Honestly, after a glance at the links, they don't inspire confidence in me either. There are papers about very small changes on very rare types of cancer, measured by proxy on a species where it's common; papers criticizing the critics claiming association with interested parties (what is a perfectly fine thing to claim, but what is it doing in a scientific paper?); and the only wide review I could find claims that the literature has very weak conclusions that are not sufficient to claim any danger.
As usual, it's not the scientists that are wackos, it's the press that is claiming things completely different from what they say. There are proposals for better test equipment that should be taken, but I don't see any other claim for change there.
> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women.
The wildest of the claims anywhere on the linked papers is a ~10% increase on the rate of one of the rarest types of cancer, so this line of research won't give you the answers you are looking for.
The thing that concerns me about millimeter wave tech and 5G is that it seems like a solution looking for a problem. My city just had a wave of poles dropped in a few neighborhoods, and they seem to me to be an expensive boondoggle. IMO, we would be better served by the heavy hand of the FCC allowing fiber providers to run telephone poles and trenches without any accountability (as the wireless carriers can with 5G).
These radio bands have been in military use for a long time. I’m surprised that no health studies have been done or released to the public.
It's not a solution looking for a problem. The problem is that the existing infrastructure does not support network slicing. Without network slicing the telcos are severely limited in their pricing models. "5G" is just them trying to convince consumers that this is for their benefit.
"These radio bands have been in military use for a long time. I’m surprised that no health studies have been done or released to the public."
I wouldn't be. To a good first-order approximation, the military doesn't give a hoot about long term health consequences and wouldn't release any such studies, if any were made, unless they indicated a requirement for the military usage to change.
>allowing fiber providers to run telephone poles and trenches without any accountability (as the wireless carriers can with 5G)
That would definitely invert the value calculations. I work in the industry and there's no question that the savings from 5G are regulatory in nature. Ironic that it's the less regulated tech that has the more questionable health effects.
This comment is utterly false. Just after a brief glance at the paper, I found a study on showing a 2x increase in cancer on a sample size of over 1,000,000 humans.
Agree - there's shouldn't be any place for ad hominem attacks in a scientific paper. To me, this is a strong indicator of bias and/or journalistic incompetence.
Maybe it's initially counter-intiutitve, but the rise in the rate of cancer should be expected as lifespans are increased and deaths from other diseases decline. E.g. every male will get prostrate cancer "if" they live long enough.
I'm amazed at how many people here actually decline to click on the links in the article, which would guide one to a large list of scientific publications, with links to the original publications themselves.
Yet they are very ready to call "more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields" "wackos" or "cranks with a PhD", call their research "bullshit" or "impossible", call the people "thruthers" or claiming "Russian troll farms" are behind this story.
I don't think I've ever seen so much non-scientific HN comments on a science article.
At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really.
> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really.
Plentiful nutrition which has led to 90% of the population of the USA being overweight, obese, or overfat is another potential culprit. Women suffering from anorexia developed fewer tumors. Similar experiments on lab animals in a controlled setting have the same result. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11246846 I believe there are other changing risk factors in behavior as well, for instance women who have never had a child are more likely to develop breast cancer and fertility rates have dropped dramatically over the last 100 years.
Cell phones have only been widely deployed in the last two decades, and I don’t think those trends in cancer rates you’re referencing correlate very well to cellular deployment.
I’d still be curious to see more research happening in the field of millimeter waves, personally I don’t see this technology as very useful right now either compared to traditional cellular due to its lack of penetration.
It's anecdotal, but a friend of mine with cancer switched to a keto diet and he had one tumor shrink, to the point where his doctor said they could (and should) now operate on it.
The large increase in sugar and starch in our diet does contribute to fast growing cancer cells and there are studies that link being overweight/obesity with cancer.
We weren't this fat decades ago. Some may blame more office work, but the biggest factor is the amount of sugar/carbs in our diets. It's grown tremendously and yet no one seems to take it seriously, discrediting things like Adkins/Keto as "fad diets" when they were closer/more consistent with American and Western European diets for several decades.
The article says, "more than 500 studies, have found harmful biologic or health effects from exposure to RFR at intensities too low to cause significant heating." The link to the 500 articles is https://drive.google.com/file/d/19CbWmdGTnnW1iZ9pxlxq1ssAdYl....
Conclusion of 1) Despite the improved exposure assessment approach used in this study, no clear associations were identified. However, the results obtained for recent exposure to RF electric and magnetic fields are suggestive of a potential role in brain tumor promotion/progression and should be further investigated.
Conclusion of 2) Ever use of wireless phones was not significantly associated with risk of adult glioma, but there could be increased risk in long-term users.
They both read as, "we found no significant effect".
Careful, you’re misinterpreting the document. The two studies you’ve picked are listed as “neither evidence of an effect or a null finding”, they are not included in the “more than 500 studies” finding harmful effects. Those studies are prefixed by “P” in the document and, although I haven’t counted, a rough estimate based on the number of pages makes it plausible that there are > 500.
That said, given the scientific consensus from rigorous meta-analyses, I expect that these “positive” studies are mostly of low quality and/or limited sample size. And scepticism is generally warranted when advocates start listing large numbers of studies instead of referring to a few meta-studies. As it happens, the best available meta-studies come to the opposite conclusion (namely, that there’s probably no harm from mobile EMF), so this long list is essentially bogus.
At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why.
Because life expectancy has also risen; people who used to be dying of other things are now living long enough that cancer is more common.
Unfortunately the hunch you have just spendt 30 seconds thinking about is sadly incorrect. The increase in life expectancy doesn't account for the increased incidence of cancers. There are other factors at play, which need to be investigated (some that we know: obesity, pollution, cigarettes).
from where does this increase in cancer probability statistic come from? anyone have a link to a paper? tried googling but found nothing reliable sadly
The article writer is a known "truther" of the field. But I like his view, I believe we need opinions from his end of the spectrum, but I've also read a few times comments such as this:
>"Academia: Where Crazy People Can't Get Fired - Dr. Moskowitz disgraces the University of California-Berkeley in precisely the same way Dr. Oz and Mark Bittman disgrace Columbia University: They are charlatans who wrap themselves in the prestige of academia to peddle foolishness to anxious parents."
To be honest, I'm somewhat surprised (in a good way!!) that Moskowitz got published on Scientific American at all.
Anyway, I have my fair share of worries on large density mmwave equipment environments, mostly focused on other things, as in, not on its effects on us, but on microbial life, bacterial life, not the focus of this article, so I won't derail, but at least for me, Moskowitz isn't this zero sum game as he may be to some field agents.
As a biochemist, I just want to chime in that I think part of the reason for an apparent increase rise in cancer rates is that we have eliminated many other causes of death already - we have to die of something, and cancer is something that is not "curable" in the sense of other disorders.
After looking at the list of publications purported to be evidence, I have to agree with the other comments here casting doubt. Most, if not all, of these publications are in no-name journals with few citations. I found one paper where the author listed a gmail email address (are they unaffiliated with any institution?)
> I think part of the reason for an apparent increase rise in cancer rates is that we have eliminated many other causes of death already
Where did you read "an apparrent increase rise in cancer rates" ? in this article or in one of the articles it references? which one?
I am not a biochemist, but I would assume academics are referring to incidence rates, not causes of deaths... If you did actually witness such a confusion in the papers, it's important to point it out, but if you didn't it would be equivalent to a physicist suspecting a colleague of confusing mu (the reduced mass of a binary system) with mu (a muon)... rather incredulous if you ask me...
Every academic discipline expects its disciples to be at least proficient in disambiguating words from context, so when one refers to a "cancer rate" in the context of causation, that it would refer to "incidence rates" i.e. the transition probability per surviving individual per unit time. This is independent of deaths by other causes.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I have worked with world-class scientists where the author only had a gmail address (untill we gave them an appointment at Berkeley).
I think this take is a little unfair. Sure, calling scientists “wackos” with reviewing the publications is extreme, we also know there is a massive body of scientific evidence looking at the link between RF waves and cancer that has pretty much found zilch at this point.
the best explanation for why more people get cancer is fewer people are dying of other diseases. Also, more people are surviving cancer. Note: I'm a scientist, and one of the reasons I'm not clicking on links in the article is that I've already done my own looking into IARC and I've concluded they are non-scientific.
Note: I'm a biophysicist who has studied cancer and RF at the graduate level, and postdoctorate level, I can read the literature, and also make reasoned efforts at evaluating whether the literature provides any useful information that would affect the roll out of 5G from health perspectives. I am unable to find any reliable evidence that would indicate that this rollout will actually have "crisis" levels of health impact.
