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Cellphones Medicine Hardware Technology

Study of Cellphone Risks Finds 'Some Evidence' of Link To Cancer, At Least In Male Rats (nytimes.com) 153

Posted by BeauHD from the many-caveats-apply dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: For decades, health experts have struggled to determine whether or not cellphones can cause cancer. On Thursday, a federal agency released the final results of what experts call the world's largest and most costly experiment to look into the question. The study originated in the Clinton administration, cost $30 million and involved some 3,000 rodents. The experiment, by the National Toxicology Program, found positive but relatively modest evidence that radio waves from some types of cellphones could raise the risk that male rats develop brain cancer. But he cautioned that the exposure levels and durations were far greater than what people typically encounter, and thus cannot "be compared directly to the exposure that humans experience." Moreover, the rat study examined the effects of a radio frequency associated with an early generation of cellphone technology, one that fell out of routine use years ago. Any concerns arising from the study thus would seem to apply mainly to early adopters who used those bygone devices, not to users of current models.

The lowest level of radiation in the federal study was equal to the maximum exposure that federal regulations allow for cellphone users. That level of exposure rarely occurs in typical cellphone use, the toxicology agency said. The highest level was four times higher than the permitted maximum. The rodents in the studies were exposed to radiation nine hours a day for two years -- far longer even than heavy users of cellphones. For the rats, the exposures started before birth and continued until they were about 2 years old. Some 2 to 3 percent of the male rats exposed to the radiation developed malignant gliomas, a deadly brain cancer, compared to none in a control group that received no radiation. Many epidemiologists see no overall rise in the incidence of gliomas in the human population. "The study also found that about 5 to 7 percent of the male rats exposed to the highest level of radiation developed certain heart tumors, called schwannomas, compared to none in the control group," the NYT reports.

It's worth nothing that the rats were exposed to radiation at a frequency of 900 megahertz, the frequency used in the second generation of cellphones that prevailed in the 90s, when the study was first conceived. For comparison, fourth generation (4G) and fifth generation (5G) phones employ much higher frequencies, which are "far less successful at penetrating the bodies of humans and rats," the NYT reports.
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Study of Cellphone Risks Finds 'Some Evidence' of Link To Cancer, At Least In Male Rats More

Study of Cellphone Risks Finds 'Some Evidence' of Link To Cancer, At Least In Male Rats

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  • So you radiated the rats way more than even a cellphone addict teen could be and they're not conclusive because of that?

    Then why the fuck did you do it?

    • So you radiated the rats way more ... why the fuck did you do it?

      Take it you've never visited DC or NYC.

    • This is one reason why I sometimes don't read the articles.

      Someone like you will always come around and summarize it in one or two sentences. Even if your summary is inaccurate, I'm unlikely to stop using my phones. I'm at so much risk from developing cancer from so many other factors that I would be lucky if I only got cancer from my phone.

      And what about all the WiFi signals constantly entering my head and passing through my body?

      What if someday we find out that low doses of radiation from phones actuall

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by N1AK ( 864906 )
      Two reasons for starters: Because if they don't detect a significant risk at that level of exposure in rats then it makes it relatively safe to assume there wouldn't be a high risk at lower levels in humans. It might also impact on decisions about what level of emissions should be acceptable in future. Are you really struggling that hard to come up with a reason?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      That's like they do. Turns out a high enough dosage of pretty much anything over a long enough period of time will give you cancer. Oddly it only seems to affect male rats that way and even though they get cancer the rats live longer than the control group. That's odd. Someone should probably look into all that a bit more.
  • Now, all the morons that go on and on about cell phone radiation in the first place and wouldn't understand the vast majority of the article and therefore won't read it will have all the evidence they need to support their claims.

    A better headline would have focused on saying "Cell phone radiation safe for humans".

    But if you don't believe me... ask the Anti-vaxxers about scientific proof published as headlines.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by rl117 ( 110595 )
      "Cell phone radiation safe for humans". No scientist would ever say that. Science is about falsifying hypotheses, not proving hypotheses. You can prove experimentally that a hypothesis is incorrect, but you can never prove that it is correct. See Karl Popper. So you can never prove that something does no harm, but you can prove that it causes harm under certain conditions. We already know that microwaves are harmful, that's not in question. The question is the degree of harm under certain conditions.

      • "Cell phone radiation safe for humans". No scientist would ever say that. Science is about falsifying hypotheses, not proving hypotheses. You can prove experimentally that a hypothesis is incorrect, but you can never prove that it is correct. See Karl Popper. So you can never prove that something does no harm, but you can prove that it causes harm under certain conditions. We already know that microwaves are harmful, that's not in question. The question is the degree of harm under certain conditions.

