Mobile Phone Transmitter Causes Brain Tumours? 374
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? (Score:4, Informative)
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:The Flaw in the Research? (Score:2, Funny)
So fat people are less likely to get cancer? Cool! Pass the donuts!
Re:Not the power. (Score:2)
As far as SAR equivalence, remember that with a cell phone you are holding the transmitter right up against your skull. Even though the tower might be emitting a lot more radiation, it is also a lot further away.
Re:Not the power. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not the power. (Score:2)
Um, no. Cells have a DNA repair proteins which can often fix damaged strands of DNA. When cells are exposed to a large dose of radiation, those repair mechanisms can be overwhelmed, and the errors won't be corrected. In this case, the cells can suffer much more damage than would occur if the exposure were spread out over more time.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Not the power. (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides, I'm not sure where you're going with the comparison to hard radiation. Sure, we're talking electromagnetic radiation here, but cell phone towers don't pump out gamma radiation or x-rays...They pump out much lower frequency mi
Re:Not the power. (Score:2)
Re:Not the power. (Score:3, Interesting)
Exposure seems to behave linearly over a certain range of dosage levels, true, but not necessarily for all dosage levels.
Not likely to be the tower. (Score:2, Interesting)
There you have it - three people
Re:Not likely to be the tower. (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Not likely to be the tower. (Score:5, Informative)
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:
Re:Not likely to be the tower. (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:Not likely to be the tower. (Score:3, Informative)
Errr right, maybe I just listen to the expert's opinion [theage.com.au].
Re:Not likely to be the tower. (Score:2)
Just drop some lab rats into the top floor of this building, put the cages up near the ceiling.
That will both give you a decent test AND improve morale. Who wouldn't enjoy working with rats suspended over their heads?
Re:Not likely to be the tower. (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation [wikipedia.org]
Re:Not likely to be the tower. (Score:3, Insightful)
The grandparent noted that cell phone towers do not meet the criteria for the ONLY KNOWN mechanism by which electromagnetic radiation can cause cancer.
There are some other, hypothetical mechanisms, some very unlikely and some plausible, but none have been shown to cause cancer. The one you cite, if true (whi
Planck's constant = 6.626068 x 10-34 m2 kg/S (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Planck's constant = 6.626068 x 10-34 m2 kg/S (Score:2, Informative)
On the other hand, the high occurence in this very building compared to the lack of such situation near the
Warning, offtopic (Score:2)
I've frequently seen Wikipedia be misleading because some 10 year old has seen fit to erase stuff written by Ph.D.'s, and replace it with his own misunderstanding ramblings
Explain that to the microwave! (Score:2, Insightful)
Electromagnetism energy, at the "microwave frequency" is still energy. Even if it is not strong to pop-corn your brain in 2 minutes, it can still have some effects..
tumor or tumour? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:tumor or tumour? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:tumor or tumour? (Score:4, Funny)
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?
Other factors (Score:2)
That of course means a hell of a lot of other rooftop towers are going to be coming down across the nation in pretty short order.
Re:Other factors (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, again from a maths point of veiw, don't forget that a cluster of seven people with brain tumors is p
Re:Other factors (Score:2)
Oh come on - there's as much chance of 7 people getting cancer like this as there is of someone winning the damn lottery!! It's impossible I tell ya, impossible!!!
I'm calling bullshit... (Score:2, Interesting)
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. Unless you want to prove Faraday wrong. I know I don't.
Re:I'm calling bullshit... (Score:4, Informative)
A sheet metal roof like that is a ground plane http://groups.google.com/group/sci.electronics/ms
I'd also say you're wrong on empirical evidence: cell phones generally do work inside buildings, this one is no exception.
Re:I'm calling bullshit... (Score:2)
Look at the mobile phone reception you get in an elevator or train.
Thats why they put radio and gps antenas outside the car and not inside
If there is metal between you and an EM source the metal will shield you.
Research (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Research (Score:2)
Depends on how many people in the building, and whether what they do could have any cause.
A university building? (Score:2)
Hmmmm (Score:2)
Australian Medical Association president Mukesh Haikerwal said there was no proof of a connection but "if you get clusters of disease it's sensible to investigate."
Ya think? Maybe this represents your proof! I like to call this the "Keystone Cops Method" of scientific inquiry.
Dr John Gall, from private health company Southern Medical Services, which has been called in to assess the sick, said last night three of those affected had tumours showing symptoms consistent with radiation.
Indeed, Watson,
Re:Hmmmm (Score:2)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:3, Informative)
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 with lots of antennas on them are actually putting out significant amounts of power (where significant = within an couple of orders of magnitude less then you experience when using a cell phone, at distances where the general public is exposed, including fl
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Informative)
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:Hmmmm (Score:2)
"Proof" is not an absolute concept; causal ties can be shown by a wide body of evidence which meets the statistical standards you wish to apply, which is why there is so much back and forth on any topic, because altering your level of statistical "validity" allows you to prove your pet theory.
