A Balanced Look At Cellphone Radiation

A month back we discussed an article in GQ on the alarmist side of the cellphone-radiation question. Now reader pgn674 passes along a PopSci feature article looking at the current state of cellphone radiation research. It profiles people who claim to be electro-hypersensitive, "who are reluctant to subject themselves to hours in an electronics-laden facility" for studies. The limited research on that condition is still showing that sufferers, in blind tests, are unable to detect radiation at levels better than chance. The article also touches on the relationship of non-ionizing radiation to cancer. The conclusion is that while it seems unlikely high-frequency fields in consumer devices directly cause cancer, they might promote it, and might also indirectly cause other health deficits beyond simply heating nearby tissue — though one skeptical researcher cautions, "The gap between a biological effect and an adverse health effect is a big one."

Typical

[Anonymous Coward]

who are reluctant to subject themselves to hours in an electronics-laden facility

Which just goes to show how much the tinfoil hat actively interferes with the thought process.... In order to conduct a valid scientific experiment on such matters, it requires a room which is 100% free from other radiation sources. Which means the rooms in the facility are anything BUT "electronics-laden".

But we're already fully aware that being vulnerable to EMR is the very least of these people's problems, which are usually only solved through extensive use of mind-altering drugs.

Reasons I'm Not Reading This

[Anonymous Coward]

1: "GQ"
2: "PopSci"
3: The entire summary reads like a news announcer sounds. I can actually hear in my head as I read it, my inner voice's pitch changes exactly like a certain bored-out-of-her-skull Asian Reporter.
4: kdawson :(
5: ...
6: Profit! (wouldn't be a list on /. without it!)

"unable to detect radiation"?

[BitterKraut]

So x-rays must be completely harmless if I can't "detect" them? Think of airplane noise, as it is permanent near large airports. Would be ridiculous to claim it seeds tumors in human bodies. It just disturbs attentiveness, concentration, calmness, sleep. If you are a sensitive person, these disturbances may severely affect your quality of life. Noises can be heard, i.e., "detected", so there's no dispute as to the possible harm they can do. But how adequate are these criteria? Consciousness is not a system monitor. It is a bonus that some species were endowed with. The human body is not a robot. Our physiological systems were not designed. They're not just modules with interfaces. Their behaviour is not just determined by a set of formal rules and a specified input. They're not circuit boards. When our bodies and their functions gradually evolved in nature's history, they were not exposed to electromagnetic fields of the quality that is in question now. As long as life is not understood (and it isn't, unless we'll have succeeded in building living cells from scratch), it is not unreasonable to be cautious. The cancer claim is notorious because any lesser claim is not shocking enough to make it to the news. It is a suicide bomb of reputation: You get some attention at the expense of credibility.

My take

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

A critic in me reckons that increased cancer levels (if there are any) may be attributed to overall worsened environment conditions (pollution, etc.), decreased food quality (and mass usage of food additives) and mass hysteria related to the risks of adverse health effects caused by EMF radiation.

Anyway, I really believe anyone can make his life safer (as for now God really knows if EMF radiation can interact with our own electric fields) by using mobile phone as little as possible - I speak on my cellular for no more than two minutes a day.

Re:On the other hand...

[Antaeus Feldspar]

The problem is that class-action litigation is also an industry, and that industry is just as capable of commissioning "studies" not to discover scientific truth but to create a useful appearance.

In fact, I'd say litigation is more capable of doing so, given that they can win victories far more easily with useful appearances. If "Big Doohickey" discovers that doohickeys causes a serious risk of seizure, they will have to try to keep everyone fooled that there's no danger, for as long as they're selling doohickeys, and they know that at any time, some researcher will look for themselves and discover the truth. By contrast, if the law firm of Dewey, Cheatham and Howe says "hey, we've got a bunch of loonballs here who claim doohickeys are causing seizures; I think we could rake in a lot of cash from the pockets of Big Doohickey if we represent them in court," they can commission scientific-looking studies which appear to show a doohickey-seizure connection, and there's probably less than twenty people in the world who have to be sold on the idea that these studies have some sort of validity: those are the judge(s) or jur(ies) hearing the case. And they only have to keep up the appearance long enough to get a favorable verdict or settlement.

The litigation industry definitely produced dodgy scholarship to push a lawsuit in the case of the MMR vaccine (think Andrew Wakefield)) and there's evidence strongly suggesting that it has done so in the case of the alleged cellphone-cancer effect. For example, take a look at the Myung meta-review of cell-phone/cancer studies [sciencebasedmedicine.org], where the author declared that even though the overall review of the chosen studies had failed to establish any sort of convincing evidence that cell phones caused cancer, a "sub-group" of "high-quality" studies established a "significant positive association". What the meta-review may have failed to call attention to, however, was that seven out of the eight "high-quality" studies were all done by the same researchers, a group led by Dr. Lennart Hardell, and that Hardell is frequently retained as an expert witness in lawsuits against cell-phone companies. Just because "the cellphone industry" isn't the industry funding a study, doesn't mean that study isn't funded by an industry or twisted to serve that industry's agenda.