The latest cell phone “radiation” study really irked me. I wrote up something, but before it was polished, a ton of other places wrote up nice articles exposing the information for what it was. For example Dr. Steven Novella wrote an excellent piece. I did a similar job in disseminating the information, but I think he did a better job, and he has a lot more authority. There are two things I would like to add which I have not seen yet, then I will explain why I am now dusting electrons of that original blog post.
First. The odds of having a winning ticket in my state’s lottery, is about 1 in 7 million. People don’t expect to win if they buy a single ticket. If you purchase two tickets, then your odds of winning increase by 100 percent! Sounds impressive, right? So why might you not be impressed?
No one really thinks that purchasing two tickets will make you any more of a winner than before. However, when exposure to X causes a 30% increase in some specific form of cancer, then we label X as very dangerous. As a general rule of thumb, if you are given data in the form of a percent, someone is trying to either hide or exaggerate something. The relative risk of X is noticeable, but nothing can be said about the real risk.
The cell phone study may have shown an increase in the relative risk of getting one specific type of brain cancer, for those people who used their phones for 10 hours a day. However, what is the real risk of getting this specific type of cancer in the first place? You are probably more likely to develop Glioma than win the lottery, but increasing this low risk by 40% still results in a low risk.
Second. Why does anyone expect a biological effect anyway? I have a degree in electrical engineering, and I’ve sold cell phones (a long time ago.) I know how much power they produced, and the idea that so little power can cause us harm seems ridiculous. For comparison, I crunched these numbers: your cell phone uses about .6 Watts to broadcast, and is about 2 inches from your brain; a low power computer monitor is about 15 watts, and is about 18 inches. You monitor is irradiating you with 1.5 times more energy than your cell phone. Most people also spend far more time in front of their computers than talking on their phone. (edit, I found this extremely physics-y explanation.)
OK, numbers scare a lot of people, so lets look at this in a way to can explain to your coworkers. Light from the cell phone passes through you head like visible light through glass. If it didn’t, you would have no reception. You teeny tiny cell phone emits a frequency of light that can pass through you, your car, your home, your office, school, and surrounding buildings, and still reach the tower. Metal, and other materials can attenuate this signal, but they need to be designed as such.
If your cell phone caused a biological effect, than your cell phone signal would have a very difficult time reaching out. Cell phone light frequencies are designed to pass through your body with no attenuation. No attenuation, no energy passed off to your body.
In a similar vein, cell phones use a very large variety of frequencies, and these frequencies have changed over the years. Cell phones have used hundreds of different specific frequencies from about 800MHz to 2.4Ghz. As the technology has advanced, the higher frequencies have become more common. The above study looked at long term cell phone usage. I seriously doubt that there was a single person who was exposed to one single frequency for every call, for length of time of the study.
There are much better odds of winning the lottery.
So, why rehash this whole thing? A NYTimes blog highlighted products to protect you from this imaginary danger. There are many more, but I don’t want to link to them as it would only help their google ranking. And today, San Francisco passed a totally stupid law forcing a label on all cell phones “warning” what their broadcast power is. (Hint, it’s 0.6 watts.)
California is weird. On one hand California, and especially San Francisco is very counter cultural. There is a lot of spiritualism, homeopathy, and distrust of anything not “natural”. How many products are in your home come with the warning: “this product contains an ingredient known to the State of California to cause cancer.” Sometimes good and sometimes bad, but leave it to California to jump on the ultra-careful side.
But this is San Francisco— Silicon Valley. This is where 70% of all cell phones are designed. If anyone should know better, it is these guys.
Finally why should I be irked? Why can’t I just leave well enough alone? What is the harm in studying something so incredibly unlikely to do anything?
Because this study reportedly cost $30M. Not only that, this is but the latest of many studies that have shown absolutely no relationship between cell phones and cancer. Wikipedia has a great list of these studies, each costing thousands to millions of dollars.
And because there are real diseases out there. Real problems that require real work to solve. I feel sad that the MDA, March of Dimes, American Cancer Society and many others are missing out and research for real cures are left unfunded. Real people with real problems are not getting the help they need. This is why I am irritated.
Laws should be there to protect us from real dangers, but protecting us from nonsense just makes all protection useless. What’s the Harm” is a cop-out. For more examples of harm in “what’s the harm”, please visit this web site.