It's a shame that you do not understand the process of scientific inquiry, but your personal opinion does not change th
Re:Hmmmm (Score:2)
Certainly, but "Ya think? Maybe this represents your proof! I like to call this the "
And to think.... (Score:3, Funny)
Surely, someone here on Slashdot has one to spare for these poor people!
Ancilliary problems (Score:4, Interesting)
Would it be possible for multiple low frequency signals to interact to form a sine wave of a much higher intensity?
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
Dihydrogen Monoxide (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Dihydrogen Monoxide (Score:2)
it's not a tumor.... (Score:2)
Statistical clusters (Score:5, Insightful)
* 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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically they suggested that it was a death trap and hinted that it was basically filled with potential health concerns. Eg there had been two floods of the building in resent years. I can imagine that such events can make a lot of things grow that you really don't want in your walls.
It's likely to be something in the building, but I doubt it is the cell to
I know what this means!! (Score:2, Funny)
Wondering about cell phones... (Score:2)
Do you still have a CRT Monitor, and not a flat panel? Here's a fun experiment. Take your cell phone, dial up a number on it and place a call. Now, hold it up to your CRT - the emag field from it skews the electron stream in distinct waves. You can probably correlate the frequency the phone operates on to the wavelength on the screen if you know your monitors vertical refresh.
not likely (Score:2)
If there is a common cause for these cases, it's more likely to be some kind of chemical pollutant or biological agent. Chemicals, fungi, and viruses can and do cause cancer at high rates. I'd rather look to the chemistry department or the biology labs than the cell phone tower for a cause.
Bothered... (Score:3, Funny)
"...the 16th and 17th floors are home to offices of senior management..."
Vinyl Chloride? (Score:2)
Re:Vinyl Chloride? (Score:2)
I think that the number of class A chemical carcinogens, non-radiactive, non-biological substances (like vinyl chloride) that are accepted to be actual causitive agents for human ca
not necessarily causative (Score:2)
The same issue surrounds the thyroid cancers associated with the Chernobyl disaster. Again - the tumours appear to be natural and generally cause no problems.
This of course does not change the fact that anyone so diagnosed will be scared to death (bad pun) and wonder when the next shoe is going to drop. So
A little story about mobile phone towers (Score:5, Insightful)
The funny part? The tower hasn't even been operational.
Re:A little story about mobile phone towers (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:3, Funny)
Yea, right... then what about radio stations? (Score:2, Interesting)
This is just as stupid as the paranoia over high voltage trasmission power lines. They may be ugly, they may be dangerous if they fall down, but you're being exposed to thousonds of times more EM radiation from the wiring in yo
Reminds me of when... (Score:2)
One day we had some tech dudes from an overseas MO, and being the geeks they were they fired up their phones in "test mode" to check out our COW.
The look on their faces when they realized how strong the output of the COW... priceless! They suggested we go out and twidd
Most of you are in denial, global warming, too? (Score:2)
To those saying that the causality implication is low, I'd say there's near empirical evidence to the contrary.
Avast! (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
The brain functions in the 1-35 hz range. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
"Well, we've had radio towers broadcasting for ages now, and there's no problem with them. So obviously EM doesn't cause cancer."
And. . .
"The Sun hits you with more EM radiation than a cell phone, so obviously people complaining about Cell Phone Em are over-reacting."
I've heard both of these arguments thoughtlessly repeated so often that they have become the same as any other meme or garden variety urban myth. I'd like to address them. First, radios. . .
FM radio signals function in the 88 to 108 MHz range, and AM in the 535-1605 kHz range.
Cell Phone signals operate in the microwave bandwidth, 1800 - 1900MHz and 800 - 900 MHz. While this is different than radio, the BIG difference is that Cell Phone microwaves are modulated all the way down to only 10 hz. Why is this significant? Because 10 hz also happens to be the general frequency where the brain's electrical activity operates.
And therein lies the problem.
Brain cells respond both physically and chemically to frequencies in that range and they do so in a variety of strange ways. For instance, the blood-brain barrier becomes permeable when exposed to modulated EM in the 10 htz range. --Which means that foreign (and toxic?) particles can cross into the brain cells themselves from the blood vessels. --If you spend a lot of time in a specific radiation zone where your blood-brain barrier is constantly not doing its job, it is reasonable to assume that the brain might be at greater risk from toxins in the blood.
This is just one example. There are several others.
Similarly, there are other problems with low-frequency EM. --For instance the 60hz electrical signals traveling down power lines have their own issues.
In conjunction with the 10 gauss magnetic field of the Earth, 60hz causes cyclotronic resonance in Lithium atoms. So what? Well, Lithium, excited in this manner, moves on a vector and is able to cross the blood-brain barrier with much greater frequency than otherwise. Lithium, as some of you may know, has a medicinal affect on the brain, and is for this reason the main ingredient used in anti-depressant drugs.
