Mobile Phone Transmitter Causes Brain Tumours?

Peter writes "Seven staff in the one building have been diagnosed with brain tumours, and everything seems to be pointing to the mobile phone towers located on the roof. The building is owned by RMIT University and an investigation is taking place. Five of the seven staff worked on the top floor of the building. Medical experts contacted by The Age Newspaper said no definitive link had been proved between mobile phone tower radiation and cancer."

The Flaw in the Research?

... no definitive link had been proved between mobile phone tower radiation and cancer."

I wouldn't say that's entirely accurate. I seem to remember the problem with the research [bbc.co.uk] being a while back that they were exposing cell tissue to thousands or millions of times the amount of radiation that a cell phone produces. I'm not sure if a cell phone tower scales to be thousands of times that of a cell phone but if it does ... there might be a legit concern here.

I believe that an SAR (specific absorption rate) of 10 Watts per kilogram is the safety limit set by the NRPB. I guess they need to do tests as to whether the people experienced this from the towers. Cell phones have a SAR of about 0.2 on average. As always, Wikipedia provides a great reference [wikipedia.org] to this subject.

Re:Not the power.

It acts in a cumulative effect, over a short period. But having a series of chest x-rays one year, and having another set 5 years later, and another set 5 years after that, doesn't mean that after the last set you're suddenly going to have radiation sickne

Re:Not the power.

"Has been shown"? You are referring to the linear-no-threshold model [wikipedia.org], which is not agreed upon universally by any means. Radiation hormesis [hps.org] seems to have a decent amount of high statistical quality evidence backing it up, though the mechanism for a causa

Re:Not the power.

Actually, it has been shown in the last 10 years that the cellular response to ionizing radiation deviates from the "linear quadratic" (a strange term indeed) model at very low doses. There is a dose threshold below which it is actually more damaging than

Planck's constant = 6.626068 x 10-34 m2 kg/S

Anyone worried about radio waves causing cancer can try to make that theory work. There is a huge barrier, however, in the form of a very very small number: Planck's Constant [britannica.com]. Planck's constant = 6.626068 x 10-34 m2 kg/S. It's that 10**-34 that makes it difficult for low-energy electromagetism like wireless transmissions to interact with chemical reactions. Thirty-four zeros is a LOT of zeros after the decimal point.

Off topic: I've linked to the Encyclopedia Britannica above because the article about Planck's constant is very short. The article in Wikipedia is long. I've frequently seen the Encyclopedia Britannica be misleading because of the severe limitation placed on size of the articles due to paper costs. Wikipedia does not have that problem.

tumor or tumour?

I suppose you're going to tell me that it's a bad idea to stick my head in a running microwave oven, too, eh?

Re:tumor or tumour?

It is slightly ironic that the Managers, and people who were really vying for such great office views, were the ones to be struck down. One for the little people.

And how do you tell if a Manager has a brain tumour? His head doesn't sound quite so hollow when you hit it with a bat?

Research

Hmm. I'd say 7 incidents in one building is probably very high; even so, that depends entirely on the relative frequency of the specific kind of tumor.

Also, did any of these people work in hazardous areas? A university can have all sorts of nasty stuff around.

It would seem to me that these incidents could be related to the cell phone tower; or it could be a very sad coincidence. You can't just freeze everything at one single point in time and go ah-ha!

There are too many other factors that aren't considered.

And to think....

...that all of this heartache could have been avoided by something as simple as a couple of tinfoil hats.

Surely, someone here on Slashdot has one to spare for these poor people!

Ancilliary problems

Perhaps it is from EMP from all the wires/power/machines that run up the wall *to* the tower, not the tower itself.

Would it be possible for multiple low frequency signals to interact to form a sine wave of a much higher intensity? ... so the tower puts out a pulse that's too small to affect genetic replication (say 10% of the threshold), but there are other EMP signitures or emmisions in the area that compound (say 5 sources at 10%), followed by personal cell phones and computers and lights...

so you could 99.999% of the time have these signals never amount to much until the proverbial "EM Seventh Wave" comes in and makes those brain cells start dividing wrong. It only takes one cell to seed a tumor.

Re:Ancilliary problems

Cell site base stations are self contained. The only things that run to them are the mains supply cables, which are indeed beefy, but that's 60Hz, not the UHF that mobile phones run at. The antennas used for cell site base stations also have a decidedly toroidal or sectoral radiation pattern. Every one I've seen in the last 10 years has used a set of sector patch antennas, which have excellent pattern control (energy goes in a set direction with set limits, not anywhere else). It's in the best interests of the cell companies to minimized the radiation that goes straight down in favor of the radiation that goes out, as straight down mostly wastes power that could be used to increase coverage somewhere else.

