One of the Worst News Reports I’ve Seen on Cell Phones and Cancer
August 18th, 2009
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There are a lot of news reports out there that sensationalize and mislead over the whole issue of cell phone and rf radiation and the claims of a link to cancer. There have been many studies done on this topic, including some of the most enormous and extensive in history and the data doesn’t indicate any increase in risk of anything due to exposure to non-ionizing radiation at the levels produced by consumer devices. This isn’t actually surprising at all, since no mechanism by which RF radiation could cause cancer has ever been shown to exist.
Based on over seventy five years of scientific data, we are about as certain as science ever gets that the only effects worth worrying about from UHF and microwave radiation are thermal in nature. Dialectic heating can cause severe tissue damage, and if extensive enough, can produce long term effects. However, this effect is negligible at the levels one would be exposed to from a cellular tower or handset. Current safety standards are orders of magnitude bellow the levels at which any health effect at all is observed.
And yes, microwave ovens do use the same kind of radiation to cook your food as cell phones and wifi use. That’s no reason to fear them. If the radiation were powerful enough it would do to you exactly what it does to food: heat it. It’s not nearly powerful enough to do this to any significant extent. Microwave ovens are related to cell phone radiation in the same way that convection ovens are related to a warm summer breeze.
Yet, you would not believe it from a report like this one, which aired in Australian…
Now that I’ve picked my jaw up off the floor, I wonder how these doctors can sleep at night. They really ought to be ashamed of themselves. I can only hope that they are ignorant enough of the effects of electromagnetic radiation to actually think this credible, because the alternative is that they are just lying outright. When facing an illness like brain cancer, nobody should put their life in the hands of a dishonest and attention-seeking practitioner.
The fact of the matter is people get cancer. In most cases, demanding a cause is an exercise in futility. It happens. It happens more often to older people but it happens to young people too. You could develop cancer and die and so could I. In fact, I might have a tiny tumor somewhere that is festering and will kill me. It’s unlikely, but it happens. The cause could be genetic or it could be caused by an oxygen free radical or a rogue cosmic ray or a random copy error during a cell division. The fact that something like cancer can kill you, for no apparent reason, is part of life. We’re all mortal and something will eventually kill you.
This misinformation and the outright exploitation of this man and his family is reprehensible, disgraceful and inhuman. The man has a terminal disease and he should not be made to live out his final days lamenting his life and kicking himself for using that phone. His last thoughts should not be that his condition and all the pain and suffering it caused himself and his family was his own fault. His family should not have to live believing that he could still be with them if only they had known about the dangers. His loved ones should not spend their lives believing his life was taken by cell phone use and fearing it themselves.
But he has been mislead and thus an already painful time at the twilight of his life is made worse.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 3:48 am and is filed under Bad Science, Misc, Quackery, inverse square. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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August 18th, 2009 at 5:52 am
Horrible. Just horrible. Absolutely reprehensible.
I should hope that a cancer doctor would have some knowledge of radiation and the effects on the body and a good understanding of what the hell gamma radiation is and the fact that it is different than other kinds of radiation.
Then on top of this, you hear this bastard talking about how he had a bunch of kids in with cancerous tumors. This is the ass writing a study? A damn study? He doesn’t seem to even get the fact that you don’t draw conclusions based on one person’s anecdotes. You’d have to look at the bigger picture and figure out the statistical anomaly (if there was one). It’s not good enough to say “Well, I’ve seen a real lot of cancer recently.” If he is involved in a clinical study then he should know that.
A doctor may have some level of being professional, but there is also a part of being a physician which involves having general compassion and respect for the feelings and suffering of your patients and value for their lives. Here you have a doctor who is going to use a patient to advance his own bull**** and get attention and this is the same man who is going to be cutting into this guy’s brain?!?!?
If your life and wellbeing honestly matters so little to a doctor that he won’t even be honest with you and he will throw away ethics like that, how can you ever know that during critical surgury he won’t cut a corner out of laziness, because obviously the whole thing about medical ethics as the caregiver means jack-**** to this guy.
