WHO: Cell phone use can increase possible cancer risk

[jteef]

By the way. There is this new thing on the net. It is called search engines. Google & Bing are 2. What is the purpose of a debate here in ATOT?

With overwhelming science favoring one side of this issue, it seems more prudent to debate the next step rather than to continually regress at the pleasure of the idiot.

How would we ever get the hydrogen bomb if we only spent our efforts proving that fission (still) worked.

 

[FoBoT]

who cares
i hope million of people get rid of their cell phones due to this huge risk of brain cancer

that's the ticket

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

The main question is: why does the WHO not feature this anywhere I can find on the website? I can't find anything from May 2011 related to cellphone usage, and the Fact Sheet on Cellphone use (written in 2010) reports no significant increase in either glioma or meningioma for 10 years' mobile phone usage. Also, CNN (aside from doing the excellent job of not reporting any of the sources they used for any of the data) reports:

"Results from the largest international study on cell phones and cancer was released in 2010. It showed participants in the study who used a cell phone for 10 years or more had doubled the rate of brain glioma, a type of tumor. To date, there have been no long-term studies on the effects of cell phone usage among children."

Given the lack of citations, I can only assume that they mean this study. And while the study shows that using a lot of call-time results in a large rise in glioma and meningioma risk, there is no evidence (in fact, evidence appears to be to the contrary) to show that anything but extraordinarily heavy use will produce such an effect.

Regardless, I think this is reckless and negligent to jump from such a study result to listing cellphone use as a carcinogen along with chloroform and engine exhaust (apparently). I say apparently because while it seems various blogs and news outlets have picked this up and run with it, nowhere can I see an actual press release attributable to the WHO. Nor can I find any notes from the WHO World Health Assembly relating to this subject.

EDIT: Finally found the press release on the IARC website, a branch of the WHO:

The evidence was reviewed critically, and overall evaluated as being limited2 among users of wireless telephones for glioma and acoustic neuroma, and inadequate3 to draw conclusions for other types of cancers. The evidence from the occupational and environmental exposures mentioned above was similarly judged inadequate. The Working Group did not quantitate the risk; however, one study of past cell phone use (up to the year 2004), showed a 40% increased risk for gliomas in the highest category of heavy users (reported average: 30 minutes per day over a 10‐year period).

'Limited evidence of carcinogenicity': A positive association has been observed between exposure to the agent and cancer for which a causal interpretation is considered by the Working Group to be credible, but chance, bias or confounding could not be ruled out with reasonable confidence.

'Inadequate evidence of carcinogenicity': The available studies are of insufficient quality, consistency or statistical power to permit a conclusion regarding the presence or absence of a causal association between exposure and cancer, or no data on cancer in humans are available.

The full study results are supposed to be out soon. Even with this data, however, I don't think this is a very good decision.

As someone who tragically lost a loved one to brain cancer ... I knew this 10 years ago.

Sorry, what does this have to do with the claim that cell phone usage has a causal relationship with brain cancer? And how did you know this?

 

[StrangerGuy]

Sad thing is millions of people like my (dense) father that have know squat what EM frequency is gonna believe RF radiation causes cancer like actual ionizing radiation because "the experts say so on TV".

 

[PsiStar]

With overwhelming science favoring one side of this issue, it seems more prudent to debate the next step rather than to continually regress at the pleasure of the idiot.

How would we ever get the hydrogen bomb if we only spent our efforts proving that fission (still) worked.

Maybe in my intent to be unclear, I was unclear. *I* do not believe that there is overwhelming science favoring one side of this issue. That is why I compared this argument to the global warming argument.

My reference to searching was to sort out a few facts ... cell phone freq bands & the like.

 

[ShawnD1]

I don't think that's the same thing.

Actually the light bulb is worse than the phone because the light bulb emits higher frequency radiation.

plank's law of being a pirate: energy is directly proportional to frequency. That means visible light is much worse than micro waves and radio waves. It also means the sun is a lot worse than a light bulb.
edit: the sun actually does cause cancer. we've known that for quite some time now

 

[Patranus]

This is the same ass clowns that thinks the United States has the 37th best health care in the world. LOL.

 

[Jaepheth]

Maybe it's not the radiation.

Maybe the plastic is being absorbed into the skin.

Or maybe it's the neodymium magnets in the speakers. Those have only been around since the 80s. Who knows what exposure to neodymium magnetic fields does after 30 to 40 years.

Or maybe it's the concentrated stupid coming out of the phone from what I imagine most phone conversations consist of. Has anyone ever done a study looking for a correlation between cancer rates and exposure to stupid/inane conversation?

 

[frostedflakes]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_2B_carcinogens

Coffee is on the same list apparently, lol.

 

[ShawnD1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_2B_carcinogens

Coffee is on the same list apparently, lol.

no biggie. the caffeine will cause heart failure before it causes cancer.

 

[silverpig]

So apparently the author of the study was on CBC radio here yesterday and said the WHO and the media distorted his findings.

If you rate carcinogens on a scale of 1-30 where 30 is the strength of cancer causing that heavy smoking is, and 1 is the lowest barely detectable level, the highest ranking of the heaviest users of cell phones ranked as a 2, and many people in that group were below 1.

The study concluded that the low usage users were not subject to higher levels of cancer, to within statistical significance.

