"Since the FCC adopted these limits based largely on research from the 1980s, the preponderance of peer-reviewed research, more than 500 studies, have found harmful biologic or health effects from exposure to RFR at intensities too low to cause significant heating."
And...
"The research suggests that long-term exposure may pose health risks to the skin (e.g., melanoma), the eyes (e.g., ocular melanoma) and the testes (e.g., sterility)."
What I see is the "small government" striking again. These federal agencies that are there to protect the public from irresponsible capitalism (e.g. Boeing) have been gutted to the point where they are effectively subsidiaries of the businesses. Lord forbid they affect shareholder value.
Not really. There's always going to be a significant fraction of the public that will be irresponsible, either through ignorance, intransigence, or greed. And then there's the fact that the amount personal education and effort required to substitute for regulation in the modern world is so high to be entirely impractical (sure you could reasonably take up one or two areas, but not all areas).
> However, a free society is not about mandating people to be safe, it's about providing the information and allowing them to make their own decisions.
I don't think it's that simple, and I think presenting things as a binary like this leads false choices. I think the right way to think about it is more along the lines of optimizing the choices so people can make good ones with a reasonable amount of total effort.
And there we're really only talking about decisions whose impact is limited to the individual making them. When there are externalities involved that's a different thing.
> Don't regulate but educate people on the harms and allow them to make their own decisions.
While that sounds reasonable in the abstract, I don't think it meets my criteria above, because the amount of education required quickly becomes far more than any individual can reasonably juggle with other responsibilities, and then there's the question of how much time most people actually want to spend on stuff like that.
No. What you are describing (not mandating, just providing information) is known as "libertarian anarchy". A "free society" still places constraints on people in the form of public health policy, if and when the risk of not doing it greatly exceeds the risk of doing it.
I do agree that marijuana represents a situation where the government failed to make a legitimate public health case, and now has to undo decades of policy.
I don't really see how this applies. First of all, the whole point is that the agency is NOT doing it, because it does not have the public's interest in mind.
Secondly, how would education help here? Am I supposed to walk around with a detailed map of 5G towers, spaced every 200 meters? Or what if Boeing decides to make a vital redundant piece of equipment optional - a thing that actually happened - killing hundreds of people. The regulation was flawed. How does education help?
> However, we have considerable evidence about the harmful effects of 2G and 3G. Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research.
Ok, well if this is the stance that this article is taking, its a +1 to the notion that Scientific American has gone the way of the History Channel, pure trash.
It think it is good that evidence was provided that the article is wrong on these points. It illustrates how easy it is to dupe people. Since the first unsubstantiated assertions were made in a magazine it now falls to those who claim it is wrong to do the work to prove it is wrong. The one first making the unsubstantiated assertion is at an advantage in that naysayers are now put in the position of proving they are right.
This happens quite a but with news reporting. This is particularly true with political reporting. It’s much harder to combat the initial messaging than it is to make unsubstantiated charges. Those unsubstantiated assertions should not have been permitted in the article.
In short, there are a number of low quality studies (blared endlessly by newspapers that have no idea how to evaluate the studies) about how cell phone radiation is dangerous, but none of those studies has withstood extensive attacks by skeptics. There simply isn't any high quality study showing some measurable damage from cellphone radiation that has a detectable impact on human health. In the meantime, absent any realistic mechanism or data showing it's dangerous, the default position is "not dangerous".
You should absolutely not trust "newspaper articles" (and in this case, Scientific American is a popular science magazine) about science. Even the best newspapers routinely mislead (intentionally or otherwise) in their science reporting.
>> we have considerable evidence about the harmful effects of 2G and 3G
>This is false.
"They have considerable evidence", that's what you are saying is false ? The evidence could say it has no harmful effects - I think you assumed the evidence was damning - but that sentence does not say that.
Before I took an interest in amateur radio I always thought that there was zero evidence of non-ionizing radiation being dangerous. Like you. I thought it was established science that it was safe. Then I came across some recent papers and came to learn that NIR is definitely associated with the disruption of cells, and it’s not because of localized heating.
