Cellphones possible cancer-causing agents

[marine1]

How about you address my points first? Are you going to advocate that people stop eating vegetables?

edit: here is something that your precious interphone study found

I'm sorry, but I just have to lolololololololol right now

Nobody is saying stop using them, smoking causes cancer and other diseases but we want to know the truth and some of us would want to make INFORMED decisions.

 

[mikeyb]

I'm not sure what to believe, one would think that there would be some substantial evidents by now, there are some people out there who spend all day on their phones.

But just in case I'm wrong: (I know it's hard to believe, but I've been wrong before )

I don't sleep next to my phone. I know that it's not pumping out much "electrical signal juices" while just idly sitting there, but sleeping next to one is just exposing yourself unnecessarily.

Don't phone when its not necessary (I rather sms and email)

 

[Archer]

Your grasping at straws so no.

Appeared does not sound as good as the 40% (verified fact) increased risk of brain cancer on the side you use your cellphone. Do you even know what the controversy around the Interphone study is about.

Ok troll, dont address my points. I even made the effort to go and read the Interphone study. If you are only going to say the same thing over and over there really is no point in discussing anything.

And as for the controversy, I assume you mean this the fact they admitted to being biased? And that the authors admit the study was not done over a long enough period?

admits that biases and errors may have limited the strength of the study and prevented a causal interpretation.

And again, correlation does not imply causation.

 

[Professor Farnsworth]

Simple physics is at work here people. I really cant believe this keeps popping up. There is simply not enough energy in your phone to do anything of significance to you. Nevermind that you need ionising radiation to cause cancer which your phone does not produce at all.

Next we'll be hearing that breathing leads to cancer since everyone that has cancer breathed their whole life

I fully agree - cell phones emit microwave radiation, which is non-ionizing. It might cause tissue close to the phone to heat up marginally (hence the studies on whether keeping a phone in the pocket decreases fertility [it has been shown that increased testicular temperature causes decreased sperm production]), though I doubt this is a significant amount, since the power levels we're dealing with are quite small (and intermittent).

 

[Necksy]

Whats new?

We all new about this & we continue to use them. So is this another Fixed scam to preserve the land line revenues?

 

[Tomtomtom]

They must be running out of no-phone control groups for these studies. And not using a cell phone today is arguably not a random choice.

It's like studying the effects of drinking alcohol on distant aspects of health -- you can easily find drinkers, but tee-totalers are quite hard to come by, and are usually tee-total for some REASON, which is self-selection and therefore NON-RANDOM. This confounds the results unless you know the reason and can control for it. Which you pretty much can't.

 

[bekdik]

Not having read the report, I'm curious as to the affect of using bluetooth or wire earphone has.

 

[icyrus]

Go read up on the Interphone study. It showed 40% increased risk of developing a tumor in heavy cellphone users on the side they use their cellphones.

You are a liar and a troll.

To anyone interested have a quick look through previous threads on this topic for an illustration of the type of person this troll is.
e.g.
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/332028-radiation-with-all-the-wireless-links

 

[icyrus]

Ah yes, thanks for linking to that. It was actually YOU who called me a liar. I have to apologise to Archer, he doesn't strike me as a bogus skeptic though he displays some of the signs he seems open to entertain something and change his opinion.

You on the other hand called me a liar without even showing that I lied. So I will say it again, **** off troll.

You mean other than misstating what a study actually found and calling everyone who is looking at established science "bogus skeptics"?

You are truly pathetic.

 

[icyrus]

"calling everyone who is looking at established science "bogus skeptics""
The fact that you can even say that means you don't know what a bogus skeptic is. Sorry dear but I look at real science.

Provide links to said real science then. You will be most unhappy to find that there is no real science supporting your ridiculous claims.

You are the pathetic one calling me a liar when you never even show I lied. Probably because you can't

As pointed out before:

The Interphone study also showed a clear link with a 40% increase in brain cancer rates on the side heavy cellphone users used their phone. How much more evidence do people need before they believe it.

