poor explanation. If microwaves cause unusual growth rates among the melanocytes, then microwave radiation could act as a promoter, not an initiator, of cancer. Ultraviolet light is both a promoter and an initiator, because it is high-enough energy to ionize DNA molecules and cause mutations. Microwaves are non-ionizing, so there is no known mechanism by which they could act as an initiator.


    I've seen quite a few posts mentioning this "ionizing radiation" thing. Shall I assume that it's only possible to cause uncontrolled cell division (e.g. Cancer) through damaging DNA directly, and not through indirect molecular mechanisms, such as causing RNA molecules to be built improperly? Is there a biologist out there who can confirm this, since it seems to be a common complaint about this article.

    Even if microwave radiation didn't act as an initiator, just promoting the growth of any cancerous cells which develop is still a pretty bad thing. And cancerous cells don't really need an initiator. As long as cell division is an imperfect process, DNA will be damaged. Perhaps a pre-cancerous mass which would otherwise have died out (due to insufficient blood flow or something) could survive with regular exposure to growth-promoting radation? (Okay, that's a complete guess. Still, I probably know more biology than this guy. Not that I know very much either...)

    Incidentally, the Stang article doesn't actually say anything about microwaves causing rapid cell division. There's just a mention in the article about "other research [which] shows..." that microwave exposure causes rapid cell growth. The abstract of his article does say that "visual display terminals" (e.g. computer monitors) and several other radiation sources were not correlated with the appearance of eye Cancer. So we can all relax now (ha!)
  • ...there now seems to be real evidence to show these claims are true, at least for cancer of the eye.

    It'll certainly give new meaning to "Watching the game, havin' a Bud..." [budweiser.com]

    --

  • Great (Score:5)

    by zairius ( 54221 ) on Sunday January 14, 2001 @12:05PM (#507832) Journal
    Now we'll have to deal with blind people on cell phones in traffic.
  • Back pocket would be safer, especially for the more weighty folk - plenty of padding as protection.

    As for the chest, we put our hearts through enough strain as it is (what, with all that American fast-food and all) :-)
    --
  • I can't believe we're comparing cellular phones to the long and great radio hobby tradition better known as "Ham" radio. I've been a Ham for quite a while now, and this crap is apples to oranges. Cell phones operate generally with 0.8 watts output at around 830mgz. This is a minute power amount, and if people would stop talking sooooo much on their phones, the question of cancer would not exist. Cell phones cause cancer about as much as living under the e/m field of powerlines, or living les than 20 miles(which we ALL do) from commercial radio stations with 50,000 watts(400,000 watts effective radiated power!) pumping day and night. Sure, with distance the field strength falls off very quickly, but its about the same radiation you're getting from cell phones and commercial transmitters. As far as this idiot saying there should bo no licensing for amateur radio, you're crazy! That is what makes ham radio a viable hobby, and keeps some order...look what happened to the 11m band('CB' for you invalids)!!!
  • Can I sue cell phone users if I go blind from second-hand radiation?
  • I've seen people make 1-2 hour cellphone calls. Dividing by 1000 [power ratio of microwave to cellphone] that gives up to 7 seconds of your head in the microwave on a regular basis.

    But you can't necessarily get the total damage from total energy absorbed. If you stand under a 100 Watt lightbulb for 3 hours (about 10,000 seconds) nothing much will happen to you. If you exposed yourself to a 1 MW light source for 1 second you could get flash burns. This is because your body has some heat dissipating capacity, so exposure well below that capacity has comparatively minor effect, while exposure well above that capability can result in severe heating, burns, etc.

    Your brain already burns something like 30 W and has good cooling from blood flowing through it. That means that adding even the total power output from a modern mobile phone- a few hundred mW- will have negligible heating effect no matter how long you are exposed. Blasting yourself with 1000 W, though, will easily overwhelm your ability to cool your brain and doing so for any appreciable period will start to cause it to overheat. Even so, your estimated 7000 J of energy is only enough to raise your brain temperature by about 1 degree C, and actually much less if it's absorbed by other parts of your head. A fever of 38 C isn't particularly serious even when it lasts for a long time, so I doubt that a couple of minutes of such a fever (by which point your body would have dispersed the heat throughout the body) would cause any notable harm.

  • Given the current saturation of cell phones, there could be a study that showed they cause instant death or mutations, and I doubt that many people would stop using them. That's pathetic.

  • It's much easier to prove that cell phones cause ulcers and car accidents.

  • Thanks.

    I'm guilty as sin, I didn't read the article properly.

  • I had a cell phone for my previous job. If I used it for any more then 3 minutes or so, my ear would get somewhat warm, even if the phone was not in direct contact with it. This has to tell you that something is happening to your body thats not normal, and probebly not good for it. The reason people are attacking cell phones is they most likely cause harm.

  • The radiation from directional antennas also decreases
    with the sqare of distance. In the case of a directional
    antenna (e.g. an antenna with a paraboloid reflector) the
    radiation is limited to a portion of the surface of the sphere
    repressenting all points equidistant from the source.
    Actually the radiation is more greatly directed in direction.
    The angle of radiation is taken to be the angle between
    directions that are 3.01dB (half power points) below the
    direction of maximum radiation. Since the surface area of
    a given amount of spheradians of surface angle (as
    opposed to arc angle which is measured in radians) is
    indeed proportional to the square of the radius of said
    surface angle.

    For clarity, the spheradians of a given area on the
    surface of a sphere is the ratio of this area, to the square
    of the radius of said sphere. This means that there are 4*pi
    speradians in a complete sphere (just as there are 2*pi
    radians in a complete circle).