Go do a Google Scholar search for “non-ionizing radiation dangerous cell phones” and you’ll find a bunch of results from 15 years ago that say it’s perfectly safe, and another bunch of articles from the past 5 years saying the opposite.
It’s not quite the same risk as chain smoking cigarettes, but it’s definitely there.
The author publishes roughly the same article in several venues on an annual basis, but interestingly, there is absolutely zero high quality epidemiological evidence supporting his position. Even at Berkeley he's a bit of an outsider with this position.
>> However, we have considerable evidence about the harmful effects of 2G and 3G. Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research.
What would be the difference between 2G/3G and 4G from a health perspective? Does 4g transmit on different frequencies or at a higher power level or something?
My assumption was that they were pretty similar from a "radio" perspective, and the differences were mostly in the protocol.
The article made me curious about the incidence of head and neck cancers over time. I only found a UK graph ending in 2018, but it does show a significant increase from 1993 to 2018[1]... 33% and 50% for men and women, respectively.
Not GP and I don't know, and this suffers the same problem (but in a way it doesn't matter) but for what you're interested in here you can just look at mortality (per general population, not patients):
Which must mean treatment (or early detection) got better, and you can say 'oh it would be even better if it weren't for ~5G~ detecting it in more people', but I say in a way it doesn't matter because it shows we're sort of.. 'coping with it', and wanting it to be better is a different conversation than whether we're making it worse.
I’m reminded of the history of the science establishing the link between cigarettes and cancer. All the same arguments and similar conflicted interests. Took many decades before the mainstream accepted the linkage and of course the industry still denies the science.
The similarities to modern public health calculus (around covid), as well as the point that a single smart person can create significant doubt where should not be any (IE, he wasn't operating in good faith), are quite extraordinary.
Which might entirely be explained by us getting better at detecting cancers, but I would have to see evidence.
The purpose of cancer detection is to be as early as possible, allowing more time for treatment. It is not to count cancers. I would assume the vast majority of cancers are eventually detected, unless you die of something else before they become a problem. So, unless I'm missing something, your claim is that at least 33% to 50% of head and neck cancers would not have ever become identifiable as cancers without improvements made since 1993, which I think is insanely high.
edit: and seeming high doesn't make it impossible, I know that there are a lot of slow growing prostate cancers where people die of old age before ever noticing them. But we know this because we checked for them after people were dead. Is there anything similar connected to particular head and neck cancers that you can point out?
Most of the time, if someone is old and dies in their sleep, then no one goes looking for an autopsy.
The spread of cancer can be really dramatic after it metastasizes so you can go from looking just a bit unwell, to dead in a few months.
And even if cancer is present, and an autopsy is done… will it get listed as cause of death when there are other conditions present that don’t need lab reports to verify them?
That's my point. Are at least a quarter to a third of head and neck cancers going undiagnosed because the sufferer dies of something else before they are noticed? In order for the count of head and neck cancers to increase by a third or a half due to earlier diagnosis, without an underlying increase in the actual number of head and neck cancers, this has to be true.
We'd need to do the same research worldwide (at least where phones were massively deployed) to confirm if there is clearly some indication of link or not. H&N cancers can come from multiple factors too.
We have little reason to believe it's dangerous either.
Look, I've known dozens of RF engineers who died of cancer (mostly lung) - people who had much higher than common exposure to both low frequency and microwave RF, but they all had one thread in common - they all smoked like chimneys. As an aside, they also used carcinogenic solvents with regularity for most of their careers. It's best not to confuse correlation with causation.
There is no evidence to indicate that exposure to RF at 5G frequencies is different than exposure to any other kind of higher frequency RF, 800, 1900, 2.6 and the other cellular bands behave similarly around the human body. If anything I'd expect lower effects, because the field strength is so low.
There is an enormous body of work that indicates that field strength not frequency is the relevant thing here.
Articles like this are little more than opinion articles.