That's not contested science. People are simply not told about it. --The fact of the matter is that the people in charge of our society have a great vested interest in keeping people dumbed down and numbed in the head, both of which are achieved by deliberately designed EM pollution.
As for the Sun. . .
Who says that the Sun doesn't affect brain function? Astrology works, (despite the fierce head-shaking of those who don't like the idea but who have never actually studied a real horoscope). --But rather than cry, "There is no magic!" perhaps it would be better to ask, "Okay. So, how does it work?"
I think there's a possible answer wrapped up in low-level EM emissions from space. . .
For instance, when solar wind from the sun hits other planetary bodies, you get these reflected fields of energy vibrating in the 1-3 hz range which bathe the Earth for periods of time. As the brain tends to fall in alignment with whatever dominating frequency exists in it's environment, perhaps such periods affect the way brains work and develop.
It is, of course, far more complicated than that, as different planets fall into different areas of the sky, and as the Earth and moon move around, you'll get all kinds of different fields in the 1-35 hz range where the brain functions. Indeed, the Sun itself is magnetically divided into 12 slices, rather like an orange. Perhaps as the Earth orbits, its inhabitants are affected?
I don't know if this is the answer, but considering such ideas seems to me a great deal more sensible than a lot of fierce head-shaking.
-FL
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cause and Effect? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cause and Effect? (Score:2)
Re:Cause and Effect? (Score:2)
FTFA:Five of the seven staff worked on the top floor of the building.
But you're right, it's likely not radon.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cause and Effect? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cause and Effect? (Score:2)
Of course it's impossible to tell without knowing more about the sample set. There may be some other factor that would be an obvious cause, if the reporters had gone into enough detail.
Still, it's not impossible that you could get a soft tissue tumor from being in close proximity to a high power transmitter for a long
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Cause and Effect? (Score:2)
Not all of the people who were afflicted were working on the top floor of the building.
Re:Cause and Effect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cause and Effect? (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, as far as I know, no-one has shown a proven (or even plausible) mechanism that allows non-ionising microwave radiation at such low energies to produce cancer. If it is non-ionising, it has to operate by thermal effects, and the power output of phone masts is regulated such that thermal effects on humans and other animals is so low as to be unmeasurable. You are more likely to get skin-cancer from standing in front of an incandescent light bulb - which (horrors) is pum
Re:Cause and Effect? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 1000 people, then you would expect 4-5 brain tumours every 7 years *on average*.
There must be many hundreds of similar buildings in Australia, so it's hardly surprising to find one with slightly more tumours than average. Human instinct is notoriously p
Re:Cause and Effect? (Score:2)
On the other hand, within the medical community, smoking has been known to be bad on many levels going back hundreds of years [harpweek.com].
The fundamental difference between the non-ionizing radiation/cancer link and what you are implying in your post is that the majority of the medical community, to date, do not believe there is a causal relationship between the two. It is hard to claim a corporate/government coverup when most researchers in the biophysical research community do
Re:Smoking was around before modern medicine. (Score:3, Insightful)
To be con
Re:Are You Stuck On Stupid??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Some kind of statistical significance is needed, for a start. Considering the millions of office buildings in the world, what is the chance that in *one* of them you'll find something "VERY rare" happening? Random chance alone guarantees it.
Much more surprising would be if you couldn't find a group of seven people with brain cancer in any office bu
Re:Are You Stuck On Stupid??? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Are You Stuck On Stupid??? (Score:3, Informative)
Like the post above said:
Correlation is not causation.
Re:Are You Stuck On Stupid??? (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Cause and Effect? (Score:2)
I'd call seven brain tumours in one building a heck of a link...
They didn't just say 'link'.
Read the related article [theage.com.au] (from the same website) for a more complete picture.
Re:Cause and Effect? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Informative)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
Only for people who have no real understading of those two terms.
Re:Cause and Effect? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cause and Effect? (Score:2, Funny)
"Anybody object to putting antennas on the roof right above you?"
"Duh, uhhh, nope, ok"
Re:Cause and Effect? (Score:3)
Re:Cause and Effect? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Cause and Effect? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 points out, you can expect something with a one in a million chance to happen to you every year. See, miracles *do* happen!
Re:Trying to cover this up again... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Trying to cover this up again... (Score:2)
If that doesn't pan out, I would check out that old microwave oven in the break room and whatever is growing in the back of the fridge.
Re:Trying to cover this up again... (Score:2)
Re:fried eggs (Score:2)
Re:fried eggs (Score:2, Informative)
2) Lacking air circulation arount your ear
3) heat from your hand
Blood-Brain Barrier and wrist-watches (Score:3, Insightful)
For the stubbornly ignorant, while the Sun IS a big source of radiation, it does NOT broadcast a microwave signal modulated into the 10 htz range where brain cells start acting funny. --Like dilating the pores in the blood-brain barrier so that any old foreign (and toxic?) particle can enter. If you spend a lot of time in a specific radiation zone where your bloo