    The area of a given surface angle (s_a) is given by;

    A=s_a * r^2, where r is the radius of curvature for this
    surface area. This means that the amount of area in this
    surface angle is proportional to the square of radius. Since
    the power that the antenna has outputed still spreads out
    over a surface area that increases with square of radius,
    the intensity of the radiation decreases with the square of
    distance

    The amount of power relative to a dipole antenna that
    the antenna outputs in the direction of maximum radiation
    (expressed in db, and notated by dBd) is the gain of the
    antenna.

    It is true that the directionality/gain of the antenna
    increases the risk do to increased radiation in a curtain
    direction (at the expense of the other directions), the
    intensity is still inverely proportional to the square of
    distance.

  • from the abstract:

    Several methodologic limitations prevent our results from providing clear evidence on the hypothesized association.

  • Or there is a common cause. You're falling prey to the assumption that if there's a correllation, there has to be a cause/effect relationship between the two, which is the SECOND hting you learn in a stats class.

    -----------------------

  • But that's a problem which should eliminate itself Real Soon Now for quite obvious reason...:-)
    --
  • People like the believe that everyone's out to get them (like cell phones). That's why studies like this get so much press. Once the study is repeated I'm sure the rates will go down.
  • Funny you should mention power lines. In my home town there is a high-tension wire running the length of the town through dedicated lots located in the middle of the blocks (the wires are perpendicular to the street direction). Seems that houses located on either side of the lots are mostly (at least half of them) vacant, and the resale value of them is down. People simply don't want to take that risk, given the choice.

    However, even though there is a possible link between aluminum consumption and Alzheimer's Disease, I don't see many people boycotting soda drinks.

    What I learned about Risk Theory: 1) the unknown is scarier than the known. 2) you can't gauge the reaction of the public because they collectively don't think logically.

    And this news is very similar to news linking mobile phones to brain cancer in the, oh what, eighties?

    Now, I had a friend who used those old phones extensively. He died of brain cancer about 10 years ago at 42. Should this convince me that cell phones are bad? Do I want toys at any price?

    I haven't bought a cell phone yet, but I drink out of soda cans nearly every day. At least I think I can recall I did... And no, I probably wouldn't buy a house under high-tension lines. They tell me you can stretch a long wire underneath one of them suckers and light a small bulb with the inductive energy.

  • but we'll never know, now that cellphones have supplanted ham radios (and at much greater cost).

    One question... can a ham radio fit in your pocket and weigh only 4 ounces?

  • Don't believe everything you read (Score:5)

    by tbo ( 35008 ) on Sunday January 14, 2001 @12:37PM (#507848) Journal
    Disclaimer: I'm a physics student. This means I know a bit about the subject, but certainly not everything.

    The mechanism by which the radiation might cause cancer is uncertain but it is known that the watery contents of the eye assists the absorption of radiation.

    The watery portion of the eye would only experience very mild thermal effects (heating). Microwaves aren't ionizing radiation.

    Other research showed that cells called melanocytes found in the uveal layer started growing and dividing more rapidly when exposed to microwave radiation.

    Since uveal melanoma starts within such cells, there is a ready-made mechanism by which mobile phone radiation might help to initiate cancer, especially in people with a genetic predisposition to the condition.

    This is a poor explanation. If microwaves cause unusual growth rates among the melanocytes, then microwave radiation could act as a promoter, not an initiator, of cancer. Ultraviolet light is both a promoter and an initiator, because it is high-enough energy to ionize DNA molecules and cause mutations. Microwaves are non-ionizing, so there is no known mechanism by which they could act as an initiator.

    As for increasing growth rate of melanocytes, this is hardly surprising. Melanocytes reproduce and produce pigment in response to electromagnetic radiation (this is how you tan). It would have to be shown that melanocytes reproduce at an unusually high rate when exposed to microwaves (of the levels emitted by cell phones), as compared with the reproduction rate from exposure to sunlight. In short, until someone shows that melanocytes react more strongly to cell-phone level radiation than to sunlight, this is a straw man.

    When the results were analysed they found the cancer victims had a much higher rate of mobile phone use,

    They found a correlation. That's not the same as cause-and-effect. One strong factor that many people overlook is socio-economic effects. For instance, perhaps affluent Brits are more likely to own cell phones and more likely to go on vacations to places to sunny places. People who are normally exposed to low levels of ultraviolet light (i.e. Brits) who suddenly find themselves in sunny climates have very little skin pigment, and are much more prone to get cancer-causing sunburns (or perhaps eye damage) than those accustomed to those levels of sun.

    though Stang cautions that his study needs confirmation

    Good for him. It sounds like he's a responsible scientist who's found a correlation worthy of further increase. He also has at least the beginnings of a mechanism to explain the correlation. Unfortunately, the Sunday Times has done the usual media thing, and overreacted. One study does not a fact make.

    Sadly, the lawyers will probably jump all over this. It's not like science, truth, or facts ever had any place in the courts...
  • forget about eye cancer, i'm more worried about people who use cell phones while driving! this may sound stupid, but i know it's right to be concerned because _i_ had an accident (my first) because of a stupid cell phone. if i hadn't been trying to shut the dang thing off, i wouldn't have smacked into the guy in front of me. even my parents can't drive while talking on a cell phone and they've got thirty years of driving experience on mine. people, shut them off before something regrettable happens!

  • Give it time (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think the reason why the cell phones are constantly under attack is that they are a relatively new phenomena. Just like any new technology, it takes time before people get used to them.

    As someone living in a country where over 50 % of the entire population has a cell phone, I find it odd that somewhere talking on the cellular phone while riding a bus or in a restaurant could be seen as rude behaviour. Or that someone would think that owning a cell phone also means that you have to be available to your boss/wife/whoever all the time. Then I remember that we had exactly the same debate several years ago when the cell phones weren't yet the everyday utility they are now. Just give it time and the people will get used to them.

