Plentiful nutrition which has led to 90% of the population of the USA being overweight, obese, or overfat is another potential culprit. Women suffering from anorexia developed fewer tumors. Similar experiments on lab animals in a controlled setting have the same result. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11246846 I believe there are other changing risk factors in behavior as well, for instance women who have never had a child are more likely to develop breast cancer and fertility rates have dropped dramatically over the last 100 years.
Cell phones have only been widely deployed in the last two decades, and I don’t think those trends in cancer rates you’re referencing correlate very well to cellular deployment.
I’d still be curious to see more research happening in the field of millimeter waves, personally I don’t see this technology as very useful right now either compared to traditional cellular due to its lack of penetration.
The large increase in sugar and starch in our diet does contribute to fast growing cancer cells and there are studies that link being overweight/obesity with cancer.
We weren't this fat decades ago. Some may blame more office work, but the biggest factor is the amount of sugar/carbs in our diets. It's grown tremendously and yet no one seems to take it seriously, discrediting things like Adkins/Keto as "fad diets" when they were closer/more consistent with American and Western European diets for several decades.
I've had trouble finding good studies on this. I don't think it's true. I've been on pretty hard keto for over two years at a time. I know other friends who have and have never heard of kidney trouble.
You occasionally have a day or two where you eat out with friends or have some fried chicken every month, and initially there is a period where you feel sick for a week as your body withdraws from sugar, but other than that I've never had kidney issues and my blood work has always come back fine.
With Adkins you do start reintroducing some carbs eventually, but you still keep it under a limit, and go back down if you start getting unhealthy.
https://www.epilepsy.com/learn/treating-seizures-and-epileps....
Yeah I’m gonna need some data to believe that one. 90% obese / overweight? I’m calling bullshit.
Edit: I should have said adults in the parent post though, this statistic doesn’t apply to kids.
https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...
Please note the table you showed the 73% is combination of "overweight" and "obese" while the row that shows obese is the same number as my citation.
EDIT: I misread the original message and thought it was referring to just obesity, not obesity/overweight.
I checked the "conclusions" of the first two: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29996112 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29709736
Conclusion of 1) Despite the improved exposure assessment approach used in this study, no clear associations were identified. However, the results obtained for recent exposure to RF electric and magnetic fields are suggestive of a potential role in brain tumor promotion/progression and should be further investigated.
Conclusion of 2) Ever use of wireless phones was not significantly associated with risk of adult glioma, but there could be increased risk in long-term users.
They both read as, "we found no significant effect".
That said, given the scientific consensus from rigorous meta-analyses, I expect that these “positive” studies are mostly of low quality and/or limited sample size. And scepticism is generally warranted when advocates start listing large numbers of studies instead of referring to a few meta-studies. As it happens, the best available meta-studies come to the opposite conclusion (namely, that there’s probably no harm from mobile EMF), so this long list is essentially bogus.
To partly redeem myself, I followed the links to the first two articles prefixed by "P". They were https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29725476 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29268055
The first didn't have a conclusion and the results were just the measured RF power in an apartment.
The conclusion of the second is, "A total of 900-MHz EMF applied in middle and late adolescence may cause changes in the morphology and biochemistry of the rat ovarium.", which makes no sense. "A total of 900-MHz EMF" is gibberish. The complete text is not freely available.
>> Study Effect Codes:
>> P This study reported effects from the exposure or radiation category (effects can be either positive or negative and may be primary or secondary outcomes)
>> N This study reported no effects from the exposure or radiation category
>> - This study offered important insights or findings but is neither evidence of an effect or a null finding
I'll be honest, this ordering seems dubious to me. P (for positive?) can show either positive or negative effects. N (for negative) shows no effects. - (for neither?) shows neither evidence of an effect or a null finding. I would think that P needs to be subdivided better to show which papers show a positive or negative effect.
Can someone do a count on the number of each category?
Because life expectancy has also risen; people who used to be dying of other things are now living long enough that cancer is more common.
"In other words, the individual incidence of cancer deaths has actually fallen."
Situation: person has an almost undetectable cancer. They see a doctor, no cancer detected, later that week they are shot by police at a routine road stop.