        In that case, no scientist would ever say "drinking water is safe for humans" because of the minuscule but real chance of it killing you.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rl117 ( 110595 )
          Correct. Think about it, how would you prove it to be safe? You can test it for various things: heavy metals, phosphates, nitrates, salinity, acidity, alkalinity, see if it kills fish (they actually do this, by running the water through a set of fish tanks to pick up on any sources of acute toxicity). But all those tests are checking specific things or conditions. You can't check for every possible contaminant. There are unknowns. It is logically not possible to say that it is safe. It is only possib
      • Ok... I'm not even sure where to start on this one.

        You missed the entire point. It was about the headline which is as far as most people will read. If you don't like the wording of the headline, offer an alternative. I was tired and didn't take the time to consider that people on Slashdot would actually go into a whole summary about scientific method.

        I also am pretty damn sure that whoever wrote the headline was not the scientists performing the research. I could be wrong... but ok.

        I'll happily yield and sa

    • That headline would be completely inaccurate. It's found a small risk, but not nonexistent.

  • >"far less successful at penetrating the bodies of humans and rats"
    Really?

    Google indicates that 3G typically operates between 1.8GHz and 2.5GHz, 4G between 2 and 8GHz, and 5G between 0.6Ghz and 6GHz, as well as 24-86 GHz

    For comparison, microwave ovens, famous for cooking things from the inside out, operate at 2.45GHz. Now, that's tuned to be really well absorbed by oils and water for the purpose of cooking - but it seems to me that 3G, 4G, and the lower range of 5G all straddle that frequency quite nic

    • Wrong on all counts.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Ozoner ( 1406169 ) on Thursday November 01, 2018 @11:25PM (#57579122)

      Microwaves DON'T heat from the inside out:

      see Wickipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      "This idea arises from heating behavior seen if an absorbent layer of water lies beneath a less absorbent drier layer at the surface of a food; in this case, .... etc"

      The Microwave is NOT "tuned to be really well absorbed by oils and water for the purpose of cooking".

      again...

      " It is a common misconception that microwave ovens heat food by operating at a special resonance of water molecules in the food. As noted microwave ovens can operate at many frequencies"

      and

      "....the microwave oven's operating frequency has absolutely nothing to do with water or any other material resonant frequency whatsoever. Any coincidence is coincidental. The ISM (industrial-scientific-medical) band frequencies given out by the FCC were determined by regulatory/bureaucratic/interference considerations not by physics".

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        This is a prefect example as to why even WikiPedia says to not use it's site for research because it is edited by anyone with a internet connection without oversight.
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academic_use

        The commonly used frequency of microwaves, 2.45 gigahertz, is easily absorbed by water, fat, and sugar. "The waves are at the right frequency to penetrate deep into food and they deliver cooking power primarily to the food's water content. Water-free solids barely absorb microwaves." That's wh

        • You have it exactly backwards:

          Yes, the commonly used frequency of microwaves (2.4 GHz) is easily absorbed by water, fat, and sugar.

          But the frequency is well removed from maximum absorption point. The frequency band was selected because the optimum frequency would prevent penetration beneath the surface of most foods.

          And FWIW, industrial microwave ovens use various other frequency bands for the same reason.

    • So you're saying these advanced rats were using microwaves also?

    • Microwaves don't really operate at 2.45GHz. They operate at 2.45GHertzish. Their tuning varies between 'crap' and 'god-awful' - the magnetron is a means of generating microwave energy at very high power levels, not at precise frequency, and magnetrons intended for microwave ovens are not manufactured to the high tolerances expected in communications.

  • Most people use their smartphones for data/texting these days, rather than voice calls. You'd assume there'd be an increased incidence of hand cancer if modern cell phone radio emissions were carcinogenic.

    • Most people use their smartphones for data/texting these days, rather than voice calls.

      Even when I am voicing, I put the phone on speaker and hold it about 30 cm in front of my face. I never put it up to my ear unless I need both hands on the steering wheel.

  • The article is full of guano to say that 4G is only on higher frequencies. 1G analog was on 800 MHz. 2G went on all bands, as did 3G and 4G. So 4G LTE is on 600 MHz up to 2.6 GHz. 5G goes on higher frequencies too. But the old 800 MHz licenses are still in use, not for analog or even 2G.
    Fools think that cell towers are dangerous. But if the antenna is up a tower, it's out of your way, and if you're near it, the phone near your head transmits with less power. The phone near your head uses maximum power when

  • Two years is not very long... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Harvey Manfrenjenson ( 1610637 ) on Thursday November 01, 2018 @11:05PM (#57579066)

    The rats in the study were only exposed to cell phone radiation for 2 years, and I'm assuming they were sacrificed at the end of the 2 years. (Rats only live 3-4 years anyway at best). How long does it take humans to develop cancer after exposure to a carcinogen? Quite a lot longer than that, in some cases. Sometimes it's decades.