I don't doubt that there seems to be a link, but whether or not it's causal needs some very carefully done science, not a newspaper story.

Re:Ancilliary problems

This is incorrect information. I have worked on cell sites and the standard installation procedure, at least regionally, is to have transmission and switching equipment in a cabinet on the ground level and run several antennta cables up the tower to the an

Statistical clusters

* There are mobile phone radio masts on tens of thousands of buildings all over the world, for almost a decade.
* There has been no significant increase in the number of brain tumours since mobile phones became popular.
* Why would people in one building sudenly have a greater chance of getting brain tumours from a radio mast, while the chances of the many (possibly hundreds of) thousands of people in other buildings with radio masts on them getting cancer stay the same? There's an antenna on the roof of a building next to the one I work in, I can see the antenna from here througn the window. Why don't I and all my colleagues have cancer?

Unless there is a huge difference in the way this mast is installed and operated, or the structure of the building from other similar installations, there's no reason to suppose this cluster of cancers has anything to do with the radio mast. There could be thousands of other factors that could be the cause.

Or there might be no cause. How many buildings are there in the world? How many random instances of cancer are there? Statisticaly, you'd expect to see the occasional fluke cluster of cancers in one building from time to time. If the odds against such a cluster in any given building were a million to one, in a survey of 10 million buildings you'd expect to see roughly 10 such clusters just by pure chance. Even if the chances were 10 million to 1, there's still no reason to suppose finding one such cluster in the sample is at all suspicious.

Simon Hibbs

Parent is correct

As a physician, but not a neurosurgeon, I had to do a quick Pubmed search to refresh some things I haven't thought about since med school. Most environment-related brain tumors come from organic chemical exposure (pesticides, benzene, vinyl chloride, etc) or exposure to other known bad actors like asbestos. TFA says that the building used to be an old theater, so there's no telling what might be in there; the clustering of cases on the top floor might imply a lighter-than-air causative agent.

The fact is, the human brain is surprisingly tolerant of radiation exposure. Radiation oncologists take advantage of this characteristic to treat cancers that have metastasized to the brain. Whole-brain external beam radiation therapy uses ionizing radiation, many orders of magnitude more energetic than any cell phone tower, but the occurrence of de novo brain tumors after brain XRT is actually pretty rare.

6

Re:Parent is correct

A previous comment in this thread quoted some posts in other threads about this article. Among them comments from people who have been in that building.

Basically they suggested that it was a death trap and hinted that it was basically filled with potential

Bothered...

Kinda lost interest once I read...

"...the 16th and 17th floors are home to offices of senior management..."

A little story about mobile phone towers

There was a small village in rural Germany. A broadcast tower for mobile phones was to be built there, and despite rabid protests from the locals, which were concerned about negative health impacts, the tower was built. Soon after its completion, more than the usual number of locals went to see their doctor, complaining about headaches, nausea, and various other little ailments which they linked to the tower.

The funny part? The tower hasn't even been operational.

Re:A little story about mobile phone towers

I dont blame the natives, it's scary having one of those antenna nearby. I moved into my house here in Alaska 10 years ago, I was a spry 26 years old and felt healthy all the time.

Now, about 5 years ago a cell phone tower was installed in lot adjacent to us, maybe 350 feet from our house (and I telecommute so I am exposed to it all the time.)

After five years of exposure to this tower, I've become very sedentary, I've stopped riding my mountain bike years ago, and I frequently end up working all day sitting in front of the computer with just short breaks. The cell tower has also bloomed my Coca Cola intake level, and I've put on about 45 pounds of unwanted weight. I feel less healthy than ever now.

Re:A little story about mobile phone towers

A large metal obstruction affects TV reception? That's just crazy talk.

Avast!

*Equips Nephroth's Trollbasher - Plus 21 damage to luddite trolls!*

There is a radio tower on the roof, just like there are radio towers on the roofs of thousands upon thousands of buildings all over the globe. Just because one building had a statistically anomalous number of brain tumors, doesn't implicate the radio tower, it implicates the location as a whole.

You can't just assume that because there is a cell tower and you so desperately want cell phones to cause cancer, doesn't mean that they do. The vast majority of the evidence (the fact that this is one isolated incident) suggests that the cause is elsewhere.

Virus

Some cancers are caused by viral infections.

That said, poorly-shielded microwave (GHz) equipment may produce spurious lobes on their radiation pattern that could affect the wrong places.

And microwave radiation can also cause genetic damage leading to cancer.