We get in our time machine, go back a week and a bit, and supply the doctor with a better detection kit.
Situation 2: person has an almost undetectable cancer. They see a doctor who refers them to a specialist, cancer detected, another notch on the cancer tally board. Later that week they are shot by police at a routine road stop.
Nothing has changed except in the second case there’s another cancer detected. The person is still dead from non-cancer causes, just in one scenario they died as a haver-of-cancer and in the other they didn’t.
Better/earlier detection will necessarily lead to a decrease in cancers that are never detected (which I interpret as an increase in cancers detected before mortality from other causes), otherwise it’s not better/earlier detection.
My money is on diet and pesticides/preservatives/etc. being another big one. With this, too, there is little official evidence that, say, Roundup, causes cancer, but there is, imo, a stronger lobby against a positive outcome in those studies, and they don't necessarily control for interactions such as Roundup combined with the surfactant that it is typically mixed with that increases cell penetration.
In sum, I’d rank the risk of Roundup being carcinogenic on roughly the same level as that of 5G: possible but unlikely, given the best available evidence.
For the record, the other reasons are to do with the larger ecological impact of roundup-based practices, such as harm to soil fungi and bacteria, and collateral damage from runoff or wind. Plus, there were some studies finding it may cause harm to intestinal lining and such, even if it's not actually a carcinogen.
We live in an increasingly sleepless society and lack of sleep is effectively a carcinogen.
The present meta-analysis suggested that neither short nor long sleep duration was significantly associated with risk of cancer, although long sleep duration increased risk of with colorectal cancer.
^Matthew Walker, presumably the 70% drop is from work at his Berkeley lab
Pollution is lower too (again, in the US): cars used to pollute a LOT more. Smog used to be far, far worse in the LA area decades ago, so even with more people and more cars, pollution is lower, particularly localized pollution that affects people more. Of course, global warming pollution is certainly higher, but that isn't localized and shouldn't have any effect on you (it's just CO2).
Obesity is significantly worse, however.
"In other words, the individual incidence of cancer deaths has actually fallen."
I also believe many of the cancers we successfully treat would be non issues if left alone. (all the young women who found lumps and become breast cancer survivors)
Cancer rates are strongly driven by age- cancer incidence increases exponentially as people age (stochastically, of course).
"In other words, the individual incidence of cancer deaths has actually fallen."
Suppose that today the average person tells their doctor about a symptom of Example Cancer (which is incurable) six months before it kills them. 1 million people per year in Standard Country die of Example Cancer, with an average of six months between diagnosis and death.
Now, let's imagine I invent a machine, it can scan seemingly healthy people and tell them if they've got Example Cancer on average 12 months earlier. Nothing changed in terms of whether people get Example Cancer, it's still incurable, but now we've improved time between Diagnosis and Death by 200% but even scarier the incidence of Example Cancer, the number of people who know they have it, has also increased by 200%. It's an epidemic!
That machine is pretty unrealistic. A more realistic machine also gives false positives for Example Cancer. Now the number of people living with Example Cancer has increased by 500% but good news, most of those people don't die of it, because they had what medics would call "Sub-clinical incidence" meaning, sure, you had the disease but it didn't actually affect your life so who cares?
>"Academia: Where Crazy People Can't Get Fired - Dr. Moskowitz disgraces the University of California-Berkeley in precisely the same way Dr. Oz and Mark Bittman disgrace Columbia University: They are charlatans who wrap themselves in the prestige of academia to peddle foolishness to anxious parents."
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/02/28/uc-berkeley-psychologis...
To be honest, I'm somewhat surprised (in a good way!!) that Moskowitz got published on Scientific American at all.
Anyway, I have my fair share of worries on large density mmwave equipment environments, mostly focused on other things, as in, not on its effects on us, but on microbial life, bacterial life, not the focus of this article, so I won't derail, but at least for me, Moskowitz isn't this zero sum game as he may be to some field agents.
After looking at the list of publications purported to be evidence, I have to agree with the other comments here casting doubt. Most, if not all, of these publications are in no-name journals with few citations. I found one paper where the author listed a gmail email address (are they unaffiliated with any institution?)