  • Get a CB. 40 channels of AM, 80 of SSB, and the transceivers are both very portable and dirt cheap. On a good day you can even get propagation to far corners of the world, and if you're so inclined it's not hard to find high-powered linear amplifiers that will work, though it's illegal to use them (who's to know, eh?)

    Of course, if you want to see what ham radio would be like without the license requirements, I repeat: Get a CB. Or read Usenet.

  • the weaker-energy radio waves (longer wavelengths) and the positioning of antennas relative to the body, but we'll never know, now that cellphones have supplanted ham radios (and at much greater cost).

    The major concern with cell phones and the potential health risks comes from a combination of power and antenna location.
    Originally cell phones operated at as much as 4watts! That's a helluva lot of power to be radiated right beside your skull. Current cellphones max out at 0.6watts.
    Given that most Ham systems are using externally mounted antennas that are not located within an inch of your skull, the exposure is far lower. Even with clam-shell style cell phones they have measured significantly lower exposure ratings as the antenna is being tilted away from the users head.

    Ham radio has to adapt now. We have to get rid of all those stupid restrictions like morse-code tests for liscenses. Anyone can buy and operate a cellphone without a liscense. The same should be true for ham radios.

    As far as cell phones supplanting Ham, and Ham's need to adapt to compensate, this doesn't make a lot of sense to me. They are two very different technologies offering very different forms of communication. Ham is great for some kinds of communication, but is a one to many medium rather than the one to one communication of telephone (cellular or otherwise). Cellular phones also have the advantage of integrating with the existing phone system - it's inherent in the design. Yes, I know you can patch into phones with a Ham if such a repeater is available.

    Getting back to the one to many aspect, it has several problems when you talk about the scale of cellular communication. Since only one person can talk at any given time on a given frequency (within their transmitters range) you quickly consume the available resources. And we don't want to forget responsibility, getting a licence forces Ham opperators to behave themselves (and assumes a certain level of maturity). Think of Usenet in the early days, it was a valuable resource. Now that anybody can post it's degenerated into noise (yes, everybody has always been able to post, but before net communications got to be point-and-click the learning curve acted a lot like a licence). Do you like the idea of people trolling the Ham space? Or having people just keying for the sake of it? Yetch... You also have the problem of privacy: none with Ham. True you can monitor cellular activity with a scanner, but with digital phones and spread spectrum technologies, it's much harder to get anything useful out of it. Besides, I have get to see a hand held Ham anywhere near as tiny as current cell phones.

    Ham is a valuable tool, but planning to use it as a cellular replacement seems like a bad plan to me. But that's just IMO.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Also see "How to lie with Statistics". A great little book we were given to read in college.

    Anothger very good book is "Flim Flam" by the Amazing Randi-- a stage magician who has amde a career out of debunking psuedo-science.
  • We hear about all the dangers of cellphone.. Err, rather, we hear certain groups of people proclaiming the dangers of cellphones.

    But what I want to see is where are people keeling over dead. People keel over dead of heart disease, of lung cancer, of smoking. But, millions have been using cell phones for YEARS, and yet, we don't hear about tens of thousands of people dying over it.

    Now, maybe cell phones, like smoking, don't cause death quickly, maybe they take years/decades to find out for certain. But, any technology runs this risk, the only way to find out for certain is to wait 50 years and look for people keeling over dead. Even if it does cause some increase in disease in 50 years, do people really want to give up such a powerful and valuable technology? If we have to give up cell phones, why not give up electricity, the light bulb, and such.. Is there any evidence that the light bulb will not cause cancer after 50 years? Where are people suing GE over their soft-white light-bulb caused cancers? How about the automobile, there is proof that it kills thousand of people a year.

    IMHO, IANAL, and I am unqualified to say this, but, I think this is just a case of a few people who want something to blame for whatever disease they have. ``It's not just bad luck that I got this cancer, it must have been caused by XYZ.'' Healthy people get cancer too.

    *Most* of us are adults and able to take the risks of any technology we use. We should not ban a useful technology because some people are dessperate for a reason for their disease other than 'bad luck'.
  • To summarise for US citizens: Our biggest-selling daily paper is a supermarket tabloid, with tits in. It's published by an Australian gangster.

    You don't think we have to deal with him too? Granted, his only large circulation newspaper here is the New York Post, which is fortunately pretty far down on the list (it's only in 4th place in New York, and 14th nationally), but he has a pretty strong presence on TV. The weird thing over here is that while conservative groups love to blame the entertainment industry for all the ills in society, they leave him alone (even though his company produces the worst of the slush). Would I be overly cynical in chalking this up to his financial support of far right-wing causes?

    I can understand how bitter you must be, though, I know how upset I'd be if the News Corporation bought the New York Times...
    --
  • With ham radio, the antenna is not right next to your head. In fact if it's a high power rig, chances are it's strung up in a tree outside your house. Also, cell phones haven't supplanted ham radios, since 98.44% of the people using cell phones now never used a ham radio in the first place. Hams are used for a completely different purpose. It's the free and easy way to talk to somebody in, say, Nepal. Or those stupid Survivor people down in the Outback. Or the Space Shuttle.

    Also, there wouldn't be a point in showing that there's a correlation between ham radio and tumors, because... there's nobody to sue! So why even study that? Sad but true.

    And lastly, you don't need Morse Code to get a license these days. You still have to know the theory, which is good. Actually there are now 3 classes of licenses (as of 4/15/2000), code is optional for the "technician" class. The general and extra classes require code but it's only 5 words a minute. Anybody can learn that in a day, and those licenses have greater privileges.
  • ...that doesn't have the antenna right next to your ear. The signal will go further with it on the roof of your car anyway, and bag phones have more power and a lot more range than handhelds while exposing your head to less radiation.
    • MOBILE phones have been linked to human cancer in a scientific study for the first time. The research suggests there is a threefold increase in eye cancers among people who regularly use the devices
    Ok, so the first statistic is that cell phone users are three times as likely to have eye cancer.
    • he had examined 118 people with uveal melanoma and obtained details about their use of digital mobile phones. This was compared with a control group of 475 people
    So my question is, exactly how many of those 118 people used cell phones? 100? 50? 20? 10?