Now. On to the next step: I completely support high quality research done by high quality scientists on non-ionizing radiation. I would, like many other scientists, to see convincing evidence about the nature of damage that could be done by 5G. So far, nearly everything has been indirect in a way that does not inspire enough confidence to propose policy changes.
Doesn't help that the article is written in a kind of exaggerated, fear mongering way. E.g.:
"
5G also employs new technologies (e.g., active antennas capable of beam-forming; phased arrays; massive inputs and outputs, known as MIMO)
"
MIMO is multiple inputs, multiple outputs, not massive. If the author is bending terminology to enhance his case, that makes the case look weaker...
Yeah. If an average person thinks MIMO stands for Massive Inputs and Outputs that's not a bad mistake. If someone purporting to speak with authority on the subject of RF radiation thinks that, it's grounds to suspect them of being a blithering fool.
>At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women.
Annual invasive cancer incidence rates have been declining in the U.S. for over two decades.
Don't fight a knee jerk reaction with one from your own.
> Cancer have risen to 1 in 5 in women and 1 in 3 in men, and nobody knows why
'Nobody knows why', seriously? Did we not establish that the likelihood of cancer increase with lifespan? When you only gets to live to 50 of course you don't die of cancer and heart disease nearly as easily. Your risk of cancer increase each year of age lived after a certain age, and any increase in life expectancy will result in more people eventually dying in cancer.
To be fair, there’s also quite a few published studies showing a positive effect for various pseudoscientific medical practices. Those studies just tend to be very poorly designed, executed, controlled, and don’t represent the actual literature trend.
You really do have to spend significant time investigating the literature to actually.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29268055 Can't get the full article, but I only see mentions of a 900MHz source (inside 3G frequency band) and no mention of power. Also it's a biochemical study on rats. Slim evidence.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26017559 This study talks about the effect of intensive radiation (3x the FCC limit for mobile phones, during 8 months) and it looks like it's actually beneficial for Alzheimer's disease. Funnily enough, it links in the abstract a lot of studies showing either inconsistent or no association between RF and cancer.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4427287/ An study from the department of ¿Psychology and Psychiatry? that finds changes in EEG activity due to mobile phone use, only when the phone is placed near the ear. Little mention of whether the RF radiation can interfere in the EEG measurement.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25738972 Mentions the CERENAT study, which shows increased risk with really heavy mobile phone usage (as in calls). The only one with actual positive effects and looking like a serious study.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25918601 Finds decreased sperm quality, but also discusses other studies finding no effect, and also says "A point of limitation in this study is the inability to assess [...] whether sperm affections are time related or not".
That's just off the first page and a half. Probably someone should do a more thorough review, but it does not give me any assurance that most of the studies with reported positive effects are done by people not in the related fields, have no relation to the problem or do not answer the actual important questions.
> And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really.
Mobile phones are not the only thing that has changed radically in the last years.
People don’t click the link because they already know better.
We are bathed in radiation everyday.
So guess what, the people who say 5G is unsafe, are also the same people that will say flying is unsafe, or using a microwave is unsafe, or eating a banana is unsafe, or being in your car is unsafe, or using your phone is unsafe. Because all these things emit radiation.
Do people care about that though? No. The effects of radiation are grossly exaggerated, and frankly any negligible effects we feel are just the price we pay for living in high tech times. I doubt anyone wants to go back to a tech free lifestyle just so they can live maybe a few more years only to die of something else anyway.
So yes, it’s quackery to say 5G is unsafe and the only reason an article like this would rise to the top is so people could come out and trash it. You want to see scientific comments then go to more interesting articles.
You conflated ionising and non-ionising radiation (flying/banana/chest x-ray vs. radio waves, wifi, light from lightbulbs).
Just so you know.
Your point still stands though, although i would say we're bathed in more intense radiation than 5G and have been bathing in it for millenias - sunlight is radiation as well!
Better live underground, i guess.
Oh, oh, but what about skin cancer you say? That's caused by sunlight, right, so radiowaves could harm you, right? Yeah, but skin cancer is caused by ultraviolet, high energy, high frequency EM radiation (3-30PHz). Petahertz, Coral! That's several orders of magnitude less than most extreme 5G!
Don't even get me started on the power levels of sun vs a base station!
So yeah, the claims of health impact are bullshit.
>At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why.
There is a clear and well known pair of reasons for this. First people are living longer and the longer you live the more prone to cancer you are. People who died of small pox did not die of cancer.
Second, more controversially, atmospheric bomb testing in the 50's and 60's.
People live too long, and don't die of stuff like pneumonia or tuberculosis or syphilis or yellow fever much anymore.
Over a long enough time span, your probability of getting some form of cancer goes to 100%. Probably more like 200% or 300%, since there are so many types that they can cut out or beat back relatively successfully these days, at least until you get too old and decrepit.
I think the title of the link is phrased badly. "We have no reason to believe 5G is safe" makes me want to comment that "we have no reason to believe 5G is unsafe" without even reading it. Maybe the title should be more specific. For example: pointing out that millimeter waves are not present in <=4G.
To be fair, it doesn't seem unreasonable to start with the assumption that something is unsafe and work to prove that it is safe. Seems safer ;)
If this was some technology where not having it would be a major impediment to society, then maybe it would be a different story. But 5G just doesn't seem that important to me.
Frankly, that's SOP on Hacker News. Half the people are commenting on something they haven't read, and the other half are complaining that news from reputable sources isn't free and/or complain that they can't read it with NoScript in Lynx on Arch Linux.
>At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why.
> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why.
Couldn't it simply be that we are curing/reducing the incidence of most other diseases? Cancer is something that typically doesn't occur until the later years of life. By reducing the number of people who die of other causes, you are increasing the potential population of people who end up getting cancer.
I actually read the article as I'm unsure this is about safe-for-human-body or safe-for-network-security.
What about the cell-phone-radiation-for-brain-cancer concern? Haven't heard about it for a while.
5G will work better in populated cities and I don't think it is a good fit for most areas in USA. Likely we will have 5G for very dense areas while 4G for the rest.
I will absolutely not live or work in close vicinity of any 5G towers.
> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why.
I'm not sure exactly what time interval you're making that claim over, but isn't a large part of it people not dying from plague and flu and having good medical care to live into old age in the first place?
>>Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research.
One thing's for sure: there _is_ paucity of research on this topic - judging by a brief search on scholar.google.com for "4G technology health effects humans".
The dissonance runs high here on the subject of 5G, the only thing I can think of that comes close is vaccinations.
Once religion is out as a guide to navigate the world, there's really not much left except science to cling to.
Despite plenty of evidence that everyone and everything can be bought, despite plenty of respected researchers raising their voices against, despite all the proof you could want of how these situations tend to play out long term.
Once you give up blind belief in science, there's nothing left to hold on to; and that's obviously a scary thought for many.
I find the HN community to be bi-modal with respect to technology: either they are very distrusting (luddites), or blindly in love with it (techno-utopians).
5G gets the techno-utopians in HN all excited about the possibilities of [INSERT THE POINT OF 5G] and they'll get mad at anything that threatens its introduction.
As a contrary data-point, I'm an increasingly luddite programmer who doesn't care at all about 5G, but I live in a town that is kind of a hotbed for conspiracy stuff and I tire of the latest scare always going round without a plausible causal mechanism.
You can find PHDs who believe just about anything (I saw one recently with a sign saying "sunspots cause global warming"), and PHDs publish papers. So you have to look at whether they were peer reviewed, in what journal, and what the findings and methods really were.
It's a lot of work to properly evaluate studies, but I think that meta-analysis is easily abused in this arena. The other big problem is the null publication bias. Have one hundred people roll dice, and if you're only interested in snake-eyes and only publish papers on where that happens, you'll get like 9 studies where they rolled snake-eyes and one responsible scientist who publishes a null result, and conclude that there's a 90% chance of snake-eyes on dice rolls...
I work around RF sources professionally. I'm intensely interested in any biological effect of the radiation I work around. I have access to journals through work and my old university, and I read primary sources with great interest (and some knowledge, being an electrical engineer). I have yet to find any credible link between gigahertz RF and health problems (except the neck problems that come from staring at a phone).
I feel like the most damning lack of evidence is the lack of correlation between cell phone adoption and the purported ill effects. In the last 20 years pretty much the whole world started holding RF transmitters up to their head, from basically zero beforehand. If there was an effect, it would be epidemic.
Then there are people like me, who are in love with technology, but work with it and science so closely we have a very good understanding of when and how technology can have risks, and when it can have benefits. And when it's impossible to predict.
Who here actually gets excited about 5G? Everything I see about 5G is just full of business buzzwords. No one can explain why [a technical person outside of the mobile telecom industry] should care. Why the hell is there a new "G" if LTE was supposed to mean "Long Term Evolution" anyway?