    I realize that there were factors in this study which would tend to overestimate the risk (e.g., intensity of radiation and daily length of exposure), but the limited length of the study would seem to introduce an error in the other direction.

    • but the limited length of the study would seem to introduce an error in the other direction.

      As you said yourself there's differences between human and rats when it comes to cancer gestation. However rats are none the less a great model for a carcinogen's behaviour in humans, and incidentally the faster development of problems is precisely why they typically get used in studies in the first place.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      The general idea is that if you expose a rat to something for half its lifespan, that's like exposing a human to it for half their lifespan. The proportionality is tied up with all kinds of things like how the animal's cellular repair mechanisms work, how fast their cells divide, etc.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Misagon ( 1135 )

      In the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were dosed with radioactivity from US atomic bombs in WWII, a statistically significant link between the bombs and increase in brain cancer appeared first forty years afterwards ...

  • Important to remember that in statistical studies (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Thursday November 01, 2018 @11:17PM (#57579096)
    The confidence interval is 98%, sometimes 95%. That is, just by random chance, 2% or 5% of the time, a study will turn up a correlation which doesn't really exist. The die rolls just happened to come up snake eyes that time. The chances increase the more correlations a study looks for. Like the massive Netherlands study a couple decades back which found a strong correlation between cell phone radiation and certain types of cancer. But it turned out they looked at thousands of possible correlations, so just by chance alone you'd have expected them to find a few hundred random correlations, with a few "strong" ones (strong by chance, not because it was real). Like if you throw a thousand darts at a dartboard, just by pure chance a few will hit the bullseye; not because you're good at throwing darts, but because of random chance.

    If (as the media tends to do) you then choose to publicize the studies finding a correlation while ignoring all the studies finding no correlation, then you're committing confirmation bias [wikipedia.org]. Studies which find no positive result still generate valid data. And dismissing them in favor of studies with a positive result is a statistical and logical error. To properly assess what's going on, you need to compare the number of positive result studies with the number of negative result studies. And given the huge number of negative result studies, the greater likelihood here is that this is one of the studies which found a correlation due to a random blip, not something that's real.

    Obligatory XKCD comic [xkcd.com].

    • We have back generated a study from the 19th century - zero cases of cancer for cell phone use pre 1900s.

      Confirmation bias!

  • Too many damn rats in this world anyway.

  • Control Group (Score:5, Informative)

    by cirby ( 2599 ) on Thursday November 01, 2018 @11:24PM (#57579116)

    There's a note by one of the reviewers who points out that the control rats in the group that were compared to the "high radiation" male rats had a lower than expected number of gliomas, which is part of how they had "more gliomas" in that group.

    The number of male rats who had gliomas actually had a fairly typical number of gliomas for rats.

    There was also a bit of fudging up above: while 3000 or so rats were studied, they broke them into smaller numbers with different dose rates. There were only 94 rats in the group of "high exposure" rats.

    Basically, instead of a "3000 rat" study, it was a whole bunch of smaller studies. Treated as a 3000-rat whole, there was no effect, statistically.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The fact that it happens only in a weird group like 'male rats' and the effect size being small is a good clue that we're seeing a statistical anomaly. It's normal to randomly get results like this every so often and it has to be weighed against all negative findings (which, one might hope, would be getting pre-registered).

      • The females had heart cancer just like the males... like 5% of them or something. The pregnant and baby rats had low body weights. But then the exposed male rats lived longer... so something weird is going on there.

        "Did NTP find health effects other than cancer?
        NTP found lower body weights among newborn
        rats and their mothers, especially when exposed to
        high levels of RFR during pregnancy and lactation,
        yet these animals grew to normal size. "

        "In addition to seeing tumors in the male rats with
        higher exposures

  • No relevance to human exposure (Score:3)

    by TubeSteak ( 669689 ) on Thursday November 01, 2018 @11:24PM (#57579118) Journal

    I remember digging into the preliminary draft that's mentioned in TFA. Here are the two highlights:

    NTP conducted the studies in phases, including several phases to determine the correct field strengths that would not raise the animal's body temperature.

    They were exposed for 10-minute on, 10-minute off increments, totaling a little more than nine hours [of radiation over an 18 hour period per day] from before birth through two years of age.

    First they had to figure out the "correct field strength" that wouldn't cook the rodents.

    Then they cycled that just-below-cooking field on and off over the course of 18 hours per day, for two years, over the entire body, beginning (for the rats) in the womb

    AFACT, there's nothing in the published materials that implies a relationship exists between the study and human health..

    • "the type of brain cancer
      observed is similar to a type of brain tumor linked to
      heavy cell phone use in some human studies."