On the interphone study:

The 13 nation INTERPHONE project - the largest study of its kind ever undertaken - has now been published and did not find a solid link between mobile phones and brain tumours.

The International Journal of Epidemiology published[24] a combined data analysis from a multi national population-based case-control study of glioma and meningioma, the most common types of brain tumour.

The authors reported the following conclusion:

"Overall, no increase in risk of glioma or meningioma was observed with use of mobile phones. There were suggestions of an increased risk of glioma at the highest exposure levels, but biases and error prevent a causal interpretation. The possible effects of long-term heavy use of mobile phones require further investigation."

In the press release[dead link] accompanying the release of the paper, Dr Christopher Wild, Director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) said:

"An increased risk of brain cancer is not established from the data from Interphone. However, observations at the highest level of cumulative call time and the changing patterns of mobile phone use since the period studied by Interphone, particularly in young people, mean that further investigation of mobile phone use and brain cancer risk is merited."

 

[Gargmel]

I as a smoker demand all cellphones to be banned in public places and giant warning signs to be plastered all over them. I also think anybody using cellphones near children should be heavily fined. Hehe, just kidding but it does remind of of the time when the first bad press came out about ciggarettes..

 

[icyrus]

The wiki link again. You never gave me a chance to respond to it first before calling me a lier.
HINT: Wikipedia is not a good source.

The same old bull**** from trolls everywhere. Wikipedia is cited so please give this tired claptrap a rest.

They should not be reporting on original research first of all as this is against their policy. If you read my previous posts you'll see why it says this. As I said the authors' conclusions were basically that people are too stupid to know which side they use their cellphones most often. That is just a stupid conclusion. The study DOES show a 40% increase, FACT!!! The authors are not the only ones who can interpret their data.

So you dismiss the authors and other respected scientific institutions' conclusions on the study. Care to link to someone you do agree with's conclusions and qualifications? Or are we just meant to take your word for it?

And despite all this I still can't help but notice that you haven't posted and links to scientific evidence that supports your tripe. Can't say I'm surprised but you could at least try prove me wrong.

 

[Jab]

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/06/the_bride_of_the_son_of_the_revenge_of_c.php

I've caught some flak before over things I've written about the almost certainly nonexistent link between cell phones and cancer. Actually, it's not the kind of flak you probably think, unless you've been a long time reader and remember the relevant posts. You'd think it would be believers attacking the mean old skeptic for denying a link between cell phone radiation and cancer, thus making me (obviously) a shill for big telecom. Actually, it was flak from one physicist and at least a couple of skeptics, who didn't like that I actually left open the small possibility that it could be possible that there is a link. The problem that irritated the crap out of me was not so much that these skeptics make the argument that it's physically impossible for cell phone radiation to cause cancer. A viable argument to that effect can be made based on how low the energy emitted by cell phones is. No, what irritated the crap out of me is that they made these arguments based on a painfully simplistic view of how cancer originates in which they assume that it's physically impossible for something to cause cancer if it doesn't break chemical bonds, which is an idea that's so 1990s. There's so much more to carcinogenesis these days than breaking chemical bonds in DNA and causing mutations. There are metabolic changes, epigenetics, and potentially a whole host of other mechanisms that we don't understand yet, and, unfortunately, these dismissals of a possible link were often based on a high school level understanding of cancer biology.

Still, despite my trying to keep an open mind on the matter, I also don't want my mind to be so open that my brains fall out, so to speak. Even accounting for the newer, richer, and more complex understanding of carcinogenesis that has emerged over the last decade, I still have to concede that, from a strictly physical, physics- and biology-based perspective, given the low energy emitted by cell phones, the chances that they can do anything to cells that would result in cancer are vanishingly small, Thus, a link between cell phones and cancer is incredibly implausible from a strictly basic science point of view. Not homeopathy-level implausible, admittedly, but nonetheless mighty implausible indeed. Nor is the epidemiological evidence particularly convincing, as I've discussed in my usual Orac-ian prose time and time again. Basically, the only suggestive studies all come from the same group in Sweden, which is always a red flag to me (that the studies all come from one group, not that they come from Sweden, I hasten to add). As I said before, whenever one group of researchers keeps finding a result that no other group seems able to replicate or that otherwise disagrees with what everyone else is finding, that's a huge problem. I'd also have a lot more confidence in this seeming association in "high quality" studies if the association didn't depend upon a single researcher and if this researcher was not also known for being an expert witness in lawsuits against mobile phone companies.