    118 people is a very puny test group. The fact that they don't reveal the amount of cell phone use amongst those people shows that something is being hidden here. Also, why didn't the researcher seek a more quantitative value for how much these individuals used their cell phones - certainly the information is held by the cell phone companies (and could be retrieved with permission).

    Add on the fact that we don't know what type of cell phones these people used (of those 118 people that we don't know how many used cell phones), whether these individuals wore glasses, we don't know any ages, how he picked his control group, the ethnic diversity of the 188 people.... the list goes on and on.

    I'm really starting to hate the media. What is it with these "journalists" that they think we don't want to know any details? What is it with these researchers that they think they can produce a study with 118 people?!

  • *EVERY* time this subject comes up, the slashdotters jump all over it pointing out "Microwaves aren't even ionizing radiation!"

    Congratulations, you've proved to the rest of us you caught one fact during your physics classes.

    Now think about this for a little while: Why in the world do you think it's necessary to rip the atoms or molecules apart to have any effect on them? Especially since we have vidence as close as the nearest microwave oven that proves RF can have a profound effect on organic material. Even heating is not the only plausible mechanism for damage - although it takes a fair amount of energy to destroy a molecule, they interact with one another at energy levels that could easily be interfered with.

    Why is everyone so quick to assume we even have a clue what is going on here? We really know next to nothing about the health effects of microwaves. (And there are some studies by the way, that show quite disturbing results in microwaved foods as compared to other heating methods, indicating there may be much more than just heating entering into the equation...)

    Keep an open mind - there's a lot to learn about here.
  • there is a slight difference between a 250 W microwave oven and a 0.6 W cell phone

    Yes, but the food in a microwave is much further away.. Intensity Falls off with 1/x^2 (because of the spherical expansion). Assuming a 6-inch radius to the center of an oven and 1-inch from phone to eye, you have 36 times the intensity.. Roughly equiv to a 36W oven. Additionally, how often do you cook "eyeballs" for several minutes at a time at 36W? The study suggests that they're affected much more severely than say raw steak.

    Incidently, I got into this sort of conversation with a friend, and I didn't know the exact frequency ranges for cell phones nor ovens. I know the chordless phones are around 2.4GHZ. I heard rumors that ovens are around 2.7GHZ or something like that, even though the microwave spectrum runs up to like 30GHZ or so.

    -Michael
  • I can't tell if I'm supposed to laugh or be appauled.. cell phone radiation is to hat-based radiation as Nuclear reactor expent Uranium is to burnt firewood.

    Radiant heat is the bombarding of fast moving molecules against the edges of a surface; using convection heat (through atomic vibration) to warm it's center. The other passes high frequency "particles" that mostly pass completely through the material, statistically colliding with random modules beneath the surface. Even materials like lead can only reduce the penitration depth.

    Our skin (and to some degree our skull) is our outer shield. But they're not immune to high frequency or nuclear radiation. What's more, our eyes have almost no protection.

    Hense the danger..

    I've always been an advocate of head-sets (even with low frequency chordless phones). Sure they might give you kidney cancer, but I'd rather dialisis than blindness / loss of brain tissue.

    -Michael
  • See my previous comment [slashdot.org].
  • Interesting.. I know that I have tenitis, and I never understood where it came from. All my friends listened to really loud rock music, but tended to have much higher auditory pickup than me. Consequently, after being in front of a monitor literally all day for weeks on end, I'd go to bed with incredible ear-aches.

    Do you think you could find some medical reports on this topic?
  • On the other hand, given the saturation of unscrupulous lawyers, there could be no studies showing any causation whatsoever, and yet there will be many more lawsuits and more anti-cell phone laws.

    (Did I say "could"? I mean "are"!)

  • Other research showed that cells called melanocytes found in the uveal layer started growing and dividing more rapidly when exposed to microwave radiation.

    Since uveal melanoma starts within such cells, there is a ready-made mechanism by which mobile phone radiation might help to initiate cancer, especially in people with a genetic predisposition to the condition.

    This is a poor explanation. If microwaves cause unusual growth rates among the melanocytes, then microwave radiation could act as a promoter, not an initiator, of cancer. Ultraviolet light is both a promoter and an initiator, because it is high-enough energy to ionize DNA molecules and cause mutations. Microwaves are non-ionizing, so there is no known mechanism by which they could act as an initiator.

    Not necessarily - for example UV causing initiaion of cancerous cells might be common in the light sensitive cells in the eye - but the body's normal defense mechanisms might be able to keep it normally under check - if microwave heating causes these cells to reproduce more quickly it might raise the chances of cancer taking hold - maybe even in a non-linear manner.

    Personally I found the article to be appropriately non-committal reporting a result but reccomending other studies reproducing the results. I think that suggesting possible mechanisms for explaining the information that their staistical study has discovered is also appropriate - they may be wrong - but if you figure out somethings up the way to figure out how the correlation is to start hypothesising and testing those hypotheses - that's the scientific method.

    This sort of way of doing science is normal - it's just that in this situation the results are potentially a PR firestorm for the cell phone industry so anything anyone sais will be explosive

  • I agree with you totally that radiant heat and high frequency or nuclear radiation are totally different. However, the only effect that microwave radiation (note: microwaves are electro-magnetic radiation a very different thing from atomic decay) can have is to produce heating in moist materials.