Where did you read "an apparrent increase rise in cancer rates" ? in this article or in one of the articles it references? which one?
I am not a biochemist, but I would assume academics are referring to incidence rates, not causes of deaths... If you did actually witness such a confusion in the papers, it's important to point it out, but if you didn't it would be equivalent to a physicist suspecting a colleague of confusing mu (the reduced mass of a binary system) with mu (a muon)... rather incredulous if you ask me...
Every academic discipline expects its disciples to be at least proficient in disambiguating words from context, so when one refers to a "cancer rate" in the context of causation, that it would refer to "incidence rates" i.e. the transition probability per surviving individual per unit time. This is independent of deaths by other causes.
> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women.
Which suggests that there is an apparent increase in cancer rates. So yes, I was referring to an incident rate. Regardless, the semantics here don't change the meaning of my statement. We have solved (for lack of a better word) many of the lower hanging fruits of human disorders. As such, we can't effectively control for incidence rates over time
Just out of curiosity, what field was that in? I could certainly see some scientific disciplines having unaffiliated world-class scientists, but others it would be virtually impossible to do high quality research outside of a lab
There were already a few codes in the area and plenty of papers, and he was mathematically inclined, so it didn't take long for him to become an expert. Once he was an expert, he pointed out major problems in existing codes (both functional and performance).
This is an area where you're working with fairly straightforward data and math (linear strings from a chosen alphabet, probabilistic model is well-established). You don't need to understand the underlying biology in detail to contribute.
Here's a longer list for you: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138357421... though a lot of those studies are about DNA damage and not cancer per se. Though DNA damage is known to increase cancer risk.
So no, not zilch, not at all.
Clearly? The actual article (here's a full text: http://www.fraw.org.uk/data/esmog/lerchl_2015.pdf) doesn't seem to show that clear link. First, there's no dose-response effect, mice with higher doses didn't present higher rates of cancer (sometimes lower). Also, Table 1 with the actual findings is just crazy. For example, the group with no radiation has the second-highest incidence of lung carcinoma. The rate of lymphoma is the same at 0W/kg and 2W/kg, but doubles at 0.4W/kg.
I'm not going to say that the article is trash because it doesn't seem to be, but it is definitely not a clear link, there is a lot unanswered there. There is no mechanism proposed, there are a lot of carcinomas studied (high probability of finding something with a correlation) and there is no dose-response effect.
"the biological activity of any specific type of EMF is inversely proportional to its frequency and proportional to its intensity"
Note: I'm a biophysicist who has studied cancer and RF at the graduate level, and postdoctorate level, I can read the literature, and also make reasoned efforts at evaluating whether the literature provides any useful information that would affect the roll out of 5G from health perspectives. I am unable to find any reliable evidence that would indicate that this rollout will actually have "crisis" levels of health impact.
Now. On to the next step: I completely support high quality research done by high quality scientists on non-ionizing radiation. I would, like many other scientists, to see convincing evidence about the nature of damage that could be done by 5G. So far, nearly everything has been indirect in a way that does not inspire enough confidence to propose policy changes.
MIMO is multiple inputs, multiple outputs, not massive. If the author is bending terminology to enhance his case, that makes the case look weaker...
Those 240 scientist have not published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields"
They are mostly experts in other fields.
Annual invasive cancer incidence rates have been declining in the U.S. for over two decades.
https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html
Also, the lifetime risk of incidence is about 40% for both men and women:
https://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2016/browse_csr.php?section...
https://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2016/browse_csr.php?section...
> Cancer have risen to 1 in 5 in women and 1 in 3 in men, and nobody knows why
'Nobody knows why', seriously? Did we not establish that the likelihood of cancer increase with lifespan? When you only gets to live to 50 of course you don't die of cancer and heart disease nearly as easily. Your risk of cancer increase each year of age lived after a certain age, and any increase in life expectancy will result in more people eventually dying in cancer.
You really do have to spend significant time investigating the literature to actually.
Diagnosis has simultaneously increased, especially in cancers where the rationale for treatment is low (e.g. prostate cancer in most men).