      From the article: https://www.niehs.nih.gov/heal... [nih.gov]

      However, the studies question the long-held
      assumption that radio frequency radiation is of
      no concern as long as the energy level is low and
      does not significantly heat the tissues.
      Did NTP find health effects other than cancer?
      NTP found lower body weights among newborn
      rats and their mothers, especially when exposed to
      high levels of RFR du

  • Virtually everyone in the whole world uses mobile phones every day, young and old, rich, poor, etc. and they have done for decades. If phone radiation caused any significant health issues, we'd be able to see those pretty darn easily. Have we?

  • J. Frank Parnell : Ever been to Utah? Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense. Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have them, too. When they canceled the project it almost did me in. One day my mind was literally bursting. The next day - nothing. Swept away. But I showed them. I had a lobotomy in the end.

    Otto : Lobotomy? Isn't that for loonies?

    Parnell : Not

  • They also tried cats, frogs, mice, pigeons both male and female and whatever other animals they could get their hands on and male rats were the only ones that gave p0.05. Cherry picking at it's finest. If radio causes cancer then it does so regardless of species or gender. Stop beating this dead horse of a subject, there is an experiment that has been ongoing for a century now, to date involving 7 billion human test subjects. If radio was causing cancer it would be bloody obvious to everyone by now. If you

  • Poor rats! (Score:3)

    by Evtim ( 1022085 ) on Friday November 02, 2018 @04:04AM (#57579576)

    This reminds me of the joke about the wild rabbit and the one born in captivity, sharing the same cage in the lab. The wild one convinces the "old dog" to escape with him (cause he knows the inns and outs in the lab), promising to show him the best three things in a wild rabbit's life.

    First, they go to a cabbage filed. "That's number one", says the wild one. They eat to bursting. Then, they go to a carrot field. "That's number two, see how great it is" intones the wild rabbit. They eat more. Three, they go to the rabbit holes. Bunnies! Lots of them! Sex all night!! "That's the best part, number three" says the wild one. "What do you think". " I don't know man", replies the lab rabbit, "It's all pretty good, but I am going back". "Why!!!". "Well, mate, I am just dying for a cigarette!".

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Whew! So this will finally convince the people who think cellphones cause cancer that everything is OK, right? Right?
  • I sleep a lot deeper with the phone and wifi off. Live in the country side far from neighbours wifi. Wife notices it too. Haven't slept this well in about 17 years. Pretty amazing for my quality of life now that I've finally figured it out. I could also never understand why I slept so well at my parents cabin until I made this connection.

  • I think we can all agree that with modern Smartphones, their power and connectivity, human psyche is way more at risk than the odd and off chance that someone gets brain cancer from cellphone radiation. I'm noticing cognitive faults in myself that I don't relate to age alone but to excess computer, web and smart device usage. And I'm sure it's way worse for people not just stuck with slashdot but hooked on FB, Twitter and Instagram.
    Whenever I'm about to upgrade my phone I always consider a downgrade. And th

  • It's worth nothing that the rats were exposed to radiation at a frequency of 900 megahertz, the frequency used in the second generation of cellphones that prevailed in the 90s, when the study was first conceived. For comparison, fourth generation (4G) and fifth generation (5G) phones employ much higher frequencies, which are "far less successful at penetrating the bodies of humans and rats," the NYT reports.

    Study originated before 2000. They spent 30 million dollars. Studied 900 MHz phones. Now we are using the 5 GHz bands. So they need 150 million dollars, (five times higher frequency, they need fives times more funding) and another 18 years to study the link between new phones and rat cancer.

    They might need another 30 million dollars to study if the rats were "holding the phone right", if they were using iPhones

  • We seem fixated on the idea that everything new must be bad for us.
    So we have studies after studies showing that Cell phones usage isn't directly affecting our health. So they turned the study up to 11 to an unrealistic version of cell phone usage, and they see a slight change. Then we can all go yelling CELL PHONES ARE BAD FOR YOU!
    While you get more harmful affects from daily lives. Sunlight bad for you, lack of Sunlight bad for you. It almost seems like we as Animals have been surviving for billions o

    • You've stumbled upon the "MythBusters" aspect of modern pseudoscience. If you don't get the result you are looking for, just do whatever it takes to get it, and then claim victory.

  • Is there anything that won't give one cancer?

  • Unless you work for the cellphone industry, there is no harm in taking precautions. Even a bluetooth headset puts out far less power than your cellphone.
    At one time, people thought that Diethylstilbestrol, Thalidomide, and radium were safe.
  • Don't female rats spend a lot more time on the phone?

  • Was the energy transmitted in digital packets near the rats or were the cellphone radiation sources analog broadcast sources?

      If digital, what was the nature of the digital packet?

      It is conceivable that a digital non-stochastic regular pulse could cause more damage to organic systems which are used to bathing in stochastic (random) levels of radiation.

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