 

[Karl Muller]

For a UN agency to say that cellphone radiation is a "possible carcinogen" is a complete turning point in the whole debate. No matter how "soft" this classification may be, the very fact that the IARC has said this, means that the weight of evidence is overwhelming enough now that they have to at least *pretend* to take notice.

This whole idea that Interphone shows that cellphone radiation can be "protective" against cancer, just shows how totally desperately biased that whole study was. The actual raw data showed a 100% increase in gliomas. They manipulated this -- citing "recall bias" -- to show a 40% increase. In doing so, they tilted the whole study so that at low levels, it showed a "protective" effect. Even Interphone acknowledged openly that this called these results into question.

Remember that for Interphone, the heaviest category of use, was just 27 minutes a day. Find me an urban kid in SA who uses a cellphone for less than 27 minutes a day, and I'll be really surprised.

The studies from Israel and China which show massive increases in parotid gland cancers since cellphones came into use, is (as I said previously on this board) a true "game changer", in that we are now seeing significantly increased cancer rates in the general statistics.

Those of you who say non-ionising radiation cannot cause cancer, just have no clue about the research or the mechanisms involved. Pulsed RF has been shown to interfere with all kinds of physiological mechanisms, including calcium efflux from the cell. Cancer is not caused necessarily by simple radiation-induced DNA breaks. If you research the history, you will find that from the 1950s, every single major symptom caused by ionising radiation, has also been reported from non-ionising radiation.

Go and read the ultimate "smoking gun" book in this debate, it's available in full on the internet, Cellular Telephone Russian Roulette, written by Robert C Kane, an RF engineer who died of a brain tumour after testing mobile antennas for Motorola. He revealed just how much the industry knew from the 1950s about the risks, and how they covered it up. Nowhere in the book does the author mention that he was dying of a brain tumour as he wrote it -- it is a tour de force of engineering insight, and I believe one of the most important books in the entire history of the human race. It will be the book that ultimately annihilates the mobile industry as we know it.

All of you who scoff and continue to put a microwave transmitter against your skull: heed the warning of Gerd Oberfeld, an Austrian epidemiologist:

"In a mere six years half of us will become electromagnetically sensitive. A prediction by Salzburg's Dr. Gerd Oberfeld who addressed the Irish Doctors Environmental Association (IDEA) April 9, parallels the prediction by the Royal College of Physicians last year which predicted that half the Irish population will have "some form of cancer" by the year 2025."
http://citizensforsafetechnology.com/dirty-electricity--cfls-in-communities-governments,67,0

This mirrors the prediction of Dr Robert Becker, twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in medicine. This was the person the US government consulted when their embassy in Moscow was being radiated by microwaves -- not a "fringe" figure. In his last major interview before he died, he was asked what might change the industry's priorities. He answered:

(Long laugh) "I don't know. Maybe at the end of the line when the occurrence of malignancy is two in every person during their life time and we have rioting in the streets for no cause and obvious problems with the psychology of the human race - maybe some people will still be OK enough to say, 'Geez, we made a terrible mistake.' But I don't see anything happening between now and then. Or there may be a technology that becomes available that is capable of safely replacing the cell phones. I don't know. But the longer it goes, the more and more difficult it will be in affecting a change in our economic structure."
http://www.wirelessimpacts.org/science/becker.html

Research Becker carefully, and see what a fantastic scientist he was, using EMFs to heal people. But because he persisted in looking also at the bad effects of radiation, he never received the Nobel prize he deserved. You will find that he used EMR to revert red blood cells back to the stem cell state, and then re-differentiate as bone cells, to heal fractures. Some people have described this as the only true HEALING mechanism ever discovered by the human race in its entire history. Yet because of his concern for the overall impacts, he was denied the recognition he deserved.