We have a pretty enormous body of work that was used to set safe field exposure limits for RF. No one seems to be making a rational argument why that work isnt relevent.
Look at the documentation of many industrial strength radio systems that include health regulations for exposure to RF. (sometimes on the outside of the box in stores even)
A hand-wavy sort of dismissal of health issues around many forms of radiation seem to be common in the tech world.
7.7B people and you found 240 of them who said, "This is scary. Pay us and we will scare you some more!"
The most poignant thing I learned in 1990 came from my electromagnetics & digital communications professor at Iowa State, Dr. Mani Mina who used to say, "The more you scare people, the more they will pay you."
He's still there and still brilliant.
As Omicron winds down the pandemic, the media needs a new boogeyman to drive clicks and scientists need funding for apparition research
It's almost Spring and time for NASA/NOAA to regale us with their latest scary tales requiring money as part of the annual Federal budgeting process. Happens every year and coincides with new swimsuit fashion releases.
48 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadAnd...
"The research suggests that long-term exposure may pose health risks to the skin (e.g., melanoma), the eyes (e.g., ocular melanoma) and the testes (e.g., sterility)."
What I see is the "small government" striking again. These federal agencies that are there to protect the public from irresponsible capitalism (e.g. Boeing) have been gutted to the point where they are effectively subsidiaries of the businesses. Lord forbid they affect shareholder value.
We don't even know if 5g is dangerous!
We're going on data from the 80's?
They could protect the public by doing research and actually finding out what's going on.
Isn't the fed the number one in research grant amounts? Can't it award something to look into this?
Not really. There's always going to be a significant fraction of the public that will be irresponsible, either through ignorance, intransigence, or greed. And then there's the fact that the amount personal education and effort required to substitute for regulation in the modern world is so high to be entirely impractical (sure you could reasonably take up one or two areas, but not all areas).
However, a free society is not about mandating people to be safe, it's about providing the information and allowing them to make their own decisions.
Smoking is the perfect example of this and a great example of how the government should act.
Don't regulate but educate people on the harms and allow them to make their own decisions.
Marijuana is the perfect example of how the federal gov't got 'mandates' wrong, and only by breaking the law have people changed it.
I don't think it's that simple, and I think presenting things as a binary like this leads false choices. I think the right way to think about it is more along the lines of optimizing the choices so people can make good ones with a reasonable amount of total effort.
And there we're really only talking about decisions whose impact is limited to the individual making them. When there are externalities involved that's a different thing.
> Don't regulate but educate people on the harms and allow them to make their own decisions.
While that sounds reasonable in the abstract, I don't think it meets my criteria above, because the amount of education required quickly becomes far more than any individual can reasonably juggle with other responsibilities, and then there's the question of how much time most people actually want to spend on stuff like that.
I do agree that marijuana represents a situation where the government failed to make a legitimate public health case, and now has to undo decades of policy.
Secondly, how would education help here? Am I supposed to walk around with a detailed map of 5G towers, spaced every 200 meters? Or what if Boeing decides to make a vital redundant piece of equipment optional - a thing that actually happened - killing hundreds of people. The regulation was flawed. How does education help?
Ok, well if this is the stance that this article is taking, its a +1 to the notion that Scientific American has gone the way of the History Channel, pure trash.
This is false.
> Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology
Also false.
This happens quite a but with news reporting. This is particularly true with political reporting. It’s much harder to combat the initial messaging than it is to make unsubstantiated charges. Those unsubstantiated assertions should not have been permitted in the article.
I missed this, and I am absolutely receptive to it.
You should absolutely not trust "newspaper articles" (and in this case, Scientific American is a popular science magazine) about science. Even the best newspapers routinely mislead (intentionally or otherwise) in their science reporting.
>This is false.
"They have considerable evidence", that's what you are saying is false ? The evidence could say it has no harmful effects - I think you assumed the evidence was damning - but that sentence does not say that.