The towers may be big, but power is low

When you have a radio repeater situation, as is the case with cell phones, it does not make sense to have the fixed repeater transmitter power level higher than the remote transmitter (cell phone). The cell phone power is rather low, otherwise you'd have a backpack to carry the battery. In ham radio repeater circles, a repeater with a high powered transmit is referred to as a repeater that's "All mouth". Here's some technical explaination of the radiation situation regarding cell towers. http://www.fcc.gov/oet/rfsafety/cellpcs.html/ [fcc.gov]

I'm not a statistics expert, but I know that abberations in distributions of whatever effect are not impossible, or even improbably, given a sufficiently large study group. My wife has experience in disease clustering in her past administrative job at a university where there was a "cancer dorm". In the end, it was all BS, panic and hype. The actual distribution was not far off the norm. Remember that perception is often much more powerful than the truth in many people's minds.

Re:Cause and Effect?

Certainly a link, but where's the evidence that it's a link to the mobile phone transmitters?

It could equally be down to insufficient ventilation allowing natural Radon to accumulate in the air inside the building.

Re:Cause and Effect?

My thought was also that it may just be something in the building. There are thousands of other buildings with cell transmitters around the country and this has never been reported before. I think it would be very wise to check the building itself for so

Re:Cause and Effect?

Air conditioning is a wonderful thing.

Re:Cause and Effect?

Heh - the aircon at my previous employer was known as the "sickness recycling system".

Re:Cause and Effect?

No it isn't. The fact that they were all working in the same building only points to a correlative factor between the building and the incidence of cancer. Could be something in the ventilation system. Could be rat poison in the coffee machine on the top floor. There is absolutely nothing about this situation that definitively links cancer to mobile phone tower radiation.

Re:Cause and Effect?

It's not even sure there is a common cause.

Approx 1 in 1500 people are diagnosed with a brain tumour every year, and according to the article the tumours were discovered over the past 7 years. The building is big: 17 storeys. If the building contains

Re:Are You Stuck On Stupid???

What would it take to convice you that there was a link? ... Seven workers in the same building all developing brain cancer is VERY rare as well as VERY telling!

Some kind of statistical significance is needed, for a start. Considering the millions of offi

Re:Are You Stuck On Stupid???

I'm not worried. I have a rock that keeps cancer away.

Re:Are You Stuck On Stupid???

In one of my Criminology classes we talked about the use and misuse of statistics. The example was used that areas with a high stork population have a high human birthrate. Does that mean that storks bring babies?

Like the post above said:
Correlation is not

Re:Are You Stuck On Stupid???

In most cities, mobile phone masts live on the roofs of the tallest buildings. Here in Glasgow, that tends to be tower blocks with low-rent flats in them. If anyone there gets cancer, it's almost always smoking-related lung cancer. Brain tumours are pretty rare anyway.

I've worked with very high power microwave transmitters for over 10 years, and my family has a fairly high risk of cancer (good ol' genetics right there). If it was going to happen, it would have happened to me by now.

Re:Smoking was around before modern medicine.

I am not sure what the medical profession is supposed to be catching up to. You emphatically state cell phones are causing cancer and assume the medical profession has to eventually come around and accept your truth. The only problem is that, to my knowl

Re:Cause and Effect?

I'd call seven brain tumours in one building a heck of a link...

Or maybe they all get lunch from the same Chinese place a few times a week. Or maybe there's something in the water cooler. Or maybe it's just a clustering phenomenon unrelated to all those things. I'm definitely not discounting the possibility, but remember, "correlation does not imply causation".

Re:Cause and Effect?

No, correlation doesn't prove causation. It does imply it, however.

The internet [wikipedia.org] seems to agree with me. I'm not trying to be a jerk, rather I'm trying to help spread understanding. I hope this link benefits everybody here.

Re:Cause and Effect?

No, correlation doesn't prove causation. It does imply it, however.

Only for people who have no real understading of those two terms.

Re:Cause and Effect?

Correlation doesn't imply a causal link. For the media, it does imply a casual link, however. Usually far too casual.

Re:Cause and Effect?

When a scientist says "no link", they mean no CAUSAL link, not correlative.

Re:Cause and Effect?

I'd call seven brain tumours in one building a heck of a link...

Actually, no. Enough people get cancer that you'll see groups of people with cancer from time to time. Doesn't mean that anything about the building caused the cancers. As Freeman Dyson poi

Re:Other factors

Actually, from a maths point of view, my first question would be: Following the first two brain tumor diagnoses, how much more vigilant to the (now known) symptoms of a tumor did the rest of the workers become? This cluster could very well be explained by

Re:Not likely to be the tower.