By the way, I’m not a doctor, so correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t the course of treatment for a brain tumor like this targeted gamma beam therapy? Maybe combined with surgery, but if it is a single tumor, I don’t know how the doctor can give up hope and say everyone dies from this. The success rate in treating brain cancer with radiation keeps going up and up. Maybe it is late stage, but still, even if its a long shot, this poor man has no hope and it must feel so helpless to be given no options for treatment.
This is making me feel sick to my stomach.
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August 18th, 2009 at 10:26 am
On behalf of Australia, I officially apologize for our dreadful media. And while I am at it, I apologize for Rupert Murdoch too.
This seems to be the topic of the month, as only a few weeks back, Channel 7 ran a report much the same on their “current affairs” program, Today Tonight (which has about as much journalistic integrity as a soggy cardboard box has structural integrity).
I am amazed that these media outlets are able to air such bollocks on an almost constant basis.
I am no longer allowed to watch the TV, as coming from a background working with telecommunications equipment, I tend to fly into a rage when I see reports like this.
It is irresponsible fear mongering of the very worst sort.
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August 18th, 2009 at 10:39 am
Most of this is wild ass ideas , speculations…No facts.
and the talking head stated a flat out lie!!!
The cellphone and the microwave oven are NOT the same radiation.
OK you could state that low freq radio is the same as high energy radar because they are electromagnetic.
but the frequencies and energy levels are VERY different.
Did my kids spend 4 hrs a day talking to lame idiots with nothing to do all day?
Yep, just as soon as they got a job to pay for their own phone. Then they found they were too busy to use the silly things. And you can probably guess that I don’t use one.
But let’s assume that they are right, well everything has a cost/hazard/convenience price that must be considered-cars-planes-power tools-drug effect-etc. Then if you must use the cell then get a head set or bluetooth. Ibuprofen is good-guess what happens if you take 2 doses very 15min for your arthritis over a period of years??? ask your doctor. EVERYTHING has a cost! deal!
But guess what? He’s going to die ANYWAY!!!! This modern tech that he and others want to blame for their problems is what has allowed him to live this long. 300yrs ago he’d be dead 5 years ago.
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August 18th, 2009 at 11:24 am
“Malignant brain tumors. The kind that leaves no survivors”
What a load of croc!! Brain tumors have a good survival rate because they are often discovered in time to fix them. Any uncontrolled growth in the brain shows up really quick as symptoms you can’t ignore.
Anyway… it took less than two minutes of Google to find a bit of info about Charles Teo. We can start with his Wikipedia page. Turns out he is already a controversial character, even before this claim:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Teo
On a hunch, I included another well known name in the search, and bingo, I was right: one of the co-authors of this study was indeed our good old friend Lennart Hardell, the swedish champion of false cancer alerts and an ardent hater of mobile phones.
http://weeksmd.com/?p=1758
/Michael
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August 18th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
The Curtains said:
No need to apologize. I certainly do not mean to single out Australia on this. One of the most damaging and panic-producing programs on this topic was “Panorama” on the BBC. It was an entire documentary-style program on this and completely full of BS. It got a lot of attention. I’ve also seen horrible reports in the US, including one which recommended using a pendant to cancel out the waves. The Canadian CBC has also reported on this in a slanted and sensational manner.
The US program 60 Minutes has a track record of very bad and sensational science stories and despite this it is a well known and ‘respected’ news program.
Needless to say, the Swedes, Germans, Dutch and Swiss have contributed plenty of BS on this topic as well.
This problem is not Australian. It is international, if not global.
This program, however, I posted, because it is especially bad in how it exploits this cancer patient and how one-sided and completely wrong it is. But other countries produce that kind of reporting too.
Sweden gave us Lennart Hardell.
The UK gave us Andrew Wakefield.
Canada gave us Rosalie Bertell.
The US gave us Doug Roke, Harvey Wasserman, George Carlo.
Australia gave us Helen Caldicott.
It would seem to me that assclownery knows no nationality.
Michael Karnerfors said:
Hardell. I should have known.
