This is a better study than previous ones, in that it used "environmental" levels of radiation, rather than blasting subjects with an amount of radiation equivalent to laying your head on top of a cell tower for 22 hours a day.
However: out of 817 individuals in the control group, 2 had benign tumors, 2 had malignant tumors, 1 had glial cell hyperplasia, and 2 had malignant glial tumors. Out of 409 individuals in the highest-dosed group, 4 had benign tumors, 0 had malignant tumors, 0 had glial cell hyperplasia, and 3 had malignant glial tumors.
Rates are elevated, but given the differences in population sizes and the relatively very small differences in rates involved, this study looks like a very good candidate for the decline effect that's been plaguing similar studies for a while now. (e.g. a regression to the mean; that the effect numbers, being small, would disappear in subsequent studies.)
Any potential link between cell phones, or wifi, and cancer, still has the fundamental problem that we should have seen cancer rates rise dramatically over the last 15 years in populations all over the world, and ... we haven't. While there have been more and more findings on other causes for cancer (and preventable mortality, like heart disease), glial cancers aren't increasing in any manner suggestive of a link to ubiquitous environmental microwave radiation.
Right. We already did this experiment, as a society. In the old analog days, people were beaming an actual watt straight into their heads, Bluetooth still being a decade in the future. Now the max is something like an eighth of that (.125 watts), and the towers are much closer so the actual power involved is probably another order of magnitude lower. You would have seen a spike in brain cancer and then a drop, and it would be obvious.
Jacquesm has it right, just an ordinary radio. There was a reason the brick-sized Motorola DynaTAC had only a 30 minute talk time, and it wasn't that the battery was small. Thus the popularity of the carphone, as noted elsewhere. It's hard to get a straight up comparison of transmission strength, because it's highly dependent on how close you are to the tower, but even if you assume max power all the time, it's about an order of magnitude less on digital.
The numbers I can find on Google are the classic Motorola 8000X "Brick phone" (AMPS technology) transmitted at up to 1.5W when handheld, and a modern LTE phone transmits at up to 0.2W.
According to this[1] LTE macrocells range from 20-69W "at the antenna connector." When they operate at the high end of that range, however, they're serving wide, sparely populated areas from atop large towers; you can't usually operate that much power where cell density is high.
And the GP is correct; both the e-field strengths and the exposure intervals in this study are far beyond what people actually experience.
Huh? The ambient e-field is about 50-300 V/m, depending on <all conditions> and can be much stronger during a thunderstorm. However, those are essentially static fields.
Hmm. RF power density in free space is a function of V/m: W/m^2 = (V/m)^2 / 377. The constant at the end is the impedance of free space. If you wish to compute the power absorbed by a rat you'd need to know its impedance, or perhaps the impedance of some specific organ.
That's probably a tough thing to calculate in a definitive manner given the number of conceivable variables. And does it add anything to the conclusion? All rats are likely to impede about the same at some frequency, so whatever the answer is it's effectively a constant; one that a rat can't do much about while remaining a conventional rat. Why not simply rely on the easily measured/reproduced V/m and assume that all such rats are experiencing the same power flux?
If I remember correctly, this rammazini institute is also the one place that found a link between cancer and aspartame, when everyone else found no link. Just checked and, yep, it is. It seems from what I've read about their studies that they are just gonna figure out how to say there is a link, even when the evidence is not very good.
Moreover, the journalistic source link tried to make shwannomas seem dangerous, but a quick reading about the tumor via google suggests that the vast majority of shwannomas are non-cancerous or benign.
Well, even if shwannomas are a relatively minor health risk, it would be pretty big news if low-level microwave radiation was causing them.
At present -- as far as I know -- there's no credible hypothetical mechanism by which microwave radiation at those levels can affect human biological tissue in that way. So, if it turns out that it is having that effect after all, then scientists have got a very interesting problem to investigate, and it would make for a much stronger argument in favor of restricting cellular technology just in case it had other health effects we're unaware of.
(I specified human here because it's an important difference. People have much thicker skulls and chest cavities than rodents, so we would expect that we'd need significantly higher doses of radiation to induce the same effects that are being studied in rodents.)
In the United States, the overall cancer death rate has declined since the early 1990s. The most recent SEER Cancer Statistics Review, updated in September 2016, shows that cancer death rates decreased by:
1.8% per year among men from 2004 to 2013
1.4% per year among women from 2004 to 2013
1.4% per year among children ages 0–19 from 2009 to 2013
There are many many causes of cancer. Even if cellphones are a significant source of cancer, any effect would be almost entirely lost in the noise. Demographic change and frequency of smoking alone explain much of the variation in cancer. That doesn't mean other things don't cause cancer.