One guy says there's no "casual" link, and your natural conclusion is to take him completely at face value and make the assumption that they were all getting together after hours and building a nuclear reactor in someone's basement??

So if you worked in tha

Re:Not likely to be the tower.

So if you worked in that building, and seven of your coworkers suddenly got brain tumors at the same time, you'd have no worries at all, eh?

Of course I would be worried - I would be worried about the building however, not the phone mast. I've just been reading the forums attached to the story [theage.com.au] and there's a few interesting comments in there - notably this one:

I would suggest that regardless of any link between mobile phone towers and cancer, a far more likely cause is toxic contamination of the building.

Anybody who has taken a good look inside the RMIT building in question should be able to plainly that the building is unsafe in many ways.

People may remember the floods and resultant evacuations that occurred at a city RMIT campus last year. Two floods, one cold water, another of near boiling water months later. This is the same building.

The safety (or lack thereof) of the wiring and electrics in the same building is also very disturbing.

Any student need only look beneath the desks in the computer rooms to get an idea.

I think RMIT must investigate ALL possible causes of these brain tumors.

It seems very controvertial as to whether mobile phone towers could cause any health-risks, and whilst I agree that it is impossible to say that these towers are safe, surely this building at RMIT with a mere two low power phone towers wouldn't be the first detected incidence of this in the melbourne CBD.

However, it is well known that there are toxins which are highly carcinogenic. It would be prudent to do a broad panel of tests for mutagenic & teratogenic toxins in this building as part of the investigation.

Re:Not likely to be the tower.

The problem with the statement 'consistent with radiation' is that the Doctor means ionizing radiation, and a cell tower emits non-ionizing radiation. BIG difference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation [wikipedia.org]

Re:Not likely to be the tower.

I wish people would stop advancing their semi-scientific theories as fact to show how smart they are. It just shows how a little education, possibly very little, can hide ignorance in almost all areas.

The grandparent noted that cell phone towers do not me

Re:Not likely to be the tower.

Welcome to Slashdot, where electrical engineers, or people who think of it as a hobby, will swear backwards and forwards that they know and understand every effect of radiation.

Errr right, maybe I just listen to the expert's opinion [theage.com.au].

Re:Trying to cover this up again...

The press would love to spin it that way.

Yes it's an unusual number of cases, but no, this is over a 5 year period. It's not like all the top floor workers got it a week after moving in.
Of the 7 brain tumors, 2 are malignant. Indicating that possibly different kinds of cancer are occuring. While the building could be to blame, it's probably not the towers sitting on top of it. More likely something else which they are exposed to inside of the building, hence why they shut down the building instead of lowering the tower's output. (They fail to mention that numerous other buildings have similar towers and exposure, but not the cancer rate.)

Re:Hmmmm

...This is totally different; those towers are pumping out huge amounts of radiation...

How do you know how much radiation is being put out by these towers? I've worked in the industry for quite a while, and can tell you that very few towers, even ones w

Re:Hmmmm

>This is totally different; those towers are pumping out huge amounts of >radiation, to try and make sure you can get a strong signal at great >distances. It's not like living inside a nuclear reactor, but its close >enough to be a bad idea.

This is not true. A GSM cell phone puts out maximum 2 W peak (900 MHz band) or 1 W peak (1800 MHz band). The average is 1/8 of this. A base station puts out a few tens of Watts. The power levels cannot be that different since you want a fairly symmetrical link budget.

The antenna elevation pattern of the base station is such that most of it is directed towards the horizon, and less towards the base of the tower. Since the power density (W/m^2) will drop off as the square of the distance, these two factors will cancel in such a way that you essentially get the same power density when moving out from the base station at ground level, at least for several hundred meters.

You will not be nuked from the handset, and certainly not from the base station. The power density from the base station will always be many orders of magnitude below that from the handset...

Since your handset will automatically decrease its power to mW when close to a base station (to save battery time, etc.), the best way to get less exposure is actually to be as close to a base station as possible!

Re:I'm calling bullshit...

But if it *is* built like this, it is absolutely impossible that any radiation of any kind managed to get through that roof to the people below.

A sheet metal roof like that is a ground plane http://groups.google.com/group/sci.electronics/msg /6d422cb367cac613 [google.com], not a Faraday cage.

I'd also say you're wrong on empirical evidence: cell phones generally do work inside buildings, this one is no exception.

Blood-Brain Barrier and wrist-watches

For the scientifically illiterate, you get more daily radiation from 15 minutes in the sun, or your watch, than those people would have received.

For the stubbornly ignorant, while the Sun IS a big source of radiation, it does NOT broadcast a microwave sign