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August 18th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
CybrgnX said:
Well, they’re pretty similar. I mean, you could say that they’re roughly the same in terms of the biological effects. Cell phones operate on a couple of frequency bands, up to 1.8-1.9 ghz, depending on the system. Wifi operates at 2.4 ghz and in some countries there are mobile services that have data systems in the 2-3 ghz range, which is also where some Wimax systems operate. Of course, some cell phone systems operate at 800-900 mhz, especially the 2G ones and voice traffic on 3G
A microwave oven operates at around 2-2.5 ghz. Both cell phones and microwave ovens could be said to operate in the “low microwave” region of the spectrum.
Of course, they’re not comparable at all in terms of radiative pattern or power.
Both microwave ovens and
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August 18th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
As Buzz0 says, cancer happens and it is usually not something you can attribute to a cause. Free radicals, cell aging, genetics. It is often just random and it happens to some people who lead perfectly healthy lives. If a person smokes for much of their life and gets lung cancer, then you could say that is most probably the cause, but with most forms of cancer there isn’t that kind of direct cause-effect kind of relationship you can see.
People seem desperate to explain why it happened or find a cause. “Why me?” “What did I do?”
I think that is why cancer seems to draw so much BS in this area. It is a control thing. People don’t like to feel that they had no control over something and that it happened for no reason other than the luck of the draw. They want to blame someone or something or at least feel like their destiny is somehow in their own hands.
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August 18th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
I’ve seen some discussion about teaching statistics instead of calculus in K-12 and there’s certainly some merit to it; although I’d much rather cut some of the crap and teach both.
The most basic insight people need is that if your test of statistical significance is to the 95% level, out of a 1000 studies on cellphones you’d expect to find around 50 of them with a positive correlation between use and brain cancer and around 50 of them with a negative correlation between use and brain cancer even if there is no correlation at all.
You must also be very careful with reporting bias; if studies that show negative correlation or no statistically significant correlation are less likely to get published than studies that show a positive correlation do get published it will over time build up to show a small statistically significant cancer causing effect when you do a meta study on all available studies, even if there is no actual correlation.
When it comes to hypothesized effects that are as weak as the proposed correlation between microwaves and brain cancer a single study just cannot turn over the result of 1000 prior studies.
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August 19th, 2009 at 2:22 am
Soylent said:
That might be worth it, although it really depends a lot on how it is taught. I have some good and some bad things to say about the way math was taught when I was in high school. I actually disliked math quite a bit as a subject, which almost caused me an identity crisis because I loved logic, science and stuff. The problem was it was taught in a very dry manner and in units that were unrelated to each other and lacked any greater relevance.
Most of the math courses consisted of doing a lot of dittos and equations out of a book to arrive at the answer. It turned the whole thing into “busy work” that you just wanted to complete. Not very much thought in terms of actually figuring anything out. You memorized the equation and plugged in the numbers to get the answer.
Anyway, I had the good luck of having a couple of teachers who actually broke that pattern and instead of giving out the equations actually lead us into figuring them out and then applying them and seeing the significance and how they all relate.
Statistics is the kind of thing that you’ll only get people to hate if you teach it that way.
I don’t recall any statistics being taught in any math courses. It was taught in physics class. Lab reports included a number of measurements with the standard deviation and the variance and everything calculated. Of course, the physics department had nothing to do with the math department.
Really though, I’m not a fan of teaching math using courses like “Geometry” and “Algebra” and “Statistics.” I prefer the method where you have “math 1″ and “math 2″ and so on, where the yearly courses all teach all of the stuff together. They’re not seperate things that exist alone. When you do geometry, you need algebra to calculate the dimensions of figures and when you take algebra functions and apply them graphically, then you have geometry. I’d prefer to have a greater deal of unity between the aspects of it and not spend one year doing one thing and then another year doing something else.
Dare I say “Holistic?”
Soylent said:
I’m not aware of any studies that found a statistically significant increase (or decrease) in cancer rates that was not found to have a fundamental flaw in it. Either a complete lack of a control group or a group that is too small to really get a descent statistical model out of or using irrelevant observations. In some cases it’s just plain lies. I’ve seen some studies which claimed to have found a higher rate, but when you look at them, it’s actually within the error bars.
Maybe I’m missing something, but if there is even one single solitary study that is of reasonably large scope, has reasonably good controls and stands up to scrutiny of the methodology and shows a significant increase in cancer rates, I’d lo
Soylent said:
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If I were ever in charge of a study and found a correlation between microwave radiation and any health effects, or for that matter, a reduction in anything, I’d be very surprised, even to the point of being skeptical of the results. I’d be very apprehensive to publish it without triple-checking everything and then checking it again.