Go do a Google Scholar search for “non-ionizing radiation dangerous cell phones” and you’ll find a bunch of results from 15 years ago that say it’s perfectly safe, and another bunch of articles from the past 5 years saying the opposite.
It’s not quite the same risk as chain smoking cigarettes, but it’s definitely there.
Edit: link, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02697...
It's still not quite enough (given the lack of strong epidemiological evidence) to make any arguments for or against 5G.
Definitely not. But to me it’s enough to give the benefit of the doubt to the author and keep reading, even when they carelessly overstate the risk.
What would be the difference between 2G/3G and 4G from a health perspective? Does 4g transmit on different frequencies or at a higher power level or something?
My assumption was that they were pretty similar from a "radio" perspective, and the differences were mostly in the protocol.
I know 5G uses different frequencies. I was asking about 2G-4G.
That sounds... high... but this is also pre-5G.
[1] https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-...
I wonder -- do cancer studies take cancer detection rates into account?
https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-...
which is roughly stable over the same period.
Which must mean treatment (or early detection) got better, and you can say 'oh it would be even better if it weren't for ~5G~ detecting it in more people', but I say in a way it doesn't matter because it shows we're sort of.. 'coping with it', and wanting it to be better is a different conversation than whether we're making it worse.
The similarities to modern public health calculus (around covid), as well as the point that a single smart person can create significant doubt where should not be any (IE, he wasn't operating in good faith), are quite extraordinary.
The purpose of cancer detection is to be as early as possible, allowing more time for treatment. It is not to count cancers. I would assume the vast majority of cancers are eventually detected, unless you die of something else before they become a problem. So, unless I'm missing something, your claim is that at least 33% to 50% of head and neck cancers would not have ever become identifiable as cancers without improvements made since 1993, which I think is insanely high.
edit: and seeming high doesn't make it impossible, I know that there are a lot of slow growing prostate cancers where people die of old age before ever noticing them. But we know this because we checked for them after people were dead. Is there anything similar connected to particular head and neck cancers that you can point out?
The spread of cancer can be really dramatic after it metastasizes so you can go from looking just a bit unwell, to dead in a few months.
And even if cancer is present, and an autopsy is done… will it get listed as cause of death when there are other conditions present that don’t need lab reports to verify them?
(*and no, also no reason to believe the contrary..)
Look, I've known dozens of RF engineers who died of cancer (mostly lung) - people who had much higher than common exposure to both low frequency and microwave RF, but they all had one thread in common - they all smoked like chimneys. As an aside, they also used carcinogenic solvents with regularity for most of their careers. It's best not to confuse correlation with causation.
There is no evidence to indicate that exposure to RF at 5G frequencies is different than exposure to any other kind of higher frequency RF, 800, 1900, 2.6 and the other cellular bands behave similarly around the human body. If anything I'd expect lower effects, because the field strength is so low.
There is an enormous body of work that indicates that field strength not frequency is the relevant thing here.
Articles like this are little more than opinion articles.
I took that as the point of the article, we don't know enough to say whether it's safe or dangerous, so let's pause and study it "for real this time".
> Articles like this are little more than opinion articles.
This article sounds like it's the opinion of the 240 scientists that are calling for the study though, not an uninformed journalists opinion.
A hand-wavy sort of dismissal of health issues around many forms of radiation seem to be common in the tech world.
This is his website: https://www.saferemr.com/
He points to a bunch of studies on this topic. Seems like there's enough there for you to make up your own mind on how reliable he can be.
He's from University of California, Berkeley and seems to study this stuff.
The most poignant thing I learned in 1990 came from my electromagnetics & digital communications professor at Iowa State, Dr. Mani Mina who used to say, "The more you scare people, the more they will pay you."
He's still there and still brilliant.
As Omicron winds down the pandemic, the media needs a new boogeyman to drive clicks and scientists need funding for apparition research
It's almost Spring and time for NASA/NOAA to regale us with their latest scary tales requiring money as part of the annual Federal budgeting process. Happens every year and coincides with new swimsuit fashion releases.
Dang, I am getting to old for this...