    As an interesting contrast to this thread I submitted an interesting interview [nytimes.com]from the New York Times this morning. Being that this is /. and all it got rejected. The scientist they interviewed has been researching the effects of microwaves on people for 25 years and has pretty much determined that they are harmless. Her research has gone as far as exposing monkeys and humans to large microwave fields and investigating the feasibility of microwaves for home heating.

    I'll freely admit that my post was intended to be a bit over the top, but being trained in physics (now working in embedded systems programming) I know that there is very little likelyhood that microwaves could cause genetic mutations. Microwaves do not have sufficient energy to change the molecular structure on DNA. You must realize that visible light is many orders of magnitude more energetic. No one would even consider that keeping a light bulb over your head would be dangerous even if the UV emissions from said bulb are an actual risk of skin cancer from that radiation (ok, light bulbs tend to be a bit more toward the red side of the spectrum and thus emit rather little UV light, but my point stands).

    As far as the saftey value of head-sets goes I remain convinced that their value extends only to keeping your hands free while driving and possibly to prevent neck cramps. The neck cramp problem though isn't unique to mobile phones and is probably more of a problem for those who use conventional phones since most people who work on the phone don't use mobile phones.
    _____________

  • At least it ought to be easy to detect (Score:3)

    by claeswi ( 212369 ) on Sunday January 14, 2001 @08:34PM (#507885) Homepage
    I've read the articles that have come out in the past two years or so about cell phones and possible epidemiological links to brain tumours, and so far I've felt reassured that I wasn't taking any big risks. Several of the studies have had serious methodological shortcomings and the problem of "multiple comparison bias" (if you make 100 comparisons between samples which are unrelated, you will find 5 "significant" correlations, and if you only highlight those in your report it will give many people (and less scrutinous daily papers) the same impression as if you'd done a study specifically to examine those and actually found correlations).

    Something to be remembered is that uveal melanoma is a very rare type of cancer; its incidence (in Europe) is about 1/30 of that of melanoma of the skin, or around 8/million/year. However, since it's a tumour which causes unilateral visual disturbances/blindness once it expands enough it's one that's unlikely to be underdiagnosed to any significant extent. Thus, the next few years' worth of uveal melanoma incidence figures should point a finger at whether we're doing anything that's increasing the melanoma risk. I don't recall how strong a risk factor sun exposure is for uveal melanoma (compared to other melanomas, for example), but I'd check whether any increase in uveal melanomas was disproportionately larger than the increase in all melanomas. In summary, if cell phones do increase the risk of UM, we'll be able to detect it quite reliably in a few years. Also, the results of a pilot study with little biological rationale to explain it doesn't warrant any particular caution while on the cell phone in my book, though of course that's a political decision that can easily swing either way.

    For those who are interested in reading up on biological effects of cell phone RF "radiation", the British Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones [iegmp.org.uk] came out with its report in May of 2000, and it goes through (complete with references) the case for and against there being significant adverse health effects of cell phone use. So far the case against cell phones seems to be weak, and most of the evidence that's piling up (a whole bunch of articles in major publications in the past two months alone) seems to cement it that way.

    The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals --Sir William Osler (1849-1919)

  • Re:And upcomming: (Score:3)

    by dagoalieman ( 198402 ) on Sunday January 14, 2001 @08:48PM (#507886) Homepage
    AND AAAAAAA PARTRIDDDDDDGE IN A PEEEEEEEAAAARRRR TRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

    Oh shit.. a bit late for that. Sorry.
  • >Many many things could be proven argumenting with
    >a correlation and many people (also in high official
    >positions) would believe them.

    The reverse is also a problem - people using the "correlation means nothing" as an excuse to avoid subjecting their beliefs to scrutiney

    Just because coating the gaseous exchange membrane of the lung with tar and reactive chemicals corresponds to increased risk of lung cancer, doesn't mean that there is any reason why we should have to put warning labels on our cigarette packets!
    (It's almost funny today, but it took decades to overcome).

    Such head-in-the-sand (mis?)reasoning is especially rampant on /. as it's a place where people are often both educated enough to be aware of the point, and opinionated enough to use it to protect their ideology from information that makes it look shakey :-)

    This chestnut gets pulled out whenever scientific findings clash with what people want to believe (or have vested interests in). Sure, sometimes it's legit, but the vast majority of the times I see it used, it's blatent stick-fingers-in-ears-and-shout "la-la-la-can't-hear-you!" behaviour.
  • You know what's even worse, all those cell phone towers. I know people who literally have them in their backyards. Has anyone done any studies on people that live near them? I'm sure those are going to cause something at least as bad as what cell phones would cause.
  • In short, the inverse square law says that a bystander 1 metre away will receive 0.25% of the radiation of the cell phone use. Read my earlier post [slashdot.org] for details.
  • Jakob Nielsen's most recent Alertbox column [useit.com] makes the point that as more mobile devices try to do everything all at once -- MP3 player, cell-phone, PDA, wireless web browser -- the cell-phone as we know it will be ill-suited to adapt. PDAs are much more versatile, since they don't have a space-hogging keypad, and don't need to be long enough to reach from the ear to the mouth. He suggests that the dominant way of making phone calls will be with a PDA and an earpiece-microphone attachment. Voila, cancer problem solved!

    I have to say, though, I've seen people walking down the street talking into their earpieces, and I'm having a hard time adjusting to the sight. Maybe we'll get used to that sight after time, though.

  • No, cigarette smoke does not follow the inverse-square law. Cigarette smoke occupies a volume of space (and drifts according to air currents, etc.), while a radiation pulse occupies a spherical shell (think surface area). Cigarette smoke also persists in the air.

    It's also worth noting that the risks of second-hand smoke have apparently been greatly exaggerated. The EPA changed their normal risk threshold for declaring something a dangerous carcinogen with second hand smoke (probably political reasons).