My first thought would be “Oh no, we must have missed something in the control selection.” Perhaps people who talk more on phones end up being higher income and thus having better health in general. Are we sure we accounted for the demographics in this aspect? What about occupation? Could we have unwittingly introduced a bias into one of the groups in this respect.
Having come up with a result that was in direct opposition to so many others and so far from what theory predicts, I’d feel compelled to go everything with a fine toothed comb and if I didn’t find a flaw, I’d ask a colleague to go over everything with a fine toothed comb and look for something I missed. Then I might get a third opinion.
If all of that turned out to show the methodology as valid, then I’d publish it, but I’d also insert a very blunt statement in the introduction that the data was very different from what we had expected, that we were at a loss for an explanation for it and that we felt that the results needed further validation.
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August 19th, 2009 at 5:14 am
I literally laughed out loud when I heard the neurosurgeon complain about seeing so many cases of malignant tumors. What next, undertakers expressing their concerns about “the number of people dying lately”?
These shows are ridiculous and I’m sure there are just as bad international variations. Previous commentors have mentioned shows like Today Tonight, Acurrent Affair, and 60 Minutes itself – these shows seem to work solely on presenting one-sided or at least heavily biased accounts of events or issues or whatever-the-hell-they-want. I imagine that by raising the concerns of ‘the general public’ about these ‘issues’ is great for their ratings. I mean, we all have microwave ovens, and mobile phones, so Oh God what if they’re all killing us!
As an example of Today Tonight and Acurrent Affair’s reporting, they can even base an entire segment of their show just harassing/stalking/annoying a person who has been alleged to commit a crime or who may have done something seen as ‘outrageous’ in the community. Sometimes, that person will be acquitted, and the show will air an update (not an apology) which lasts about 10 seconds.
I’m sure I could find countless examples of this kind of thing on youtube (please dont look, your braincells will thank you!).
60 Minutes likes to present these kind of ‘we could all by dying’ / ‘the sky is falling’ sensationalized stories from time to time (arguably all the time). New flu virus? New technology? Weather suspiciously bad lately? Government do anything even slightly controversial? New flu virus? (better make it a double-length special…)
—
I would also like to say something about education while I’m having a little rant here. I am constantly shocked at how (especially young people – yet I am young person myself, <25) have absolutely no idea about scientific concepts or a basic understanding of the world we live in.
While it has been a few years since I finished high school, if the current system is even remotely like it was when I was a student there, we could do alot better (I’m sure I will cop some flak for my horrible English after posting this!) in regards to ‘compulsory’ science education. Teach the inverse-square law at least!
Even though I’m surrounded by the next generation of scientists at my university I am still surprised about the amount of ridiculous things I hear – most of which have been discussed on this site (I’ve read through about 96 pages of this blog and have noticed many recurring topics
). For example, RF radiation, nuclear radiation, all kinds of new-age / eco-stupid things, all of which I like to think my peers should be able to see right through. Sadly this is not the case! Unfortunately in my family the situation is especially bad, no matter how much I try to explain things. One will spend $250 on a clairvoyant session, another will declare a 5 meter no-go zone around the microwave-death-oven-machine while it is running, and certainly all of them [i]think a chemist is a pharmacist[/i]. Also its apparently safe to shower during thunderstorms if you’re standing on a rubber bath mat. *Face palm*
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August 19th, 2009 at 9:33 am
Google Translate keep surprising me with its accuracy with some languages, including Swedish (German however… eeew). Here are two articles auto-translated by Google about Hardell and the criticism he has faced.
Svenska Dagbladet – Alarm reports can not be substantiated
Svenska Dagbladet – Lennart Hardell Swedish champion in cancer alert
/Michael
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August 19th, 2009 at 11:21 am
DrBuzz0:
You are correct and me wrong. I was thing of the 20GHz where water is resonant and heats very quickly. I was in high power radar and had a couple of guys get their low hanging equipment sterilized because they did not know it was ON.
