To think there is no radiation damage to my toddler

[lovinbeingmum]

Had a couple of friends over last night. The talk turned to warming food, milk etc for the kids. I said I use the microwave and three horrified faces turned around to look at me. Seems the microwave should be avoided for little ones. There's bound to be some harm. So, well.... What do you guys do?

FYI, the kids in question range from 1.5-5 years.

I think the 'millions of people...thirty years' is fairly comforting.

It's not like when people say that their Uncle Fred smoked 60 a day and lived to 101.

I do however stand clear of my microwave oven (which is quite old) and when I was pregnant with my now 13yo one and only, I kept my mobile phone well away from my belly. I also hoik his from under his pillow at night to stop radio waves frying his adolescent brain.

He refuses to wear a tinfoil hat these days :(

I wouldn't know a synthetic cis isomer if it whacked me over the head, but microwaving formula can be very bad for babies. This is because most people don't get the formula hot enough to be safe. The water you make up formula with needs to be over 70 degrees C in order to kill the bugs that are in the powder.

It's no good just heating the formula up to drinking temperature in the microwave, even if you are using previously boiled water. The bugs are in the powder - many people do not realise that formula is not a sterile product, and that this is one of the reasons that formula fed babies are more prone to tummy bugs.

Anyway, as you were...

Plastics leak chemicals, dangerous ones. Its why they (only recently) started removing BPA from children's items. Recent research is now indicating that even BPA free plastics leak additional harmful chemicals when heated (microwave being the worst but dishwasher also bad). So I try to only use plastics for freezing food, not warming. And I hand wash them. I bet there will be a day when other substances in plastics are removed. Microwaves do omit radiation especially when running but also when not to a much smaller degree. Its not recommended to stand beside the microwave when it's running or have it close to children when it can be avoided. But that alone won't do you much harm. Its everything else as well. But you could worry about it forever. I just try to reduce the things that are bad and keep the things that make my life easier and more convenient. But I do think people are hugely unaware of all these tiny little things that are actually bad for them.

Did I dream it, or did people used to think that microwaving tea/coffee (with milk in) would cause cancer?

Well thanks MadameCurie for your answer, it is a good one.

It reminds me of a saying I heard from a fireman, he made a black and grim joke that "An englishman's house is his castle and it is also his deathtrap" which was a reference to the fact he could advise people to do something or not do something but he could not force a householder to do whatever.

I still thought that Sellafield got into trouble over the death of a subcontractor who fell down from a ledge inside one of the stacks associated with a defunct air cooled graphite plutonium production reactor. If they got into trouble over the death of a subcontractor then it does suggest that the site owner / occupier has a responsibility for the health and safety of the subcontractor.

If you extend this idea then the householder could be responsible for the building worker, but maybe being an experienced industrial company the operators of Sellafield are held to a higher standard than a typical householder.

Any person working at Sellafield would be covered by the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, which places a lot of duties on the Employer.

If you, as a private householder, are having building work done on your house then you are deemed as exempt from the relevant regs, the Construction Design and Management regs, unless you control the building to works to a substantial degree, eg insist that your builder uses an unsafe method of access. Your building contractor still has to comply with his own duties under these regs though, which includes planning and carrying out the work without causing any risks to health and safety,

Microwaves do omit radiation especially when running but also when not to a much smaller degree. Its not recommended to stand beside the microwave when it's running or have it close to children when it can be avoided. But that alone won't do you much harm. Its everything else as well.
What a mixture of sense and nonsense!
If a microwave oven is in good condition and the door seals working correctly the amount of (non-ionising) radiation is tiny. I have access to laboratory measuring instruments and have used them to check my own, and a few other microwaves.
That amount of radiation will not hurt a child, but since you can't always be certain the seals are perfectly clean it is sensible not to let a child look into front while it's running, as I said above.
If the seals are seriously damaged it is very dangerous should not be used. Cut the plug off and send the oven for recycling.
A microwave oven does not emit any radiation at all when not cooking. There will be a very small and totally harmless mains frequency field around it if it's still plugged in, but no more than any other mains appliance and less than many.

Non-ionising radiation is not harmful. It doesn't matter if you stand next to the microwave as it can't hurt you.

Cote
Excessive microwave radiation can and does cause harm, in exactly the same way as other non-ionising radiation like sunlight causes sunburn and tissue changes. In particular it can cause cataracts.

Engineers who work with microwave equipment have to be extremely careful about this, and have to use radiation detection and measuring equipment to limit their exposure.

A microwave oven is harmless IF in good condition.