    Normally, the threshold is a doubling of risk of cancer over the course of long-term exposure. With long-term exposure to second-hand smoke (i.e. someone living for 40 years with a smoker--a lot more than most people get), the risk is only 1.4 times normal. By comparison, drinking pasteurized milk is, over the course of your lifetime, a higher cancer risk. My source for this is the Wall Street Journal (although not perfect, probably more reliable than the Sunday Times).

    Finally, the jury is still out on whether first-hand cell phone radiation causes cancer. Leaping to conclusions about second-hand radiation is incredibly premature.
  • Well, according to the abstract they accounted for monitor radiation. Specifically:

    We conducted a hospital-based and population-based case-control study of uveal melanoma and occupational exposures to different sources of electromagnetic radiation, including radiofrequency radiation.

    and more specifically:

    Other sources of electromagnetic radiation such as high-voltage lines, electrical machines, complex electrical environments, visual display terminals, or radar units were not associated with uveal melanoma.

    The reason people "attack" cell phones is that they use high-energy microwaves to carry their information (the same waves you use to cook food). I don't know about you, but that in itself is enough to set off warning bells in my head. Additionally, widespread cellular use has just caught on. We won't really know about the effects for at least another 10-20 years when suitable longitudinal epidemiological studies will have been done. Conversely, people have been using monitors for a while now....

  • They found a correlation. That's not the same as cause-and-effect.

    I know this is a bit off-topic, but I'd like to stress this point. Many many things could be proven argumenting with a correlation and many people (also in high official positions) would believe them. It gets worse when so-called "scientists" start believing it too. (Note, I'm not saying this researcher has, as tbo pointed out.)

    The best example in our math class was that ice cream should be banned because it causes a major increase in drownings. It's a fact that there is a clear correlation: significantly more drownings occur in those months of a year when most ice cream is sold. (Especially true in climates where winter is cold.)

    That, of course, doesn't make it cause-and-effect...

  • Weak methodology (Score:5)

    by catseye_95051 ( 102231 ) on Sunday January 14, 2001 @01:39PM (#507896)
    According to the abstract the conclusions are based on intreviews with volunteers (self-selection being one confounding factor). The only source of informatiuon is the interview script, making it likely that many other corrolations were missed in questions unasked.
    No mention was made about conmtrolling for even such obvious effects as family medical history

    The "control" is an interpretation control but not a test grou pcontrol. Given that herte is no control on the writing of the questions, control on the interpetation of the results is of minimal value.

    In short, this looks like very very very BAD science.

  • Having a cell phone is a no win proposition: you either talk on it, in which case it is jammed up against your brain (and now, apparantly, gives you eye cancer, too). Or you don't talk on, and leave it your belt clip. Right next to your reproductive organs.

    On second thought, never mind, it's an easy choice. I'll go for the three headed babies.

  • As for increasing growth rate of melanocytes, this is hardly surprising. Melanocytes reproduce and produce pigment in response to electromagnetic radiation (this is how you tan). It would have to be shown that melanocytes reproduce at an unusually high rate when exposed to microwaves (of the levels emitted by cell phones), as compared with the reproduction rate from exposure to sunlight. In short, until someone shows that melanocytes react more strongly to cell-phone level radiation than to sunlight, this is a straw man.

    ...

    Good for him. It sounds like he's a responsible scientist who's found a correlation worthy of further increase. He also has at least the beginnings of a mechanism to explain the correlation. Unfortunately, the Sunday Times has done the usual media thing, and overreacted. One study does not a fact make.

    Regarding your first point, are you saying that melanocytes in the eye produce pigment (resulting in tanning) due to sunlight? If so, it's untrue: people have the same eye colour with or without lots of sunlight; uvea do not tan.

    Regarding your second point, the Sunday Times was just reporting the study (in layman's terms) as it appeared in Epidemology. There's nothing wrong with this. The study presents EVIDENCE for a link. No more; no less. The Slashdot story, the Sunday Times, and the article in Epidemology made this clear.

    Sara Chan (story submitter)

    _____________________________
    "To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be." --Anna Louise Strong

  • You have to realize that before this was published in "some limey tabloid", it was published in Epidemeology, which is a quite reputable scientific journal. We should never take any of these studies as "truth" - in fact, no amount of scientific studies can ever prove something as true. They only offer more or less correlation between two things. The study offers a possible correlation between microwave radiation and cancer - that's all. It warrants further investigation.

    -Karl
    ----------
    [root@kgutwin /dos]# file msdos.sys

  • MOBILE phones have been linked to human cancer in a scientific study for the first time

    This is not the first time. I've read about several studies that have linked mobile phones to cancer before. None of the results of those studies, however, have been found to be reproducible, and were thought perhaps to result from conditions in specific labs, background radiation etc etc.

    Unfortunately I have no references and I'm too lazy to dig some up, so my post is equally meaningless. I do remember reading about these things though.

    This guy's results also remain to be verified.

  • There's one of those antennas on the top of the 17 floor building I live in. I asked a friend of mine who is doing a Phd. on something to do with cell phones about it once and he said that right below the antenna the radiation is very small. But that's under it, I wouldn't be happy if they put an antenna like that on the same height as my appartment closeby though.

  • Voodoo Science (Score:3)

    by bcrowell ( 177657 ) on Sunday January 14, 2001 @02:03PM (#507915) Homepage
    If you want to free your mind from this kind of voodoo science, you should read Robert Park's book, called -- you guessed it! -- Voodoo Science. This ridiculous stuff about nonionizing radiation causing cancer has been kicking around for years. Every half-baked, poorly designed study showing a weak correlation has been followed by a careful, well-designed one showing the correlation doesn't exist. But you can guess which version gets all the press and which one is ignored by the media. You can check out The Assayer [theassayer.org] for my own entertaining and highly insightful review ;-) of this wonderful book.