It was not able to make the same determination for the highest usage participants, but it was also not able to say that they were subject to higher levels of cancer.

 

[ShawnD1]

It was not able to make the same determination for the highest usage participants, but it was also not able to say that they were subject to higher levels of cancer.

I think XKCD did a comic about this. Something like color of jelly beans vs cancer and it has frame after frame of "X color has no correlation" then at the end green does have a statistically significant difference. Last frame: green jelly beans cause cancer.
(hint: correlation does not mean causation)


I have a theory hypothesis. If you spend a lot of time on the phone, it probably means you have a lot of friends. Spending more time outside with friends = cancer.
Having lots of business contacts = you probably smoke a lot = more cancer

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

I have a theory hypothesis. If you spend a lot of time on the phone, it probably means you have a lot of friends. Spending more time outside with friends = cancer.
Having lots of business contacts = you probably smoke a lot = more cancer

Possibly. At the very least you would hope that the WHO uses good quality studies that corrects for such confounders, or has the data to correct itself. Which is another reason why I find it kind of strange how the WHO has done this without doing any of its own research, it seems.

 

[silverpig]

Possibly. At the very least you would hope that the WHO uses good quality studies that corrects for such confounders, or has the data to correct itself. Which is another reason why I find it kind of strange how the WHO has done this without doing any of its own research, it seems.

The WHO report said (AFAIK) that while they could rule out low usage groups from being at a higher risk of cancer, they couldn't do the same for the highest usage group. Thus, they put cell phones on a watch list. Seems fairly reasonable. Can't prove it doesn't cause cancer, so let's look at it some more.

The media turns that into OMG CELL PHONES WILL FRY YOUR BRAIN!!! xkcd did a comic about that too btw.

 

[BUTCH1]

How close are you sitting to your monitor?

The sun puts about 1350W/m^2 on the earth.

I've got about 1kW of radiation around me right now... just a quick guess.

About 2 feet and that comparison is useless as it does not operate at 2.5Ghz and its not 1 inch from my brain. I'm still not sold on the WHO's conclusions but your lumping ANY kind of radiation into the mix and it's not the same.

 

[DrPizza]

About 2 feet and that comparison is useless as it does not operate at 2.5Ghz and its not 1 inch from my brain. I'm still not sold on the WHO's conclusions but your lumping ANY kind of radiation into the mix and it's not the same.

More or less, all electromagnetic radiation IS the same stuff. The difference among the different types of the stuff is the frequency (and related energy.) There's nothing magical about 2.5 gigahertz. It's midway between 2.4 gigahertz and 2.6 gigahertz. Its energy is halfway between the energy of 2.4 gigahertz output and 2.6 gigahertz output. And, that energy is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the minimum amount of energy that's necessary to affect a genetic change which would lead to cancer under ANY known mechanisms.

I'll try an analogy. Think of your genetic material as being a big armor plated tank. Visible light would be like bullets. Most of the bullets aren't capable of damaging the tank... at all. A few of the most powerful bullets actually are capable of a tiny bit of damage, but damage nonetheless. Cannonballs are more capable; these would be like ultraviolet radiation. And, big ass missiles are even more capable yet - these are like xrays and gamma rays.

Now, in this analogy, what are the waves emitted from your phone like? Well, they'd be like packing peanuts. No, wait, that's too powerful. They're like the little tiny styrofoam balls that they stuff cheap stuffed animals with. Nope, that doesn't work either, because that's still a couple orders of magnitude too powerful. I guess the best I'm going to do here is say that cell phone radiation is like having little tiny styrofoam balls that are about the size of a grain of sand. And, you've got to damage the armor coating on the tank by shooting them - at the same speed the bullets were traveling at - at the tank.

So, could you actually do some damage to the tank with them? Sure - with gadzillions of them shot all at once. This would relate to the power output of the phone though. Your cell phone is only capable of sending out a few hundred of these tiny grain sized pieces of styrofoam per second, more or less in all directions, so the the closer you are to the tank, the more are going to hit it. Still, even if you were against the tank, there's not enough total energy to do anything to it with those styrofoam grains.

Any argument about it being 2.5 gigahertz is like saying that "well, maybe a 0.000100 meter styrofoam ball isn't going to damage the tank, but how about a 0.000101 meter styrofoam ball? Or a 0.0000999 meter styrofoam ball?

 

[Jeff7]

The WHO report said (AFAIK) that while they could rule out low usage groups from being at a higher risk of cancer, they couldn't do the same for the highest usage group. Thus, they put cell phones on a watch list. Seems fairly reasonable. Can't prove it doesn't cause cancer, so let's look at it some more.

The media turns that into OMG CELL PHONES WILL FRY YOUR BRAIN!!! xkcd did a comic about that too btw.

The Daily Show played some of the clips of the various news-like outlets.
Why is it that the comedy show seems to do better journalism and investigative reporting than the news outlets?
(Also unpleasant is when they say things I perceive to be utterly outlandish, but when I look into it a bit, it turns out that they're actually true.)


"In testing, Pill X was found to cause cancer in one out of 50 trillion trillion cells, which promptly resulted in the death of the cell in question."

The TV report would be, "Pill X could be a cancerous death sentence for your entire family!"