Also weird that your statistics start in the mid 2000's when cellphones were widely adopted.
Eh, at that level, an actual effect from mobile phones could have been masked by a bigger decrease in some other effect. Besides, cancer diagnosis is often delayed relative to exposure to carcinogens. I'm keeping my tinfoil hat firmly in place, thank you.
Which you're free to do. But you can't cite cancer rates as the cause for your tinfoil hat. (And should perhaps raise the question of what is causing your tinfoil hat?)
Another study spanning 13 countries found some correlation with the highest use cases, but was cautiously worded that the effects may not be causative: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20483835
An Australian study similarly found no increase in brain cancer rates over its 30-year study period: https://theconversation.com/new-study-no-increase-in-brain-c... (sorry, can't get the original source for this one -- had to dig it out of Google from memory).
The CDC has a cool dataviz tool that compiles a bunch of data from 1999 to 2014 (the most recent year for which it's available): https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/USCS/DataViz.html (click on the "Trends" button near the top). The trend line for annual rates for all new cancers for that period is flat; brain cancers are flat too, although thyroid cancers increase over that period at an unsettling rate. The articles I can find on that suggest that some (though maybe not all) of that increase is due to changes in diagnostic techniques, e.g. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/878030
There have been studies with rodents that did find statistically significant increases, but -- as far as I know -- those have all had some pretty serious methodological issues, like unrealistically massive amounts of exposure or not controlling for the tissue temperature increases that can be caused by exposure to powerful microwave radiation.
All of the big human population studies that I know of have found either no correlation at all, or some correlation but at such small numbers that it could also be statistical noise.
If any large studies have found conclusive statistical correlation in humans between cell phones and cancer, I'm not aware of it. (And would like to be.)
edit: which is not to say btw that cell phones aren't dangerous. They kill people every year -- just not with cancer, but by being a distraction while driving. http://www.nsc.org/learn/NSC-Initiatives/Pages/priorities-ce... . "A Deadly Wandering" is also a pretty okay book about this. Multiple studies described in that book found that, with very very rare exception, people could not safely drive and operate a cell phone at the same time, no matter how good they thought they were at multi-tasking. This is my PSA for the day.
A basic issue that I am not clear on regarding statistics - do we say that 400 or 800 is a pretty good size sample, and therefore our results should be accurate and repeatable, or do we say that the control group's cases of cancer (population x incidence) were not several hundred, and therefore a difference of a few cases is obviously meaningless?
My intuition is that if you did the control portion a hundred times, you would not get exactly the same incidence of cancer, but I never took a statistics course.
Maybe I'm reading something wrong but in your image it shows 19 total malignant brain tumors (Meningeal/Glial) across all exposure groups (n=1631) versus 4 across the control group (n=817).
4/817 = .004
19/1631 = .011
Malignant tumors in rats exposed from 5-50 RFR appear to be 2.75x more likely to have some kind of malignant brain cancer than the control group. That hardly seems inconsequential.
I'm not sure you can compare the groups in that way without distorting the answer to the question being asked.
In a previous study, a side-effect was discovered in which the gender of the researchers handling the rodents had some impact on their tumor rates. They have a more acute sense of smell and male hormones induced a higher level of stress which caused a higher rate of tumors.
So, let's suppose that approximately 1 member of each group will develop a tumor for some reason unrelated to the effect being studied.
If you have 5 groups, one control and 4 experiments, then potentially you'll see a 4x effect increase if you lump the experiment groups together.
This would only hold of course if the effect isn't directly proportional to the population size -- if it's proportional to the number of groups instead. So, I dunno, maybe. But I'd be reluctant to draw any conclusions from numbers for "all experimental groups" vs "one control group".
And while the percentages and ratios involved can look conclusive (varying from 0% to 2.2% -- that's an infinite percentage increase!), the effects in absolute numbers are still quite small.
I mean I'm just working with the data as presented. We can and should look for confounding influences - hence why reproducability is so important. However a mean 2.7x rate increase is not trivial if we start thinking about possible epidemiological impacts.
Based on the evidence available right now, I don't think there's a link between cellular technology and cancer. If there was about one more study like this one -- from an overall reputable research outfit, with a good population size -- I'd start to reconsider.
And if another study is done and doesn't find the same effects, then that's still another interesting case of the decline effect. So, either way, it's a win.
I haven’t run the numbers (but I did download the article), but with that low a level of incidence, I’d worry that we are still in the range of Poisson noise.
I just wanted to offer some related story on cancer.