I've coined the term "orchard picking" for this. If the subject is climate or vaccines, most people will yell "learn the facts" and "follow the science" and generally act as though dissenters deserve every ounce of contempt we can pour on them. On those topics I generally agree, except maybe for that last part. But somehow on other topics - e.g. most discussions of programmer productivity or effects of technology - it's all "meh, here's my anecdote instead" and other forms of pseudo-skepticism. There I tend to break from the crowd. I believe science is a mode of thought, not just another rhetorical club to pick up when it's convenient and set down again when it's not.
Perhaps because everyone here knows there's very little actual, proper science on programmer productivity, and even less of that is applicable in workplace environment.
There is no break from the pattern in this thread. People still call for following the science - they just consider this article's science to be the RF engineering equivalent of Wakefield study.
> The scientists who signed this appeal arguably constitute the majority of experts on the effects of nonionizing radiation. They have published more than 2,000 papers and letters on EMF in professional journals.
The pioneers behind reverse transcriptase were ridiculed by their peers for years. As DNA could only travel in one direction. Francis Crick even called the scientist a wacko. But in the end, the 'wacko' was proven correct and won the Nobel Prize for being so. His name is Howard Temin.
Learned all about him from Malcom Gladwell's podcast this weekend. A really fascinating story of someone that wouldn't give in to peer-pressure, because he was convinced:
We have already solved all the worlds problems, unified quantum mechanics with classical physics, cured cancer and figured out how to factor primes. None of these works will ever see the light of day or be taken seriously because of the sources.
That may sound like hyperbole but somehow I doubt it's far from the mark. Tons of modern advances were from novices or unaccredited. Flight, Relativity, Baysian and Boolean logic; Two hicks, a patent clerk, a preacher, and a self-taught math nerd.
While the effects of the latter three are pretty well understood for certain kinds of radiation (ionizing and non-ionizing) ranging from "acute radiation sickness due to gamma burst" to "listening to the radio your whole life doesn't have a link to cancer", there is truth that a specific band of millimeter 5G has been less studied than others.
However, science follows patterns, and interpolating the existing data to this sub-infrared region opens a kind of wiggle room similar to, but in fact the opposite to, low dosimetry of ionizing radiation that has given the Linear No Threshold model a run for it's money. Except in this case, skeptics are typically concerned about chemical effects due to subdermal heating (not really as compelling as ionizing radiation effects), or debating the "non-ionizing-ness" (which is less common because its even less supported by evidence).
It comes down to a persons personal risk. In my opinion, the sun beats out all non ionizing radiation concerns, particularly when it comes to heating of the skin and subdermal tissues. Wear a hat and sunscreen (against the sun).
Still worth researching and acknowledging the data gap, as the EU does in its metastudy of 40+ years and X00 scientific papers [0], but there's no reason to be alarmed based on the existing corpus of evidence.
> It comes down to a persons personal risk. [..] Wear a hat and sunscreen.
What's the "hat and sunscreen" protection against millimeter wave cellphone towers, that someone else installed on their private property near you?
I'm not yet convinced the risks exist. But conceptually if there was a danger, there's no "personal risk" argument. We're blanketing the whole area around a tower with millimeter wave/5G, a person cannot opt out.
The sun is a 1000 watts per square meter exposure at your body, cell towers might be 100w if you hugged the antenna then inverse square law to distance to about 0.00000001 watt with a strong signal. Your cell device is a millwatts transmitter, equivalent to an LED light shining on you.
You don't need hat and sunscreen for street lights or flashlights nor would you need it for cellular power levels, orders of magnitude difference in exposure.
A hat and sunscreen does offer some protection against millimeter wave radiation - the had will block some (smallish but non-zero) percentage of the radiation, as will the sunscreen as long as you apply a thick layer.
As far as I know the exposure is a bit like a bell curve.
Right besides the tower you're in a blind spot, then it gets more intense as you move out of the blind spot and then it gets lower as you move further away.
I have a wallet with RFID protection. Could we make cell phone cases and/or glass with shielding that blocks 5G signals, limiting exposure in part of the phone that wouldn't be need to be sending and receiving signals? Basically have a naked antenna and shielded everything else. I am not a mobile phone hardware wizard :)
There is such a thing as RF shielding that uses copper or other conductive metals in a grated screen as a means to block out radio frequencies. While the application is typically used as a means to create telecommunication dead zones, i could easily see somebody capitalizing on this kind of health scare by putting copper shielding in say clothing like a hoodie.
I think when comparing this to the sun there are lots of things worth considering from many different angles.
1. To say this threat is nothing compared to the risks we face from the sun, completely ignores the fact that we have millions of years of evolutionary exposure to sunlight and because of that fact the immune system has become way more acclimated to dealing with it's carcinogenic properties. Of course, our immune systems aren't perfect but considering how much more exposure we all are to sunlight than any other carcinogen, if we didn't have a strong evolutionary tolerance to it; melanoma would obviously be the #1 leading cause of cancer. But it's not.
Now in hindsight, what we don't have evolutionary genetic tolerance for is microwave radiation. While i'm not in anyway an expert in biology or the physics of light, I do have enough insight to know that we should never underestimate the possible negative outcome of any potential problem when it's still just a mathematical theory we're playing with rather than a reality of nature we're all dying from.
I mean, we underestimate and miscalculate these kind of things all the time and it's kind of counter productive that the answer to the question of "When will we learn to stop doing this?" is always "Once, we underestimate and miscalculate, discover our error and become smarter because of it"...
2. The bigger issue this has when compared to the sun is the fact that all of us can agree while there is such a thing as getting too much sun. However, there isn't such a thing as internet that is too fast. We essentially all want to be able to download terabytes at the speed of light so that we can one day be on Mars and be able to seamlessly stream Netflix from Earth while were up there. And while of course there is a speed of light limitation of like i believe 8 minutes, that doesn't mean people aren't going to complain why they cant instantly stream from there.
This is what we need to understand about this issue. There is no limitation to how much radio wave radiation we want when we are thinking of that radiation in the language of the internet, as "Content".
3. When it comes to protecting ourselves from this, if it actually does turn out to be a substantial problem. All the solutions suck.
The radio wave EM shielding for example protects you from the potentially harmful waves. But it also creates like I said, a deadzone.
So putting it in your walls of your home, because you don't want you and your entire family constantly being exposed to the cell tower that might only be a football field length away from your house (as the one near my house is), also means you can't receive or make calls to and from your cell phone. This is a deal breaker for most people, and as far as i'm aware RF shielding isn't like sunscreen where it blocks out most of the harmful light while letting in the some you want. It's an all or nothing solution.
Which is why I think putting the RF shield in clothing like a hoodie would be an interesting venture idea. The shielding protects your body, while your phone is still outside of the shielded area. (although this obviously doesn't protect your face and i don't think RF shielded masks are going to find a market other than antifa)
And another reason why the implications of this would really suck, is that it means were stuck with crappy wires and the companies who own the rights to pumping internet to and fro over them. I am mostly looking forward to 5G because I view it as the primary means we are going to get ourselves out of the era of shitty slow internet and greedy cable company overlords who wouldn't know how to disrupt something if a tv with rainbow bars on the screen hit them in the face.
The thing is that there's really ton of evidence that non-ionizing radiation is not significantly harmful to humans at levels that don't cook you.
If you want to counter that you can't just pile up small studies that might be hinting at possibility that there might be some other effect.
You need a smoking gun. Single study, but bulletproof and large, showing strong effect. Everything else will be dismissed as "maybe, possibly, but most likely not really".
This comment explains precisely why the dismissal from so many here. Correlational studies without a plausible causal mechanism are highly suspect.
As an illustration, people have used obviously bogus examples like, in the past 100 years, piracy has risen. So has global warming. Therefore, pirates cause global warming.
Unless a 5G study specifically addresses the mechanism, and how non-ionizing radiation can cause damage to DNA, or has a very large correlation established that does a very good job of controlling for other factors, these studies will be dismissed out of hand.
There's plenty of ways that non-ionizing radiation can result in increased cancer rates. For example, they can induce currents in the DNA (DNA is s molecular wire) which might jam the base excision repair system and prevent it from detecting DNA damage (which is a redox-driven process).
What's even scarier is that this sort of an effect will not be found in a standard Ames test and also is unlikely to be found in highly controlled lab settings, since it requires a second factor - a contaminating primary mutagen - to manifest its effect.
wouldn't all that depend on tge specific signal transmitted? If you just look at random memory access, you'll find that it's not prone to corruption. That didn't stop rowhammer for example.