Look at Microwavenews.com, and you'll see many examples of scientists whose careers were destroyed the moment they published or replicated an experiment showing problems with EMR. It's an unbelievable story -- unless you factor in the strenuous efforts of a trillion-dollar industry to sweep all evidence of harm under the carpet. And here the efforts of the SA industry cannot be ignored. Killing people to make money is not a pretty sight -- take a look, you'll see it in what follows, I'm sure.

 

[icyrus]

[blather snipped]

Can you provide links to actual scientific studies supporting your position then?

 

[Karl Muller]

They must be running out of no-phone control groups for these studies. And not using a cell phone today is arguably not a random choice.

It's like studying the effects of drinking alcohol on distant aspects of health -- you can easily find drinkers, but tee-totalers are quite hard to come by, and are usually tee-total for some REASON, which is self-selection and therefore NON-RANDOM. This confounds the results unless you know the reason and can control for it. Which you pretty much can't.

This is a most important point. At the SABS/STUK international conference on cellphones and health in 2007 (attended by the WHO's Emilie van Deventer etc) I said that the possibility of a proper controlled experiment was now impossible, since everyone on earth is being irradiated with microwaves, from satellites downwards. We cannot possibly find any "non-radiated" subject unless we put a pregnant woman in a Faraday cage and keep her there for nine months.

So there is no possibility of real science any more, I said -- there is just the politics of money.

There was, of course, dead silence after I said this. However, afterwards a couple of the researchers -- including Prof Dariusz Leszczynski, head of the Finnish government radiation authority, STUK -- came privately to me and said I was actually quite correct.

Whatever huffing and puffing may ensue, remember this point. The industry has rushed to make sure that the whole planet is bathed in this radiation without any attempt to warn or protect the global population. Even now that the WHO has said there is a possible risk, you will not see Vodacom or Cell C or (ha, ha) MTN tell their customers, er, maybe you should think about limiting your exposure to our products.

If you have children with cellphones: you've been warned. If they get ill, you have only yourself to blame. Go and look at the crowded children's leukaemia wards, and think twice. Bribe your kid with a landline in their bedroom if necessary, but DO NOT expose children to close-up microwave radiation.

 

[icyrus]

If you have children with cellphones: you've been warned. If they get ill, you have only yourself to blame. Go and look at the crowded children's leukaemia wards, and think twice. Bribe your kid with a landline in their bedroom if necessary, but DO NOT expose children to close-up microwave radiation.

For the love of hades keep your fearmongering bullsh*t to yourself until such time as you can provide solid scientific peer-reviewed data to corroborate such!

 

[Tomtomtom]

Those of you who say non-ionising radiation cannot cause cancer, just have no clue about the research or the mechanisms involved. Pulsed RF has been shown to interfere with all kinds of physiological mechanisms, including calcium efflux from the cell.

Okay, so what is the putative pathway from calcium efflux to cancer? If RF can cause cancer, there will be studies showing as much (with dose response). Do you have citations?

Until I see these I'm with Jab's guy. One guy who works on RF antennae and dies of a brain tumour is barely evidence, let alone proof. I take "possible" to mean "above-zero probability", but no more than that at this stage.

 

[murraybiscuit]

no worries, i have a cellphone cover with crystal healing and holographic properties.
cost me a damn fortune, but it's guaranteed to ward off the negative energies.

 

[Tomtomtom]

Cellphones possible cancer-causing agents: Experts

A respected international panel of experts says cellphones are possible cancer-causing agents, putting them in the same category as the pesticide DDT, gasoline engine exhaust and coffee.

and......... PICKLES! http://www.slate.com/id/2295964/