The only 'radiation' that microwaves emit is radio waves in the 2.4 GHz range - exactly the same range as used by baby monitors, cordless phones and all the Wifi and Bluetooth devices around your home. The only difference is the power of the radio waves - which is why bluetooth earpieces are (allegedly) safe but microwave ovens have shielding built into the body of the oven.

Just to be pedantic Grandad, the DECT cordless phones sold in Europe operate at 1.9 GHz, not 2.4 GHz.

But like the other devices you mentioned, they only radiate milliwatts of power and are entirely harmless (although a few scaremongers may disagree). A microwave oven generates typically 800 watts, so it is vital to keep all of that energy sealed inside.

Just to be more pedantic, I deliberately didn't mention DECT.

But anyway, I was making the point that this scary microwave 'radiation' is all around us, including in our babies' bedrooms.

I used to work for a lady that said I had to take children out of the room every time I used the microwave. Also, we moved house a few times, and children's bedrooms had to be arranged in a way that ensured beds were furthest away from wifi router on a different floor....

I know you didn't mention DECT Grandpa, but most of them are these days. :)

"Excessive microwave radiation can and does cause harm, in exactly the same way as other non-ionising radiation like sunlight causes sunburn and tissue changes"

Ultraviolet (UV) is the part of sunlight that causes harm and that is ionising. See graph here.

Microwave radiation is non-ionising by definition and hence can't cause DNA damage and cancer. Theoretically, if you manage to expose yourself to lots of it over a very long time, I guess it can cook your insides, but that's about it.

www.google.co.uk/search?q=microwaves+cataracts

So you can Google microwaves cataracts, Sally?

Microwave radiation was found to cause cataracts in rabbits at intensities of about 180 mw/cm2. Your microwave oven would leak a maximum of 1 mw/cm2 at a distance of 5 cm. So if you sat with your eyeballs practically glued to your microwave oven for over an hour, you might have something to worry about. If you are a rabbit.

Or not. Monkeys were found to develop no cataract even at microwave intensities of 500 mw/cm2, although they suffered face burns.

Microwaves are very high frequency and only have a heating effect on objects that contain water. Standing near a microwave will not give you radiation poisoning. Mobile phones also use microwaves but a slightly longer frequency so using phones will not boil your brain. The only damaging waves in the electromagnetic spectrum are UV, x-rays and gamma rays. Safe electromagnetic waves are radio waves, microwaves, infra red and visible light. Sound waves are not on the list because they are longitudinal waves and not tranverse. Simples

DH is a phyisicist with a specialism in radiation from a top UK university. We used the microwave for warming bottles, he regularly checked it 'professionally' with some scary looking equipment.

Apparently you're more likely to get a dose of radiation sitting on a granite rock on Dartmoor for your picnic.

As I said above, twice, there is no danger from the microwaves in a domestic oven if it is operating correctly and the seal is not damaged.
I have checked my own oven, and a few others, with a calibrated field strength meter and the radiation was minimal in every case.
But if the oven is not properly sealed, the output from that magnetron is potentially damaging.

If anyone is interested to learn more, the definitive limits on exposure are published in the The Electromagnetic Fields (EMF) Directive, which can be downloaded from:
eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2013:179:0001:0021:EN:PDF

The maximum radiation values are listed in Annex 3.

Do phone masts emit radiowaves then ? are they safe too ? this is a genuine question from someone with no physics background who is fed up with living in a area with a rubbish signal and was a little disappointed when everyone threw their hands up in horror at the idea of one being sited nearby .

frumpet - yes, but no! They have to radiate, that's how they work. They all emit microwaves - it just means very short length waves. They are designed to miss people, tilt of antenna, shielding, height etc.

DH installs them, builds the masts and outs the aerial in. He only has to wear protection if they go past radio/TV aerials... the phone masts caused a massive furore years ago, many claiming their kids would be fried...

There has been extensive research and there is still no consensus of opinion. If you live under one then some people report ill health. If you look on line you will find lots of sites with 'proof' and links to all the research that supports it. But there is an equal amount of research that refutes all points.

Basically, the jury is out. But phones are here, we all use them. So we seem to have chosen to accept the risks. All else is NIMBYism, in part justified.

Nomama sums it up very well. There is a theoretical risk, but it's so small that no-one has actually been able to prove any harm. There are certainly much more harmful influences in the environment, e.g. from chemical pollution.
Engineers working in close proximity to transmitting aerials have to be protected, but for you and me there is no provable problem. In actual fact you receive more signal from the phone in your hand than you do from the base station on a nearby mast.
Just to be clear about the 'microwaves' tag. There is nothing special about microwaves - the term merely relates to a particular range of radio frequencies. To be pedantic, some mobile phone signals qualify as microwave and some don't, but there is no difference to any perceived effect on the body.