(work in cancer research)
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29725476 The article only measures exposition, no conclusion on effects other than a literature review.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29268055 Can't get the full article, but I only see mentions of a 900MHz source (inside 3G frequency band) and no mention of power. Also it's a biochemical study on rats. Slim evidence.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25747364 One author, talks about wildlife orientation.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26017559 This study talks about the effect of intensive radiation (3x the FCC limit for mobile phones, during 8 months) and it looks like it's actually beneficial for Alzheimer's disease. Funnily enough, it links in the abstract a lot of studies showing either inconsistent or no association between RF and cancer.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4427287/ An study from the department of ¿Psychology and Psychiatry? that finds changes in EEG activity due to mobile phone use, only when the phone is placed near the ear. Little mention of whether the RF radiation can interfere in the EEG measurement.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25738972 Mentions the CERENAT study, which shows increased risk with really heavy mobile phone usage (as in calls). The only one with actual positive effects and looking like a serious study.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25885019 Decreased nasal mucose in rats. No mention of whether thermal effects were at use here.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25918601 Finds decreased sperm quality, but also discusses other studies finding no effect, and also says "A point of limitation in this study is the inability to assess [...] whether sperm affections are time related or not".
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25531835 This one is about nicotine sulfate + RF exposition in frog embryos, and doesn't find effects of RF alone.
That's just off the first page and a half. Probably someone should do a more thorough review, but it does not give me any assurance that most of the studies with reported positive effects are done by people not in the related fields, have no relation to the problem or do not answer the actual important questions.
> And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really.
Mobile phones are not the only thing that has changed radically in the last years.
We are bathed in radiation everyday.
So guess what, the people who say 5G is unsafe, are also the same people that will say flying is unsafe, or using a microwave is unsafe, or eating a banana is unsafe, or being in your car is unsafe, or using your phone is unsafe. Because all these things emit radiation.
Do people care about that though? No. The effects of radiation are grossly exaggerated, and frankly any negligible effects we feel are just the price we pay for living in high tech times. I doubt anyone wants to go back to a tech free lifestyle just so they can live maybe a few more years only to die of something else anyway.
So yes, it’s quackery to say 5G is unsafe and the only reason an article like this would rise to the top is so people could come out and trash it. You want to see scientific comments then go to more interesting articles.
Just so you know.
Your point still stands though, although i would say we're bathed in more intense radiation than 5G and have been bathing in it for millenias - sunlight is radiation as well!
Better live underground, i guess.
Oh, oh, but what about skin cancer you say? That's caused by sunlight, right, so radiowaves could harm you, right? Yeah, but skin cancer is caused by ultraviolet, high energy, high frequency EM radiation (3-30PHz). Petahertz, Coral! That's several orders of magnitude less than most extreme 5G!
Don't even get me started on the power levels of sun vs a base station!
So yeah, the claims of health impact are bullshit.
Every time I was enticed to look up more about hormesis, I see the same issue: an intrinsically linear effect of a factor is studied, with a precise linear generator of the factor, but outside of the generator there is a background component to the factor which is ignored, which causes a misinterpretation of non-linearity.
A concrete example, suppose you have a light sensor in a "dark" enclosure, then at large enough intensities the current through the photodiode is linear with the incident illumination, but if there is some light leaking (or alternatively thermal radiation, and hence temperature, and hence dark current) then as the light generator is set to lower and lower levels, the light sensor will no longer linearly approach 0, since the signal starts to delve below the noise floor (so it will allways be measurable, but require more and more oversampling to decrease the noise floor). To confuse this effect which has nothing to do with photons getting converted to electron hole pairs, it is a misinterpretation to consider the effect "non-linear" close to the noise floor, and an even bigger misinterpretation to consider it "beneficial". Sure even high levels of ionizing radiation can be beneficial to the offspring of a colony of bacteria, fungi, or plants as a group, but it most certainly is harmful to the the individual bacteria, fungi or plants individually.
In the case of the light sensor, the current through the reverse biased photodiode will still be ideally linear with the total incident illumination, just no longer linear with the illumination of the non-dominant light source.
I think it should be pretty obvious that we can't avoid radiation, and we were evolved to handle a certain amount of it.