> As an illustration, people have used obviously bogus examples like, in the past 100 years, piracy has risen. So has global warming. Therefore, pirates cause global warming.
Actually you got that wrong. This was related to real piracy (i.e. people with eye patches on ships robbing other ships) which went down, not software piracy. So the decline of pirates is related to global warming.
(The example came from Bobby Henderson, the founder of the flying spaghetti monster.)
(i) it seems this "non-ionizing radiation" has many parameters that can modify significantly the way it propagates in the environment (and in human bodies), so I'm not sure speaking of non-ionizing radiation in a general way is sufficient to address the problem
(ii) following this reasoning and your comment about "a single study, bulletproof and large": it does seem that it is in fact what is being asked by this group - that time be given for a meaningful and large study of the specific radiation from 5G tech
and therefore requiring that kind of large study before widespread implementation actually seems warranted.
I'd be interested in seeing signatures from people at institutions I recognize and trust. There are a lot of people with degrees FROM credible institutions, but very little in terms of currently being researchers in the field AT credible institutions.
It's not hard to find 250 wackos if you pull random scientists working in random fields at random institutions. Most have no better way to know safety of 5G than I do.
Now, there's obviously some frequency band where we get into health risks. 5G jumps us from single-digit GHz to double-digit -- I'd guess you'd have to go at least past visible light before you run into safety issues, at least barring extremely high levels of exposure. Intuitively, it seems to me like that ought to still be safe, but I'm no expert.
But an appeal to experts -- with no real experts behind it -- doesn't do it for me. Neither does an appeal to papers based on volume, without a clear description of what they found and how. Most science is junk science.
Is Harvard Medical School an institution you recognize and trust? Columbia? Monash? McGill? Can we dispense with the tired ad hominems and talk about science? A self-proclaimed guess from a self-proclaimed non-expert seems ill placed in a credentialist diatribe.
When the list of people also includes folks who claim to "customize clinical trials to support marketing claims"[0] it is hard to take even experts with solid credentials seriously.
Five out of five signers from my country are well-known EHS proponents, and at least three have financial ties to the illness. Having a Ph.D. degree from a well-known university does little to prevent later involvement in quackery.
... I found them, and that's exactly what raised flags.
If a faculty at HMS signed on, that'd be okay. If a ransom person with a degree from HMS does, that doesn't carry the same weight. I was pretty clear about "at" versus "from."
"Is Harvard Medical School an institution you recognize and trust?"
After their primary university admissions scandal? Absolutely not, not that I ever trusted them in the first place (Memphis has a far better medical program.)
I would like to add to this that many academics who study wireless research, specifically MIMO beam forming - aren't particularly incentivized to find issue with 5G. I've spoken to a few who have dismissed health concerns whilst waving their hands about the actual Science. To them this is worth anything up to 10 years of funding and research opportunities in what can be a very competitive research area.
They receive A LOT of funding from cellular companies in particular, any research that throws doubt on 5G could lead to their funding being pulled. Not only this, but most of the interesting 5G hardware is coming from the cellular companies on loan.
My point is: You have a perfect storm for a rushed technology with potential for health risks. Almost every Country on the planet is investing lots of money into 5G and the technology itself requires a significant number more cellular towers to be built in closer proximity to people.
If there is any genuine question about 5G's safety, I would rather stay on the side of caution. It's not as if people will kill over if they don't have 5G immediately. Not only this, the technology will be more mature and the price will likely come down for infrastructure development.
The article explicitly calls the 200 participants the world's leading experts in non-ionizing radiation. I haven't researched their credentials or examined their research. But if all existing research points in one direction, that constitutes empirical evidence. Of course methodological and statistical problems abound across all academia. The article makes existing research seem unequivocal and argues we need to conduct further research for 4G as well as 5G health effects
Fortunately the article is wrong because the signers are almost all either: 1) long-retired and out of the game entirely, 2) not trained in the field or qualified at all, or 3) known quacks who have peddled this kind of thing for years, or some combination of the three, and the articles cited are all written by that same population (and often published in no-name journals that I could probably get published in) or don't say what the author claims they do (many of the articles explicitly state that they found no connection whatsoever).
So I guess the moral of the story is "don't believe everything you see in pop science magazines," although I would have hoped nobody did to begin with(?)
>Now, there's obviously some frequency band where we get into health risks. 5G jumps us from single-digit GHz to double-digit -- I'd guess you'd have to go at least past visible light before you run into safety issues, at least barring extremely high levels of exposure. Intuitively, it seems to me like that ought to still be safe, but I'm no expert.
I highly doubt that 26+ GHz will receive much attention. You have no range, you need line of sight otherwise it won't work. At least 3.4GHz (and the other LTE bands) don't have that issue.
Why is being below visible light a factor? Different wavelengths have different properties that don't necessarily map linearly with frequency, such as the ability to pass through your body.
I clicked on a few links and Googled a few names.
It's roughly what I'd expect: People with few publications now working in other fields, people without scientific publications, but university degrees, people who regularly speak at events from radiation critics, people who are invested in other fringe theories.
People get fooled by "large lists of peer-reviewed publications". Peer review is a lowest level quality mark for a piece of science. It means that hopefully it's not complete bullshit. Sometimes it still is, because noone can forbid you to call your journal "peer-reviewed" with your own weak standards of peer review. And sometimes credible journals make huge mistakes (remember the "Wakefield-study"...). Even with only well-performed, non-flawed studies you'll always have some studies saying that something is there that actually isn't. That's simple statistics, you'll have outliers.
"Here's a large number of studies saying X" is meaningless in a topic where a very large number of studies have been done. What you need is systematic reviews of the literature that not only count studies, but evaluate their quality and combine their results.
Also it's not true that "nobody knows why" cancer incidence has risen. It's a mixture of people getting older and diagnosis getting better. Not mysterious at all.
> People with few publications now working in other fields
I'm surprised this statement passed muster on HN where there must be some number of PhDs now working in other fields. Certainly the ones I know wouldn't take kindly to the idea that somehow, just because they left academia their research can be easily and completely dismissed.
There's nothing wrong with changing fields. But if you tell me "these are the most relevant scientists in the field" and most of them aren't actively working scientists - it looks fishy...
Being such a person is totally fine (I’m one myself). What’s damning is the fact that this list is largely composed of just such people (plus some that are less qualified).
Yeah, this is just a ridiculous way to dismiss the papers. Most authors are "people with few publications now working in other fields". One professor trains 25+ PhDs in their career, and usually all but one or two of them will end up fitting that description.
It's unfortunately common in science for someone who's an expert in one field to think they can easily be an expert in another field and get it completely wrong. Linux Pauling is the most well known example of this.
Wouldn't the difference there be that the person consuming meat is voluntarily consuming it while even people sticking to older tech phones are exposed to the newer radiation? I am no luddite but this would be my argument from a devil's advocate position
But not everyone eats barbecued meat or has barbecued meat near/next to their body 24/7 like people who use cell phones. I can opt out of eating barbecued meat though it carrying a phone close to my body.
> For example, eating barbecued meat causes cancer, but it we don't ban it.
Sure, but the absolute risk is very low and it's probably zero if you add veggies to your meal. And also causality was not established, observational studies on this topic suffering from the healthy-user bias in addition to a lot of confounding factors and in general for nutrition the evidence is very low quality, compared with medication research.
This isn't a boolean. Saying that "this or that causes cancer" is meaningless without giving the risk factor, which has to be statistically significant and in case of meat it isn't.
In other words if you want to compare the risks of 5G with anything, I think nutrition is a really poor choice due to the low standards for evidence we have and due to all the confounding factors and biases.
Not sure if assessing the safety of 5G is easier, but at the very least you can do double-blind studies. At the very least you can compare it with the placebo effect. Which in nutrition isn't possible.
Cigarettes and alcohol too. Radiowave effects, even if they do cause anything, are quite easy to mitigate in humans by wearing clothing with carefully positioned electrical conductor insertions.
"Causes" implies that you will get cancer if you partake. Maybe you mean "increases the risk of". Agreed that your risk exposure might only be fractions of a percent and not worth abstaining or regulating.
Most people in the cancer field (I worked in a tangential one) believe that incidence of cancer is due to people living longer (cancer rates go up a lot as you age), and not dying of other diseases first. In a sense, cancer is what you get after you solved the other problems.
> "Here's a large number of studies saying X" is meaningless in a topic where a very large number of studies have been done. What you need is systematic reviews of the literature that not only count studies, but evaluate their quality and combine their results.
"The present review - of results published by my group from 2006 until 2016"
Self-evaluation of quality is not quite a systemic review of literature. Neither is research on drosophila melanogaster quite in the same ballpark as research on homo sapiens.
