Cellphone Radiation Is Harmful, but Few Want to Believe It (opens in new tab)

I'm very suprised to find there is some science to this. I'd assumed the radiation was just too weak.

"Our main takeaway from the current review is that approximately 1,000 hours of lifetime cellphone use, or about 17 minutes per day over a 10-year period, is associated with a statistically significant 60% increase in brain cancer."

So, brain cancer is on the rise? (Or better diagnosed?)

The possibility of non-ionizing radiation having a significant biological effect beyond simple heating used to be dismissed… but that came from not knowing much about molecular biology.

Electric fields can rotate charged molecules, e.g. switching proteins between states which can alter signaling cascades, open ion channels, etc. This provides a pretty well understood mechanism for negative effects.

What I want to see in a claim like this, and I don't (or missed it) is that cases of cancer for parts of the body where cellphones are commonly places (head, hip/groin) are increasing. Otherwise it seems like the external view of this theory proves it false.

I very much would like to hear it, if true. I'd also like to know about Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

From the abstract of the latest meta-analysis the author published:

"In a meta-analysis of 46 case-control studies, compared with never or rarely having used a cellular phone, regular use was not associated with tumor risk in the random-effects meta-analysis. However, in the subgroup meta-analysis by research group, there was a statistically significant positive association (harmful effect) in the Hardell et al. studies (OR, 1.15—95% CI, 1.00 to 1.33— n = 10), a statistically significant negative association (beneficial effect) in the INTERPHONE-related studies (case-control studies from 13 countries coordinated by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC); (OR, 0.81—95% CI, 0.75 to 0.89—n = 9), and no statistically significant association in other research groups’ studies. Further, cellular phone use with cumulative call time more than 1000 h statistically significantly increased the risk of tumors."

I'm far from an expert in the statistical interpretation of such statements, but to me, these results look all over the place. Furthermore, it seems that ALL the studies in the meta-analysis that found harmful effects originated from teams led by the same researcher (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Hardell), which, to be sure, is an interesting insight, but not one that should necessarily strengthen the belief in the hypothesis.

We've been exposed to artifically-generated EM radiation for well over a century. The effects should've been very visible by now.

When the researcher claimed that 5g may accelerate the development of drug resistant microbes I decided I could safely dismiss them. If someone has some proposed mechanism I might reconsider, but that seems very unlikely to me. Drug resistance is expensive for cells so they only do it if they have to. RF isn’t going to lead them to spontaneously develop a trait and the rate of mutation is already optimized, speeding it up isn’t going to lead to super viruses because evolution already has all the tools it needs to speed up mutations if beneficial. He also seemed very focused on the number of individuals antennas associated with 5g which is clearly the wrong metric

From the article:

first of all, few scientists in this country can speak knowledgeably about the health effects of wireless technology.

I think this dramatically underestimates the number of scientists and engineers who work with RF at dangerous frequencies.

Dissenting opinion from someone qualified to speak on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0xwyVlqsRo

Not gonna pretend I'm an expert on EM radiation effects, but this statement:

> Our main takeaway from the current review is that approximately 1,000 hours of lifetime cellphone use, or about 17 minutes per day over a 10-year period, is associated with a statistically significant 60% increase in brain cancer.

Is pretty misleading. He's talking about odds ratio here, not relative risk, because these were case-control studies. And because they seem to have been conducted specifically looking for people with cancer, they do not conform to the rare disease assumption (in this case, the paper says cancer = 24,717, control = 41,358, nowhere close to the typical 10% cutoff at which odds ratio is considered to reasonably estimate relative risk.

Also they found no statistically significant relationship in any direction until they did subgroup analysis. That starts getting awfully close to p-hacking. "All studies overall don't find an effect, but if we limit to the studies that find an effect, we find an effect."

Finally, this seems like an awfully hard thing to study using case controls. I'm not going to try and find these studies being meta-analyzed, but it would seem they're largely finding people with brain cancer and people without brain cancer, and surveying them on how long they've used cell phones and how much. Unless they're actually going back and consulting 10 years worth of their own phone records before answering, which I am sure they are not doing, how accurate is the recall seriously going to be? And there is no attempt to quantify the characteristics of usage relevant to the mechanistic reasons to believe a risk might present, that is, how strong was the signal, how far away from their ear do they keep the phone, are they typically going hands free, do they keep the phone or on near them when not in use? These are impossible to study using this kind of study design.

I'm not some kind of shill for big telecom. I barely even use a mobile phone. I talk to my dad maybe once a week and that's my only regular call. My diet and workout tracking apps are the only apps I use aside from banking. I almost never bother to bring it with me when going shopping and don't sleep with it within arm's reach. So I'm following the recommendations here anyway, not because I'm afraid of cancer but because I don't see a need for having a phone nearby on any regular basis.

At the same time, through no fault of their own, these researchers are studying something that is virtually impossible to prove anything about, and even what they might have found if you squint really hard at a specific subset of a non-random, non-representative scene, still wasn't a lot. I don't see how this warrants a press campaign aside from Joel Moskowitz apparently being politically active in getting California municipal governments to warn consumers about anything and everything.