A long time ago I had the experience to join a alternative medicine (TCM : Traditional Chinese Medicine) group relating to cancer. They said human body is an extremely complex, despite our advance in science we still can not fully understand and explain it. Just like how little we know about our brain, and hormones.
We went to a rural village in China, where they are one of the most heavy smokers. Well not really heavy, but like minimum 2 packs per day. Most of them have been smoking for more then 40 years, so this is no small amount of consumption. There were once a study trying to find links between smoking an cancer. They went to this place and discover their age of dying are mostly past 80, and no one had been treated or diagnosed with cancer.
So the results were against the evidence that heavy smoking results in higher rate of cancer of early death. They wrote down Chinese may not subjected to this rule in their report.
Which we know is bogus, Chinese are no different to any other humans, so what make this village so "special". What we then see is their day in day out routine, all of them are farmers, they get up early, they work ( exercises ), they eat very clean, all food and veg are fresh. As well as fish, they smile and sing while they work. And they are all happy being there. After dinner it is early sleep. Along with the unpolluted air, all these is basically a very healthy life style that most people in City or developed countries failed to achieve.
What the leader then said, we dont have a cure for cancer, or we have. But what we offer is something that most of you wont be able to do. Cancer is an reaction of your body that were caused by multiple factors, and mainly and mostly by you, yourself. Your energy and mind dictates many things. Just like there are many many cases where Western medicine or treatment has said you only have maximum 6 months to live while the patients, with their will power were able to go 3 or 5 years more. Your negative energy and stress are your biggest link to cancer. All other factors were mostly there as multipliers. The whole starting point of TCM is that you should try and not get sick in the first place, and in the case you do, instead of trying to kill off whatever symptoms you have, TCM try to tune your body to better accommodate it and hopefully would self repair it.
There were many other details and little story, but I try to keep it short. I know this may be an unpopular thing, and I wouldn't normally have share it. Until I read about Steve Jobs saved Scott Forstall with Acupuncture in the news, then I realise may be not everyone in the west are against TCM.
I was tempted to ignore this comment, because it's off-topic, but I'm not sure that that's a very good way to handle misinformation on important topics, either.
> They went to this place and discover their age of dying are mostly past 80, and no one had been treated or diagnosed with cancer.
Even if I were to believe this story -- and I don't -- there are many confounding factors in cancer and other biological systems. There are other places where residents have been found to live abnormally long (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/italy-acciaroli-s...). There is some evidence that cancer is common but rarely becomes dangerous because of immune responses, which brings along with it all the usual confounding factors related to immune system health (sleep, diet, exercise, and all the other advice that nobody likes following).
But regardless, there are things which reliably and directly cause an increase in cancer risk, and the question here is whether certain amounts of microwave radiation is one of them.
> Until I read about Steve Jobs saved Scott Forstall with Acupuncture in the news, then I realise may be not everyone in the west are against TCM.
Steve Jobs died of a specific form of pancreatic cancer (initially, a neuroendocrine tumor) that is very treatable and could have been removed surgically when it was discovered, before it advanced into the state that eventually killed him. Had he opted for conventional medicine instead of letting his head be filled with nonsense, he'd probably still be alive.
And in the case of Scott Forstall, if he wasn't treated with Acupuncture, all the previous 7 cases that had symptoms exactly the same as his were all died.
>There is some evidence that cancer is common but rarely becomes dangerous because of immune responses, which brings along with it all the usual confounding factors related to immune system health (sleep, diet, exercise, and all the other advice that nobody likes following).
Agree.
Look, I am not saying TCM solves every problem. It is just there are many things that we dont know. And in the cases of SJ, may be he should have gone to remove it surgically.
However: out of 817 individuals in the control group, 2 had benign tumors, 2 had malignant tumors, 1 had glial cell hyperplasia, and 2 had malignant glial tumors. Out of 409 individuals in the highest-dosed group, 4 had benign tumors, 0 had malignant tumors, 0 had glial cell hyperplasia, and 3 had malignant glial tumors.
https://imgur.com/a/VeEUb
Rates are elevated, but given the differences in population sizes and the relatively very small differences in rates involved, this study looks like a very good candidate for the decline effect that's been plaguing similar studies for a while now. (e.g. a regression to the mean; that the effect numbers, being small, would disappear in subsequent studies.)
Any potential link between cell phones, or wifi, and cancer, still has the fundamental problem that we should have seen cancer rates rise dramatically over the last 15 years in populations all over the world, and ... we haven't. While there have been more and more findings on other causes for cancer (and preventable mortality, like heart disease), glial cancers aren't increasing in any manner suggestive of a link to ubiquitous environmental microwave radiation.