I haven't read the article, and I'm not a party to the 5G debate, but what you're describing in your comment is a meta-analysis, which is a practice that has produced some of the most controversial findings in recent times. If anything is needed to clear up an inconclusive body of studies, it's better and more reliable studies and experiments, not meta-analyses.
Meta-analyses try to find the unknown common truth by reviewing multiple studies and their methods and weighing them accourding to their percieved (really, calculated) quality.
By combining the results of the best studies and giving us an overview of them, meta-analyses really are the best studies we have.
"In addition to providing an estimate of the unknown common truth, meta-analysis has the capacity to contrast results from different studies and identify patterns among study results, sources of disagreement among those results, or other interesting relationships that may come to light in the context of multiple studies." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-analysis
With a potentially large # of studies on a specific subject, some of which may be contradicting, meta-analysis will be done.
Whether by accredited scientists, or institutions who do this on a professional basis with open and established criteria and consistency in approach (though there may still be flaws in the approach); and/or by individuals when confronted with large # of studies, when I feel bias would almost certainly be the primary driver.
While you absolutely cannot eliminate the latter, it feels it would be foolish to dismiss or eliminate the former.
As long as:
a) World is a bit tricky (phenomena difficult to define and isolate; limitations in equipment and measurements; limitations in humans)
b) We use statistical analysis as primary differentiator of significance
There will continue to be contradicting studies.
Not disagreeing it's always better to improve studies and experiments, but it feels like meta-analysis of multiple studies is not just a necessary evil, but a good and desirable next step.
Yeah, a meta analysis is only as good as its inputs. Unfortunately many meta analysises read like "we found 20 studies on the topic, but 19 of them are crap and the one good study didn't really ask the question we're asking, so we really don't know". And yeah, there's considerable wiggle room for a meta analysis. But I don't think you'll find any serious scientist doubting the usefulness of a meta analysis per se.
I knew other grad students who'd say, "oh, it's a meta analysis" and then toss it in the bin. But in recent years I've met people who worked on boards for cities and hospitals where they dug though a lot of papers and wrote detailed meta analysis about the larger body of work. They'd comment on things that seemed consistent and inconstant, and tried to help others make well informed decisions.
With a meta-analysis, you do have to look at the whole thing. Phrased like, "when controlled for.." you can't control for some things over 10 different studies. You need to read how they attempted to control for things and why the came to their conclusions.
They are still valuable and you shouldn't just chuck them in the bin.
So as to help me best evaluate the validity of the article, what is your background? Are you familiar w/that field? That would help me assess the usefulness of your critique of the backgrounds of people linked to in the article.
"Lyon, France, May 31, 2011 ‐‐ The WHO/International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has
classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B),
based on an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer1
, associated with
wireless phone use."
The "possibly carcinogenic" declaration is quite weak ("evidence far from conclusive").
Even if it was "carcinogenic to humans", there's a lot of things that are vital to modern society which fall into that category. It's then up to the regulators to guess an "acceptable" limit of exposure.
"Joel M. Moskowitz, PhD, is director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been translating and disseminating the research on wireless radiation health effects since 2009 after he and his colleagues published a review paper that found long-term cell phone users were at greater risk of brain tumors. His Electromagnetic Radiation Safety website has had more than two million page views since 2013. He is an unpaid advisor to the International EMF Scientist Appeal and Physicians for Safe Technology."
This article does not represent scientific consensus. It is alarmist, linking nearly every report that supports the author's point of view and offering no opposing points of view. This is not journalism.
Should that absolve them of writing deceptive articles that feed in to a type of paranoia that is fairly harmful to society[0]?
[0]: Not that the anti-wireless people are particularly influential right now, but they're fairly close to antivacciene people in how they perceive the world with an almost complete absence of rational thought.
With every new generation of cellular technology, this question comes up.
This started as early as CT, then DECT, GSM, 3G, 4G and now 5G.
After 30+ years of having consumer grade wireless telephony we are still debating whether the radio signals have any negative effect on living beings.
If we can't draw any conclusion from a sample size that big, then I must conclude that the effects of EM-radiation are so minimal (if any at all), that it is not something I should worry about.
On the one hand, I think your conclusion is correct, but on the other hand, it took quite some time to establish the health risks of smoking. Because there were concerted disinformation campaigns etc.
It's not like smoking is subtle. Just ask any none smoker, or how people started with their first cigarette. Coughing, dry throat, WTF is happening, I've smoke in my lungs.
That is true. However we had multiple areas in the world where we could watch the mobile market basically explode within a short amount of time, there are people using phones for hours daily across time spans upwards of a decade and yet so far I haven't heard of any health statistic correlating with this trend.
Whereas with smoking we can see over ten times higher risks for certain types of cancer-related deaths. That doesn't mean there's no effect due to mobile phones, but I think if it were remotely comparable to smoking we'd see a significant impact by now.
Genuine question: Is there a name for saying "past evidence hasn't shown this to be true, thus it's likely to remain untrue"?
I was debating a different technology with a friend and he made such a comment, but my response was that the frequency, scope and importance of past technological advancements won't hold a candle to those of the future.
5G is also fundamentally different in one important way. We are moving a way from fewer high powered towers, to a lot more low powered cells. Yes this existed in 4G, but 5G is taking it to the next level.
What I find particularly troubling: 4G is for me already more than good enough. 5G is really not so well thought out. They require a lot more cells. The exposure is much higher... They cost more (?).
A lot of cancer rates rising is pollution, but we generally believe most of it is chemical forms of pollution, not electromagnetic.
That said, I am sure there are structures in the body that can selective absorb or react to non-ionizing radiation that we may not yet know about. Our cellular mechanisms are impressively complex.
If there was an outbreak of cancers at the right side of the head (the place where we usually hold our phone while talking on it), we'd know. But there aren't.
No, it is not acceptable, and I didn't say that it is.
It is a good thing that we spend research effort into identifying why this is happening.
All I'm saying is that I have concluded, for myself, that EM-radiation is the least of my worries when it comes to negative effects (including cancer).
I see your point but I have a hyper sensitivity to EMF (among other things) and I turn off any wireless technology wherever I can (like Bluetooth, when I don't have any paring devices at home) and many devices aren't comfortable for me to keep, despite me working in an IT industry.
The symptom isn't classified as a disease at where I live, so it's hard to get any decent medial treatments and I'm afraid 5G might harm me even harder when higher frequency typically makes me feel worse without a way to get away from it.
Have you ever tried a double blind test of your symptoms? I'm not going to be judgmental at all, but my friend's father had this ~10 years ago, and (being a scientist) decided to participate in a double-blind study. Turned out he scored no better than chance on any of the tests. That was a big enough eye opener for him that he was pretty much "cured" of EHS.
Readit News
As usual, it's not the scientists that are wackos, it's the press that is claiming things completely different from what they say. There are proposals for better test equipment that should be taken, but I don't see any other claim for change there.
> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women.
The wildest of the claims anywhere on the linked papers is a ~10% increase on the rate of one of the rarest types of cancer, so this line of research won't give you the answers you are looking for.
These radio bands have been in military use for a long time. I’m surprised that no health studies have been done or released to the public.
I wouldn't be. To a good first-order approximation, the military doesn't give a hoot about long term health consequences and wouldn't release any such studies, if any were made, unless they indicated a requirement for the military usage to change.
That would definitely invert the value calculations. I work in the industry and there's no question that the savings from 5G are regulatory in nature. Ironic that it's the less regulated tech that has the more questionable health effects.
Maybe it's initially counter-intiutitve, but the rise in the rate of cancer should be expected as lifespans are increased and deaths from other diseases decline. E.g. every male will get prostrate cancer "if" they live long enough.
Yet they are very ready to call "more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields" "wackos" or "cranks with a PhD", call their research "bullshit" or "impossible", call the people "thruthers" or claiming "Russian troll farms" are behind this story.
I don't think I've ever seen so much non-scientific HN comments on a science article.
At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really.
Plentiful nutrition which has led to 90% of the population of the USA being overweight, obese, or overfat is another potential culprit. Women suffering from anorexia developed fewer tumors. Similar experiments on lab animals in a controlled setting have the same result. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11246846 I believe there are other changing risk factors in behavior as well, for instance women who have never had a child are more likely to develop breast cancer and fertility rates have dropped dramatically over the last 100 years.
Cell phones have only been widely deployed in the last two decades, and I don’t think those trends in cancer rates you’re referencing correlate very well to cellular deployment.
I’d still be curious to see more research happening in the field of millimeter waves, personally I don’t see this technology as very useful right now either compared to traditional cellular due to its lack of penetration.
The large increase in sugar and starch in our diet does contribute to fast growing cancer cells and there are studies that link being overweight/obesity with cancer.