Oh and also. To make a scientific claim, you have to make a hypothesis. Not just a claim "5G causes cancer", but "5G causes cancer by this and this method". Without method of action best you can do is a corelational study, which is jus one step higher a case study, which is basically an anecdote.
There is a clear and well known pair of reasons for this. First people are living longer and the longer you live the more prone to cancer you are. People who died of small pox did not die of cancer.
Second, more controversially, atmospheric bomb testing in the 50's and 60's.
Over a long enough time span, your probability of getting some form of cancer goes to 100%. Probably more like 200% or 300%, since there are so many types that they can cut out or beat back relatively successfully these days, at least until you get too old and decrepit.
If this was some technology where not having it would be a major impediment to society, then maybe it would be a different story. But 5G just doesn't seem that important to me.
I mean, what else is there left to kill us?
Couldn't it simply be that we are curing/reducing the incidence of most other diseases? Cancer is something that typically doesn't occur until the later years of life. By reducing the number of people who die of other causes, you are increasing the potential population of people who end up getting cancer.
What about the cell-phone-radiation-for-brain-cancer concern? Haven't heard about it for a while.
5G will work better in populated cities and I don't think it is a good fit for most areas in USA. Likely we will have 5G for very dense areas while 4G for the rest.
I will absolutely not live or work in close vicinity of any 5G towers.
I'm not sure exactly what time interval you're making that claim over, but isn't a large part of it people not dying from plague and flu and having good medical care to live into old age in the first place?
One thing's for sure: there _is_ paucity of research on this topic - judging by a brief search on scholar.google.com for "4G technology health effects humans".
Once religion is out as a guide to navigate the world, there's really not much left except science to cling to.
Despite plenty of evidence that everyone and everything can be bought, despite plenty of respected researchers raising their voices against, despite all the proof you could want of how these situations tend to play out long term.
Once you give up blind belief in science, there's nothing left to hold on to; and that's obviously a scary thought for many.
5G gets the techno-utopians in HN all excited about the possibilities of [INSERT THE POINT OF 5G] and they'll get mad at anything that threatens its introduction.
You can find PHDs who believe just about anything (I saw one recently with a sign saying "sunspots cause global warming"), and PHDs publish papers. So you have to look at whether they were peer reviewed, in what journal, and what the findings and methods really were.
It's a lot of work to properly evaluate studies, but I think that meta-analysis is easily abused in this arena. The other big problem is the null publication bias. Have one hundred people roll dice, and if you're only interested in snake-eyes and only publish papers on where that happens, you'll get like 9 studies where they rolled snake-eyes and one responsible scientist who publishes a null result, and conclude that there's a 90% chance of snake-eyes on dice rolls...
I feel like the most damning lack of evidence is the lack of correlation between cell phone adoption and the purported ill effects. In the last 20 years pretty much the whole world started holding RF transmitters up to their head, from basically zero beforehand. If there was an effect, it would be epidemic.
There is no break from the pattern in this thread. People still call for following the science - they just consider this article's science to be the RF engineering equivalent of Wakefield study.
I think the push to make these scientist seam like wackos, is all the money loss for the new tech(and even existing tech)
Oh, and more important than the studies is who is doing them and who is funding them.
> The scientists who signed this appeal arguably constitute the majority of experts on the effects of nonionizing radiation. They have published more than 2,000 papers and letters on EMF in professional journals.
That’s a pretty strong group.
Learned all about him from Malcom Gladwell's podcast this weekend. A really fascinating story of someone that wouldn't give in to peer-pressure, because he was convinced:
http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/40-the-obscure-virus-...
That may sound like hyperbole but somehow I doubt it's far from the mark. Tons of modern advances were from novices or unaccredited. Flight, Relativity, Baysian and Boolean logic; Two hicks, a patent clerk, a preacher, and a self-taught math nerd.
Yet they are very ready to call "more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields" "wackos" or "cranks with a PhD", call their research "bullshit" or "impossible", call the people "thruthers" or claiming "Russian troll farms" are behind this story.
I don't think I've ever seen so much non-scientific HN comments on a science article.
At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really.