The power levels are different but then so is the distance from the brain. Unless you use the microwave to dry your hair ;-}.
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August 20th, 2009 at 12:32 am
CybrgnX said:
I believe the primary reason for choosing the low to mid S-band (~2.5 ghz) is that it’s a fairly good compromise between effeciency in heating and penetration power. The frequency has to be low enough so that food items don’t always end up hot on the outside and still cold on the inside. Of course, that sometimes happens anyway with dense foods, but it’s not really an issue of water resonance. The 2ghz range heats things well and can penetrate a chunk of meat or a TV dinner relatively well.
CybrgnX said:
Geez…
I’ve heard some horror stories about RF injuries occurring to the guys who manned the DEW line way the hell up in the arctic circle, or other northerly radar stations like at Thul. In the extreme cold they figured out that if they temporarily stopped the radar and pointed the beam down they could stand in front of the dish and it would make them feel nice and warm.
What they did not realize is that the receptors to heat tend to be on the outside of the body and the microwaves could penetrate and heat up the water inside cells, getting the deeper tissues hot enough to cause damage before they could feel the sensation of discomfort. The worst injuries were to the eyes, because the eyeball does not have nerve receptors to heat and it is full of fluid – perfect medium for the microwaves to heat up.
I will try to find a citation of that. I heard it a long while back.
CybrgnX said:
Well, not only distance. In the case of a microwave oven, it’s shielded with a mesh over the viewing window. This keeps the microwaves in and also can reflect stray energy back into the food to improve effeciency.
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August 24th, 2009 at 4:43 am
I believe I have seen a Youtube video where four kids put their cellphones together and get them going and produce enough heat to pop popcorn. I would not like my brain to be in the place of the popcorn, would you? Really there is so much absolute common non-sense spouted by both sides – you included.
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August 24th, 2009 at 4:50 am
Paul said:
What you saw was a viral ad for Cardo Systems bluetooth headsets.
http://gizmodo.com/5015932/cellphone-popcorn-video-is-viral-marketing-for-bluetooth-headset
The phones did not pop the corn… it was noting but simple video manipulation anyone can do in programs like Adobe AfterEffects. What they did was simply to drop poped corn onto the unpopped ones. They maske dout the fall, and as soon as the corn hit the table, they removed the onpopped corn and left the poppe dones in the frame. Any hack with a video manipulation program can do it.
Cardo has since they were criticized for the fact that what they did was a complete fabrication that frightened people for no good reason other than to make money pulled the ad.
/Michael
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August 24th, 2009 at 5:41 am
Paul said:
Personally I WOULD like my brain to be in place of the popcorn – because I would be benefiting from the convenience of using the phone – and because the video you refer to is just one of several which are all fake or misleading. It is all explained here: http://www.snopes.com/science/cookegg.asp
Specifically, the video you refer to was made by a wireless headset manufacturer called Cardo Systems – they used to have an article on their website which explained how the video was fake and why they made it (which seems to now be removed or lost). They still have a link to a youtube video explaining it but you have to be on their youtube friends list to see it. Fortunately other people copied the video and you can still see it: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cardo+systems+popcorn&search_type=&aq=f
Sadly, I first saw this viral video in a chain email sent between hundreds of freaking-out office workers and soccer mums who probably immediately locked there mobile phones away in the nearest lead shielded vault. (/sarcasm)
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August 24th, 2009 at 10:51 am
Paul said:
I never bothered making a post about that video because I figured that everyone already knew it was fake. I figured most people probably realized that as soon as they saw it and anyone else has since learned that the cat is out of the bag. I mean it’s just so ridiculous, why bother debunking something so thouroughly debunked?
I guess I was wrong. People are still suckered by it.
There are two basic ways one could make a video like that (and there have been copycat videos). One is to take a microwave magnetron and use that to heat the popcorn by placing it under the table or out of the camera’s field of view. The other is to use simple digital editing effects. Apparently the original video was digitally edited (which is the safer way of doing it)
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August 24th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
I’m a physicist and I’ve just written a blog about cell phone and microwave oven radiation. Please check it out and draw your own conclusions:
http://intensive-purposes.blogspot.com/2009/08/will-microwave-radiation-give-you_19.html
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