We weren't this fat decades ago. Some may blame more office work, but the biggest factor is the amount of sugar/carbs in our diets. It's grown tremendously and yet no one seems to take it seriously, discrediting things like Adkins/Keto as "fad diets" when they were closer/more consistent with American and Western European diets for several decades.
Yeah I’m gonna need some data to believe that one. 90% obese / overweight? I’m calling bullshit.
I checked the "conclusions" of the first two: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29996112 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29709736
Conclusion of 1) Despite the improved exposure assessment approach used in this study, no clear associations were identified. However, the results obtained for recent exposure to RF electric and magnetic fields are suggestive of a potential role in brain tumor promotion/progression and should be further investigated.
Conclusion of 2) Ever use of wireless phones was not significantly associated with risk of adult glioma, but there could be increased risk in long-term users.
They both read as, "we found no significant effect".
That said, given the scientific consensus from rigorous meta-analyses, I expect that these “positive” studies are mostly of low quality and/or limited sample size. And scepticism is generally warranted when advocates start listing large numbers of studies instead of referring to a few meta-studies. As it happens, the best available meta-studies come to the opposite conclusion (namely, that there’s probably no harm from mobile EMF), so this long list is essentially bogus.
Because life expectancy has also risen; people who used to be dying of other things are now living long enough that cancer is more common.
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>"Academia: Where Crazy People Can't Get Fired - Dr. Moskowitz disgraces the University of California-Berkeley in precisely the same way Dr. Oz and Mark Bittman disgrace Columbia University: They are charlatans who wrap themselves in the prestige of academia to peddle foolishness to anxious parents."
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/02/28/uc-berkeley-psychologis...
To be honest, I'm somewhat surprised (in a good way!!) that Moskowitz got published on Scientific American at all.
Anyway, I have my fair share of worries on large density mmwave equipment environments, mostly focused on other things, as in, not on its effects on us, but on microbial life, bacterial life, not the focus of this article, so I won't derail, but at least for me, Moskowitz isn't this zero sum game as he may be to some field agents.
After looking at the list of publications purported to be evidence, I have to agree with the other comments here casting doubt. Most, if not all, of these publications are in no-name journals with few citations. I found one paper where the author listed a gmail email address (are they unaffiliated with any institution?)
Where did you read "an apparrent increase rise in cancer rates" ? in this article or in one of the articles it references? which one?
I am not a biochemist, but I would assume academics are referring to incidence rates, not causes of deaths... If you did actually witness such a confusion in the papers, it's important to point it out, but if you didn't it would be equivalent to a physicist suspecting a colleague of confusing mu (the reduced mass of a binary system) with mu (a muon)... rather incredulous if you ask me...
Every academic discipline expects its disciples to be at least proficient in disambiguating words from context, so when one refers to a "cancer rate" in the context of causation, that it would refer to "incidence rates" i.e. the transition probability per surviving individual per unit time. This is independent of deaths by other causes.
Here's a longer list for you: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138357421... though a lot of those studies are about DNA damage and not cancer per se. Though DNA damage is known to increase cancer risk.
So no, not zilch, not at all.
Note: I'm a biophysicist who has studied cancer and RF at the graduate level, and postdoctorate level, I can read the literature, and also make reasoned efforts at evaluating whether the literature provides any useful information that would affect the roll out of 5G from health perspectives. I am unable to find any reliable evidence that would indicate that this rollout will actually have "crisis" levels of health impact.
Now. On to the next step: I completely support high quality research done by high quality scientists on non-ionizing radiation. I would, like many other scientists, to see convincing evidence about the nature of damage that could be done by 5G. So far, nearly everything has been indirect in a way that does not inspire enough confidence to propose policy changes.
MIMO is multiple inputs, multiple outputs, not massive. If the author is bending terminology to enhance his case, that makes the case look weaker...
Those 240 scientist have not published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields"
They are mostly experts in other fields.
Annual invasive cancer incidence rates have been declining in the U.S. for over two decades.
https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html
Also, the lifetime risk of incidence is about 40% for both men and women:
https://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2016/browse_csr.php?section...
https://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2016/browse_csr.php?section...
> Cancer have risen to 1 in 5 in women and 1 in 3 in men, and nobody knows why
'Nobody knows why', seriously? Did we not establish that the likelihood of cancer increase with lifespan? When you only gets to live to 50 of course you don't die of cancer and heart disease nearly as easily. Your risk of cancer increase each year of age lived after a certain age, and any increase in life expectancy will result in more people eventually dying in cancer.
You really do have to spend significant time investigating the literature to actually.
Diagnosis has simultaneously increased, especially in cancers where the rationale for treatment is low (e.g. prostate cancer in most men).
(work in cancer research)
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29725476 The article only measures exposition, no conclusion on effects other than a literature review.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29268055 Can't get the full article, but I only see mentions of a 900MHz source (inside 3G frequency band) and no mention of power. Also it's a biochemical study on rats. Slim evidence.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25747364 One author, talks about wildlife orientation.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26017559 This study talks about the effect of intensive radiation (3x the FCC limit for mobile phones, during 8 months) and it looks like it's actually beneficial for Alzheimer's disease. Funnily enough, it links in the abstract a lot of studies showing either inconsistent or no association between RF and cancer.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4427287/ An study from the department of ¿Psychology and Psychiatry? that finds changes in EEG activity due to mobile phone use, only when the phone is placed near the ear. Little mention of whether the RF radiation can interfere in the EEG measurement.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25738972 Mentions the CERENAT study, which shows increased risk with really heavy mobile phone usage (as in calls). The only one with actual positive effects and looking like a serious study.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25885019 Decreased nasal mucose in rats. No mention of whether thermal effects were at use here.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25918601 Finds decreased sperm quality, but also discusses other studies finding no effect, and also says "A point of limitation in this study is the inability to assess [...] whether sperm affections are time related or not".
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25531835 This one is about nicotine sulfate + RF exposition in frog embryos, and doesn't find effects of RF alone.
That's just off the first page and a half. Probably someone should do a more thorough review, but it does not give me any assurance that most of the studies with reported positive effects are done by people not in the related fields, have no relation to the problem or do not answer the actual important questions.
> And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really.
Mobile phones are not the only thing that has changed radically in the last years.
We are bathed in radiation everyday.
So guess what, the people who say 5G is unsafe, are also the same people that will say flying is unsafe, or using a microwave is unsafe, or eating a banana is unsafe, or being in your car is unsafe, or using your phone is unsafe. Because all these things emit radiation.
Do people care about that though? No. The effects of radiation are grossly exaggerated, and frankly any negligible effects we feel are just the price we pay for living in high tech times. I doubt anyone wants to go back to a tech free lifestyle just so they can live maybe a few more years only to die of something else anyway.
So yes, it’s quackery to say 5G is unsafe and the only reason an article like this would rise to the top is so people could come out and trash it. You want to see scientific comments then go to more interesting articles.
Just so you know.
Your point still stands though, although i would say we're bathed in more intense radiation than 5G and have been bathing in it for millenias - sunlight is radiation as well!
Better live underground, i guess.
Oh, oh, but what about skin cancer you say? That's caused by sunlight, right, so radiowaves could harm you, right? Yeah, but skin cancer is caused by ultraviolet, high energy, high frequency EM radiation (3-30PHz). Petahertz, Coral! That's several orders of magnitude less than most extreme 5G!
Don't even get me started on the power levels of sun vs a base station!
So yeah, the claims of health impact are bullshit.
There is a clear and well known pair of reasons for this. First people are living longer and the longer you live the more prone to cancer you are. People who died of small pox did not die of cancer.
Second, more controversially, atmospheric bomb testing in the 50's and 60's.
Over a long enough time span, your probability of getting some form of cancer goes to 100%. Probably more like 200% or 300%, since there are so many types that they can cut out or beat back relatively successfully these days, at least until you get too old and decrepit.
If this was some technology where not having it would be a major impediment to society, then maybe it would be a different story. But 5G just doesn't seem that important to me.
I mean, what else is there left to kill us?
Couldn't it simply be that we are curing/reducing the incidence of most other diseases? Cancer is something that typically doesn't occur until the later years of life. By reducing the number of people who die of other causes, you are increasing the potential population of people who end up getting cancer.
What about the cell-phone-radiation-for-brain-cancer concern? Haven't heard about it for a while.
5G will work better in populated cities and I don't think it is a good fit for most areas in USA. Likely we will have 5G for very dense areas while 4G for the rest.
I will absolutely not live or work in close vicinity of any 5G towers.
I'm not sure exactly what time interval you're making that claim over, but isn't a large part of it people not dying from plague and flu and having good medical care to live into old age in the first place?