    The Assayer [theassayer.org] - free-information book reviews

  • Nah, when it's next to your head it's probably an inch away from brain cells, through some skull and skin. In your pocket or on your hip it's only adjacent to your hip bone. It's usually (at least for me) at least 5-6 inches away from my family jewels. At that distance, thanks to inverse square, microwave exposure is tiny. I might end up with hip-cancer, but that sounds kinda unlikely... hip tissue isn't particularly microwave susceptible, I would imagine.
  • I've always wondered why America was so much behind Japan and Europe when it comes to cell phones. Dammit, I know now.
  • There have been endless studies of exposure to non-ionizing radiation, and the fact is that there has never been a confirmend mechanism or result that has held up with time that any such radiation causes cancer.

    A sample size of 118 positives and 475 negatives, along with speculation of a mechanism which itself may not actually be proven, and is only one involving growth rate, not initiation hardly looks to me to outwegh all the previous work in this field.

  • This never happened with ham radios (Score:4)

    by Chuck Flynn ( 265247 ) on Sunday January 14, 2001 @12:11PM (#507921)
    In all the years that we communicated with ham radio instead of cellphones, not one study showed that anyone was getting cancer from radio spectra. Part of that might have to do with the weaker-energy radio waves (longer wavelengths) and the positioning of antennas relative to the body, but we'll never know, now that cellphones have supplanted ham radios (and at much greater cost).

    Ham radio has to adapt now. We have to get rid of all those stupid restrictions like morse-code tests for liscenses. Anyone can buy and operate a cellphone without a liscense. The same should be true for ham radios.

  • Re:It still won't make much difference... (Score:5)

    by patreides ( 210724 ) on Sunday January 14, 2001 @12:11PM (#507922)
    It's true of cigarettes...

  • So your main points are...

    • people are not yet keeling over dead
    • millions have been using them for 5 ish years
    • maybe they cause sloooow death
    • maybe light bulbs etc. cause slooow death
    • people aren't suing light bulb makers
    • cars involve lots of deaths
    • people aren't suing car makers
    • anything has risks
    • don't deprive ourselves of useful tech, 'just in case'
    • it's just people looking to blame their illness on someone

    Well, that's a lot of loosely strung together points. Are you a woman? No, seriously, you have to use a lot of intuition to make connections between all those points and still call it an argument.

    I think it's a valuable insight that there are some people who Just Want To Blame. And these JWTBs will try to get in the way of cell phones, GM, smoking... hell, even the internet (my son shot another boy because he read it on the internet etc.)

    So these JWTBs go round trying to 'protect' everyone. Because everyone is a 'victim' And as you say, we should hold ourselves as adults, and be responsable (ie. choose for ourselves).

    But, in order to make that choice, we need good data. We need information. Do I start smoking for the pleasure of it, or is nicotine sufficiently addictive that I will experience more discomfort than pleasure when I want to stop? Do I use a cell phone for the convenience, or will it increase my risk of getting cancer (remembering that one in three die of cancer anyway... will a cell phone dramatically increse that risk?)

    I think the argument that people are just not dying fast enough is not valid. Sorry, but your logic is silly. And I spend a lot of time being silly, so believe me, I know silly.

    Just because we tolerate x thousand road deaths does not mean anything causing less than x thousand deaths is ok.

    Just because light bulbs might cause harm (people falling off chairs when changing them?), and we accept light bulbs, does not mean we accept any possible hard to detect harm from everything else.

    In talking statistics, we can make chances sound real small. But for the one in a million person who gets that fatal condition, it will kill them.

    Also, we could be in the business of cleaning up this planet. Try hoarding all the garbage you would throw out in a year. Now multiply that by 50. And again by 500 million. It's all going somewhere.

    Cell phones are just another suspect technology because we have wised up to the fact that most of our technologies involve harmful environmental side effects.

    People are taught in school (at least I was) that different types of radiation have different effects, some linked to cancer. Now cell phones emit radiation, and I for one don't know what effect that type of radiation will have. I would like to know. I would like it to be studied a lot.

    Now I suspect that the tobacco companies don't try to prove that nicotine is 'highly addictive'. And I suspect that scientists are a conservative bunch -- 'false' until proven 'true'. And I suspect that politicians will seek to pacify the public and protect the industries -- insert picture of politician feeding burger to daughter here. And I suspect that the environment is treated like some magical tardis where you can dump things and they will 'just dissapear'. Witness latest debate about whether it's 'safe' to eat tinned salmon.

    So the JWTBs seem to target every new technology. But guess what? A lot of our technologies "don't work" -- cars turn a small mistake into a 26 car pile up, television entertains you while your mind and body rots, food packaging preserves the food a few weeks and the packet forever -- I mean, I don't want to be a bleeding heart, but we could all add to this list... is it any surprise that some people worry about mobile phone radiation?

    We are just beginning to ask questions about what the real extent of pollution in the environment is. And in that light, all these 'hard to detect little risks that are a part fo life' may just all add up and wipe our 'responsable' little asses off the planet. We need more research into these things. Not just ignore it as part of 'life is risky'.

    So yes, the JWTBs are a sad lot. But they are also going to be a very busy lot.

  • Well, people may have been smoking tobacco forever, but perhaps it's just recently that the average life span has been long enough to observe these effects. Or perhaps our medical technology has only recently been advanced enough to determine the correlation between tobacco smoking and cancer, for whatever reason. Basically, there could be *many* reasons why we're diagnosing cancer more often now, even though the actual cancer rates amongst smokers may NOT be increasing.

    This is much like my argument against people claiming that natural disasters, war, et al, are more common these days. IMO, it's simply because now, we have an advanced enough communication system to be able to inform the rest of the world about these events the minute they happen. So, it's not that these events are happening more frequently. It's just that our technology is advanced enough to allow us to find out about these events when they happen.