One thing's for sure: there _is_ paucity of research on this topic - judging by a brief search on scholar.google.com for "4G technology health effects humans".
Once religion is out as a guide to navigate the world, there's really not much left except science to cling to.
Despite plenty of evidence that everyone and everything can be bought, despite plenty of respected researchers raising their voices against, despite all the proof you could want of how these situations tend to play out long term.
Once you give up blind belief in science, there's nothing left to hold on to; and that's obviously a scary thought for many.
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5G gets the techno-utopians in HN all excited about the possibilities of [INSERT THE POINT OF 5G] and they'll get mad at anything that threatens its introduction.
You can find PHDs who believe just about anything (I saw one recently with a sign saying "sunspots cause global warming"), and PHDs publish papers. So you have to look at whether they were peer reviewed, in what journal, and what the findings and methods really were.
It's a lot of work to properly evaluate studies, but I think that meta-analysis is easily abused in this arena. The other big problem is the null publication bias. Have one hundred people roll dice, and if you're only interested in snake-eyes and only publish papers on where that happens, you'll get like 9 studies where they rolled snake-eyes and one responsible scientist who publishes a null result, and conclude that there's a 90% chance of snake-eyes on dice rolls...
I feel like the most damning lack of evidence is the lack of correlation between cell phone adoption and the purported ill effects. In the last 20 years pretty much the whole world started holding RF transmitters up to their head, from basically zero beforehand. If there was an effect, it would be epidemic.
There is no break from the pattern in this thread. People still call for following the science - they just consider this article's science to be the RF engineering equivalent of Wakefield study.
I think the push to make these scientist seam like wackos, is all the money loss for the new tech(and even existing tech)
Oh, and more important than the studies is who is doing them and who is funding them.
> The scientists who signed this appeal arguably constitute the majority of experts on the effects of nonionizing radiation. They have published more than 2,000 papers and letters on EMF in professional journals.
That’s a pretty strong group.
Learned all about him from Malcom Gladwell's podcast this weekend. A really fascinating story of someone that wouldn't give in to peer-pressure, because he was convinced:
http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/40-the-obscure-virus-...
That may sound like hyperbole but somehow I doubt it's far from the mark. Tons of modern advances were from novices or unaccredited. Flight, Relativity, Baysian and Boolean logic; Two hicks, a patent clerk, a preacher, and a self-taught math nerd.
* Frequency of radiation
* Power of exposure
* Duration of exposure
* Where in the human body absorption is occurring
While the effects of the latter three are pretty well understood for certain kinds of radiation (ionizing and non-ionizing) ranging from "acute radiation sickness due to gamma burst" to "listening to the radio your whole life doesn't have a link to cancer", there is truth that a specific band of millimeter 5G has been less studied than others.
However, science follows patterns, and interpolating the existing data to this sub-infrared region opens a kind of wiggle room similar to, but in fact the opposite to, low dosimetry of ionizing radiation that has given the Linear No Threshold model a run for it's money. Except in this case, skeptics are typically concerned about chemical effects due to subdermal heating (not really as compelling as ionizing radiation effects), or debating the "non-ionizing-ness" (which is less common because its even less supported by evidence).
It comes down to a persons personal risk. In my opinion, the sun beats out all non ionizing radiation concerns, particularly when it comes to heating of the skin and subdermal tissues. Wear a hat and sunscreen (against the sun).
Still worth researching and acknowledging the data gap, as the EU does in its metastudy of 40+ years and X00 scientific papers [0], but there's no reason to be alarmed based on the existing corpus of evidence.
[0] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
Edit to add citation
What's the "hat and sunscreen" protection against millimeter wave cellphone towers, that someone else installed on their private property near you?
I'm not yet convinced the risks exist. But conceptually if there was a danger, there's no "personal risk" argument. We're blanketing the whole area around a tower with millimeter wave/5G, a person cannot opt out.
You don't need hat and sunscreen for street lights or flashlights nor would you need it for cellular power levels, orders of magnitude difference in exposure.
Right besides the tower you're in a blind spot, then it gets more intense as you move out of the blind spot and then it gets lower as you move further away.
I think when comparing this to the sun there are lots of things worth considering from many different angles.
1. To say this threat is nothing compared to the risks we face from the sun, completely ignores the fact that we have millions of years of evolutionary exposure to sunlight and because of that fact the immune system has become way more acclimated to dealing with it's carcinogenic properties. Of course, our immune systems aren't perfect but considering how much more exposure we all are to sunlight than any other carcinogen, if we didn't have a strong evolutionary tolerance to it; melanoma would obviously be the #1 leading cause of cancer. But it's not.
Now in hindsight, what we don't have evolutionary genetic tolerance for is microwave radiation. While i'm not in anyway an expert in biology or the physics of light, I do have enough insight to know that we should never underestimate the possible negative outcome of any potential problem when it's still just a mathematical theory we're playing with rather than a reality of nature we're all dying from.
I mean, we underestimate and miscalculate these kind of things all the time and it's kind of counter productive that the answer to the question of "When will we learn to stop doing this?" is always "Once, we underestimate and miscalculate, discover our error and become smarter because of it"...
2. The bigger issue this has when compared to the sun is the fact that all of us can agree while there is such a thing as getting too much sun. However, there isn't such a thing as internet that is too fast. We essentially all want to be able to download terabytes at the speed of light so that we can one day be on Mars and be able to seamlessly stream Netflix from Earth while were up there. And while of course there is a speed of light limitation of like i believe 8 minutes, that doesn't mean people aren't going to complain why they cant instantly stream from there.
This is what we need to understand about this issue. There is no limitation to how much radio wave radiation we want when we are thinking of that radiation in the language of the internet, as "Content".
3. When it comes to protecting ourselves from this, if it actually does turn out to be a substantial problem. All the solutions suck.
The radio wave EM shielding for example protects you from the potentially harmful waves. But it also creates like I said, a deadzone.
So putting it in your walls of your home, because you don't want you and your entire family constantly being exposed to the cell tower that might only be a football field length away from your house (as the one near my house is), also means you can't receive or make calls to and from your cell phone. This is a deal breaker for most people, and as far as i'm aware RF shielding isn't like sunscreen where it blocks out most of the harmful light while letting in the some you want. It's an all or nothing solution.
Which is why I think putting the RF shield in clothing like a hoodie would be an interesting venture idea. The shielding protects your body, while your phone is still outside of the shielded area. (although this obviously doesn't protect your face and i don't think RF shielded masks are going to find a market other than antifa)
And another reason why the implications of this would really suck, is that it means were stuck with crappy wires and the companies who own the rights to pumping internet to and fro over them. I am mostly looking forward to 5G because I view it as the primary means we are going to get ourselves out of the era of shitty slow internet and greedy cable company overlords who wouldn't know how to disrupt something if a tv with rainbow bars on the screen hit them in the face.
If you want to counter that you can't just pile up small studies that might be hinting at possibility that there might be some other effect.
You need a smoking gun. Single study, but bulletproof and large, showing strong effect. Everything else will be dismissed as "maybe, possibly, but most likely not really".
As an illustration, people have used obviously bogus examples like, in the past 100 years, piracy has risen. So has global warming. Therefore, pirates cause global warming.
Unless a 5G study specifically addresses the mechanism, and how non-ionizing radiation can cause damage to DNA, or has a very large correlation established that does a very good job of controlling for other factors, these studies will be dismissed out of hand.
What's even scarier is that this sort of an effect will not be found in a standard Ames test and also is unlikely to be found in highly controlled lab settings, since it requires a second factor - a contaminating primary mutagen - to manifest its effect.
Actually you got that wrong. This was related to real piracy (i.e. people with eye patches on ships robbing other ships) which went down, not software piracy. So the decline of pirates is related to global warming.
(The example came from Bobby Henderson, the founder of the flying spaghetti monster.)
(i) it seems this "non-ionizing radiation" has many parameters that can modify significantly the way it propagates in the environment (and in human bodies), so I'm not sure speaking of non-ionizing radiation in a general way is sufficient to address the problem
(ii) following this reasoning and your comment about "a single study, bulletproof and large": it does seem that it is in fact what is being asked by this group - that time be given for a meaningful and large study of the specific radiation from 5G tech
and therefore requiring that kind of large study before widespread implementation actually seems warranted.
It's not hard to find 250 wackos if you pull random scientists working in random fields at random institutions. Most have no better way to know safety of 5G than I do.
Now, there's obviously some frequency band where we get into health risks. 5G jumps us from single-digit GHz to double-digit -- I'd guess you'd have to go at least past visible light before you run into safety issues, at least barring extremely high levels of exposure. Intuitively, it seems to me like that ought to still be safe, but I'm no expert.
But an appeal to experts -- with no real experts behind it -- doesn't do it for me. Neither does an appeal to papers based on volume, without a clear description of what they found and how. Most science is junk science.
https://emfscientist.org/index.php/emf-scientist-appeal
Likewise for a list of relevant papers:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/19CbWmdGTnnW1iZ9pxlxq1ssAdYl...
Is Harvard Medical School an institution you recognize and trust? Columbia? Monash? McGill? Can we dispense with the tired ad hominems and talk about science? A self-proclaimed guess from a self-proclaimed non-expert seems ill placed in a credentialist diatribe.
0: http://energymedicineri.com/
If a faculty at HMS signed on, that'd be okay. If a ransom person with a degree from HMS does, that doesn't carry the same weight. I was pretty clear about "at" versus "from."
Science isn't a democracy.
After their primary university admissions scandal? Absolutely not, not that I ever trusted them in the first place (Memphis has a far better medical program.)
They receive A LOT of funding from cellular companies in particular, any research that throws doubt on 5G could lead to their funding being pulled. Not only this, but most of the interesting 5G hardware is coming from the cellular companies on loan.
My point is: You have a perfect storm for a rushed technology with potential for health risks. Almost every Country on the planet is investing lots of money into 5G and the technology itself requires a significant number more cellular towers to be built in closer proximity to people.
If there is any genuine question about 5G's safety, I would rather stay on the side of caution. It's not as if people will kill over if they don't have 5G immediately. Not only this, the technology will be more mature and the price will likely come down for infrastructure development.
So I guess the moral of the story is "don't believe everything you see in pop science magazines," although I would have hoped nobody did to begin with(?)
I highly doubt that 26+ GHz will receive much attention. You have no range, you need line of sight otherwise it won't work. At least 3.4GHz (and the other LTE bands) don't have that issue.
People get fooled by "large lists of peer-reviewed publications". Peer review is a lowest level quality mark for a piece of science. It means that hopefully it's not complete bullshit. Sometimes it still is, because noone can forbid you to call your journal "peer-reviewed" with your own weak standards of peer review. And sometimes credible journals make huge mistakes (remember the "Wakefield-study"...). Even with only well-performed, non-flawed studies you'll always have some studies saying that something is there that actually isn't. That's simple statistics, you'll have outliers.
"Here's a large number of studies saying X" is meaningless in a topic where a very large number of studies have been done. What you need is systematic reviews of the literature that not only count studies, but evaluate their quality and combine their results.
Also it's not true that "nobody knows why" cancer incidence has risen. It's a mixture of people getting older and diagnosis getting better. Not mysterious at all.
I'm surprised this statement passed muster on HN where there must be some number of PhDs now working in other fields. Certainly the ones I know wouldn't take kindly to the idea that somehow, just because they left academia their research can be easily and completely dismissed.
For example, eating barbecued meat causes cancer, but it we don't ban it.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU5XkhUGzBs
Sure, but the absolute risk is very low and it's probably zero if you add veggies to your meal. And also causality was not established, observational studies on this topic suffering from the healthy-user bias in addition to a lot of confounding factors and in general for nutrition the evidence is very low quality, compared with medication research.
This isn't a boolean. Saying that "this or that causes cancer" is meaningless without giving the risk factor, which has to be statistically significant and in case of meat it isn't.
In other words if you want to compare the risks of 5G with anything, I think nutrition is a really poor choice due to the low standards for evidence we have and due to all the confounding factors and biases.
Not sure if assessing the safety of 5G is easier, but at the very least you can do double-blind studies. At the very least you can compare it with the placebo effect. Which in nutrition isn't possible.
The sixth link in the article will get you what you want: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138357421...
Self-evaluation of quality is not quite a systemic review of literature. Neither is research on drosophila melanogaster quite in the same ballpark as research on homo sapiens.
By combining the results of the best studies and giving us an overview of them, meta-analyses really are the best studies we have.
"In addition to providing an estimate of the unknown common truth, meta-analysis has the capacity to contrast results from different studies and identify patterns among study results, sources of disagreement among those results, or other interesting relationships that may come to light in the context of multiple studies." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-analysis
With a potentially large # of studies on a specific subject, some of which may be contradicting, meta-analysis will be done.
Whether by accredited scientists, or institutions who do this on a professional basis with open and established criteria and consistency in approach (though there may still be flaws in the approach); and/or by individuals when confronted with large # of studies, when I feel bias would almost certainly be the primary driver.
While you absolutely cannot eliminate the latter, it feels it would be foolish to dismiss or eliminate the former.
As long as:
a) World is a bit tricky (phenomena difficult to define and isolate; limitations in equipment and measurements; limitations in humans)
b) We use statistical analysis as primary differentiator of significance There will continue to be contradicting studies.
Not disagreeing it's always better to improve studies and experiments, but it feels like meta-analysis of multiple studies is not just a necessary evil, but a good and desirable next step.
Thoughts?
Yeah, a meta analysis is only as good as its inputs. Unfortunately many meta analysises read like "we found 20 studies on the topic, but 19 of them are crap and the one good study didn't really ask the question we're asking, so we really don't know". And yeah, there's considerable wiggle room for a meta analysis. But I don't think you'll find any serious scientist doubting the usefulness of a meta analysis per se.
With a meta-analysis, you do have to look at the whole thing. Phrased like, "when controlled for.." you can't control for some things over 10 different studies. You need to read how they attempted to control for things and why the came to their conclusions.
They are still valuable and you shouldn't just chuck them in the bin.
Peer reviewed used to be the epitome of proof, now it's been relegated to base minimum?
Are you saying that consensus is no longer considered valid proof? (not that I disagree, it's just that this is a rare argument in my experience)
https://www.iarc.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E.pdf
"Lyon, France, May 31, 2011 ‐‐ The WHO/International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B), based on an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer1 , associated with wireless phone use."
Even if it was "carcinogenic to humans", there's a lot of things that are vital to modern society which fall into that category. It's then up to the regulators to guess an "acceptable" limit of exposure.
"Joel M. Moskowitz, PhD, is director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been translating and disseminating the research on wireless radiation health effects since 2009 after he and his colleagues published a review paper that found long-term cell phone users were at greater risk of brain tumors. His Electromagnetic Radiation Safety website has had more than two million page views since 2013. He is an unpaid advisor to the International EMF Scientist Appeal and Physicians for Safe Technology."
This article does not represent scientific consensus. It is alarmist, linking nearly every report that supports the author's point of view and offering no opposing points of view. This is not journalism.
[0]: Not that the anti-wireless people are particularly influential right now, but they're fairly close to antivacciene people in how they perceive the world with an almost complete absence of rational thought.
This started as early as CT, then DECT, GSM, 3G, 4G and now 5G.
After 30+ years of having consumer grade wireless telephony we are still debating whether the radio signals have any negative effect on living beings.
If we can't draw any conclusion from a sample size that big, then I must conclude that the effects of EM-radiation are so minimal (if any at all), that it is not something I should worry about.
Edit: typo
Same with asbestos, lead in gas/paint, uranium lipsticks, &c.
Whereas with smoking we can see over ten times higher risks for certain types of cancer-related deaths. That doesn't mean there's no effect due to mobile phones, but I think if it were remotely comparable to smoking we'd see a significant impact by now.
I was debating a different technology with a friend and he made such a comment, but my response was that the frequency, scope and importance of past technological advancements won't hold a candle to those of the future.
Something which was true/false for 10 years is more likely to remain so for the next 10 than another thing which was true/false for 1 year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
What I find particularly troubling: 4G is for me already more than good enough. 5G is really not so well thought out. They require a lot more cells. The exposure is much higher... They cost more (?).
Why are we having this technology?
Also, what has lead in gasoline to do with EM-radiation?
Cancer rates are rising and we're not sure why. Is that acceptable?
That said, I am sure there are structures in the body that can selective absorb or react to non-ionizing radiation that we may not yet know about. Our cellular mechanisms are impressively complex.
https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html
* People get older
* Cancer detection is improving
* Cancer mortality is sinking
It is a good thing that we spend research effort into identifying why this is happening.
All I'm saying is that I have concluded, for myself, that EM-radiation is the least of my worries when it comes to negative effects (including cancer).
The symptom isn't classified as a disease at where I live, so it's hard to get any decent medial treatments and I'm afraid 5G might harm me even harder when higher frequency typically makes me feel worse without a way to get away from it.
Sadly the only other mention I've ever seen is the fictional series "Better Call Saul". And the character's suffering was depicted as entirely mental.
While I understand that you might want to silence vocal minorities for business reasons, I've only stated facts from my past 20 years of life.