  • Actually, most modern microwaves are 900-1500 watts, all of which is directed toward the contents of the oven. Compare with your average digital phone, which transmits with 1-2 watts, dispersed in all directions.
  • I agree with this but don't you think that the people carrying out the research thought about it ? The research was done by reputable scientists, I know that doesn't mean that they don't make mistakes but it would surprise me if they overlook stuff like that.

    Reputable scientists, like all people, make mistakes. Doing this kind of research and taking into account every variable is almost impossible. All he claimed was there was a correlation, not a cause-and-effect relationship.

  • From what I was able to extract from the abstract, they have a 95% confidence level requirement, and they checked a variety of possible causes:

    'Other sources of electromagnetic radiation such as high-voltage lines, electrical machines, complex electrical environments, visual display terminals, or radar units were not associated with uveal melanoma.'
    So, they checked at least half a dozen different possible factors. Each time they sliced the data a different way, and only once did they get a probability less than 1/20. Naively, you would expect them to get this result about one time in three if there is no real effect. It wouldn't surprise me if there are two other studies, testing other sets of patients or other random diseases, that found no correlation and did not get into the tabloids.

    It is a simple example of lunchmeat statistics-- No matter how you slice it, it's still baloney.

  • Law suits top concern? (Score:3)

    by hguthrey ( 61908 ) on Sunday January 14, 2001 @01:33PM (#507939)
    If confirmed by subsequent research, the finding could lead tothousands of costly lawsuits by people with eye and possibly brain cancers.

    Does anyone else find it somewhat disconcerting that the biggest fear this report seems to raise is that of law suits? Wouldn't it be better if this research led to the study of safer cell phone technology, rather than act as an excuse for "short-sighted" freeloaders to jump on a band wagon and sue their favorite cell phone company?

    I would expect this sort of mentality from some parts of the world, but surely The Times would be above this?

  • The Sunday Times (Score:3)

    by chazR ( 41002 ) on Sunday January 14, 2001 @03:03PM (#507943) Homepage
    My source for this is the Wall Street Journal (although not perfect, probably more reliable than the Sunday Times).

    As a Brit, I tried to work myself into a state of righteous indignation over that statement. Then I realised that you're right.
    There was an era, in the dim, distant past, when The Times was the 'newspaper of record', and The Sunday Times was the paper that did serious, well researched investigative journalism. Then, Rupert Murdoch happened.

    It is a sad fact that more .uk people buy the (Murdoch owned) paper called "The Sun" than buy a newspaper. The Sun isn't a newspaper. It is a daily rag based on the (very profitable) concept that a lot of people with 35p (==$0.5) are happy to spend that on a paper that has headlines like "Phwooarrr! Look at the tits on that!!!". Page 3 of The Sun (Every day) has a topless photograph of a young woman (aged 17-20).

    It is very hard to gain the moral high ground about *anything* when you live in a country where the highest-selliing daily paper is largely filled with young women's breasts, and salacious, inaccurate and often inflammatory stories about sexual misdemanours of priests.

    To summarise for US citizens: Our biggest-selling daily paper is a supermarket tabloid, with tits in. It's published by an Australian gangster.
    Ye Gods. We *deserved* to lose our Empire.
  • I'd say the effects of cellphone radiation reach at least as far as the cellphone tower. Wouldn't you say? :)

  • Second-hand radiation not a threat (Score:5)

    by tbo ( 35008 ) on Sunday January 14, 2001 @12:17PM (#507945) Journal
    Second-hand cell-phone radiation is not a threat, due to the inverse-square law. The cell phone is 5 cm (2") from the user's head, whereas it's probably at least a metre (3'3") from your head. That means you recieve about one quarter of one percent of the radiation the user does. Hardly significant.
  • You're absolutely right.

    As far as I know the reason why certain types of radiation cause cancer is that they ionize molecules in the cells of the human tissue. The energy carried by microwave quanta, however, is not high enough to cause ionization of the atoms and molecules in a human cell and that's why I've always been sceptical of a direct connection between cell phone use and cancer.

    The microwave radiation does, however, excite molecular rotations which increases the temperature of the tissue slightly, but then again the intensity of the cell phone radiation is so small that the temperature increase is negligible (less than the natural temperature variation in a human body).

  • In the next month or two, the following will probably come out:
    6 articles saying "I told you so."
    5 articles claiming this study was flawed.
    4 studies claiming that cell phones are harmless.
    3 studies claiming that this study is accurate.
    2 major cell phone companies releasing statements to the effect that their products are safe.
    1 person trying to sue a cell phone maker for assumed dammages.
  • "
    Actually, most modern microwaves are 900-1500 watts, all of which is directed toward the contents of the oven. Compare
    with your average digital phone, which transmits with 1-2 watts, dispersed in all directions.
    "

    I've seen people make 1-2 hour cellphone calls. Dividing by 1000 [power ratio of microwave to cellphone] that gives up to 7 seconds of your head in the microwave on a regular basis.

    Volunteers to test this?

  • The essence of the difference is that light travels at a constant (damn fast) velocity in a straight line, while smoke diffuses through a volume.

    You blow a puff of smoke. For the sake of argument, we'll assume there is a discrete "smoke front", and that, inside this, the smoke is evenly distributed. When the smoke occupies a sphere of radius 1, we'll say the concentration of smoke within the sphere is 1. When it occupies a sphere of radius 2, the concentration has dropped to 1/8.

    You emit a pulse of radiation. When it reaches a distance of 1, the power is 1. When it reaches a distance of 2, the power is 1/4.

    If you have people smoking in a poorly-ventilated room, the level of smoke exposure is nearly constant, no matter where in the room you are. The same is not true of cell-phone radiation, unless the walls are perfectly reflective of the radiation (not gonna happen).

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