Am I being Unreasonable to worry about the longterm effects of wifi and mobile technology on my kids

[Noellefielding]

with information like this out there?

drive carefully

Well, let's not mention diesel fumes

Love this 1960s view on smoking

news.bbc.co.uk/panorama/hi/front_page/newsid_9180000/9180455.stm

And this advert saying Drs think smoking is ok

It's fine is indeed not science, but there has been a lot of work done on EMF radiation and living tissue and as far as I know there's nothing repeatable or separable from tissue heating effects. Should be stop looking ? No we shouldn't. Given the widespread adoption of wifi and mobiles, most of the planet is a living lab right now so I think if there are any effects they are going to be long term / subtle. But we will see them. So far we've seen nothing repeatable or separable from tissue heating though.

Alas the two papers cited are paywalled so I can't have a look :( are they actually saying they have an emf or mf sensitive cell line ? Wouldn't that be quite a biggie? I'd want to check their setup. Was the distance to emission source identical for all cultures? Are they sure they were all exactly temperature controlled? Was there any tissue heating? Was a control run with no mf but identical tissue heating ? Are they sure that F344 strain was phentyped properly ? How repeatable was this?

There may be other mechanisms at work

There may be, but you're going to get a Nobel Prize for finding them. Put power into a radio transmitter, and the various energies that emerge (electromagnetic and heat mostly) are all accounted for. Talk about mysterious "other mechanisms" smacks of luminiferous aether: mysterious fields and effects that leave no trace of themselves. Any mysterious "other mechanism" would be operating at infinitesimal energies and masses, because we can account for the energy and mass in transmitters. As such, it seems to put it mildly unlikely that it interacts with matter.

If it's not heat, and it's not ionisation, and it's not near-field magnetism, what other effect could it be? And the magnitude of those effects around a phone are substantially lower than many, many other sources we regard as safe.

The smoking thing is really interesting. There were significant concerns very early on that it was very bad, but the tobacco companies actively suppressed the notion and paid out shed loads of money to 'sympathetic opinion leaders.'

Pretty grim stuff, and that and a million other scandals have lead to the situation we have today where regulations are as tight as a gnats chuff. As well they should be.

Should be stop looking ? No we shouldn't. Given the widespread adoption of wifi and mobiles, most of the planet is a living lab right now so I think if there are any effects they are going to be long term / subtle

This is my point. Who really knows. Use phones but use them wisely.

If you feel confident that an hour a day on a phone close to your ear is safe, go ahead. That's your choice.

It's a shame people can't read the papers.

For example, Orlando quotes the claim: In an in vitro cell system, EMF exposure of human breast tumor (MCF-7) cells led to an activation of genes that have been associated with the induction of metastasis in breast cancer cells (Girgert, 2009).

Right, but we're off into a different sort of woo here. Let's skip for a moment over the proxy outcome ("activation of genes associated with" is a bloody long way from "causes cancer") and look at what they actually did.

namechange

Never said it caused cancer. But if you activate genes that are associated with metastasis, that's probably not a good thing.

The point is - you cannot say that there is no link or danger.

Sorry, caught by cut and paste triggering control-enter.

"MCF-7 BC cells from 2 different sources were exposed to highly homogeneous 50-Hz EMFs"

Right, so we aren't in radio, we're now worrying about mains causing cancer, 1990s-style (Currents of Death, that sort of stuff). At 50Hz we're in the near field almost exclusively, and the wave length of such radiation as there might be is greater than the size of the earth.

In fact, the epidemiology of claims that 50Hz EMF affects cancer is pretty much discredited, so the effect they set out to explain probably doesn't exist. But even if it did, the relevance of 50Hz to mobile phones or WiFi is extremely hard to see. It's not my field, so I can't see if their experimental work is good, but I can see they are attacking an almost entirely disjoint problem.

Many of the health bodies,cancer charities etc all say that there is no definitive link - but they also say that studies have shown some evidence and others have shown different things.

That's my point.

You can say that it's safe. Other people aren't sure.

namechange

How confident are you that there is no danger to health from mobile phones?

How confident are you that there is no danger to health from mobile phones?

As confident as I am that coffee isn't carcinogenic.

Almost every day I wish I had my pubmed login credentials back ....

One of the downsides of leaving academia!

As I said before, I used to work in the same building as a bloke who investigated mobile phone fields in living tissue. They did try very hard indeed but came up with nothing.

I honestly think wifi is fine, and I'm interested as to why this is one of the things people latch onto.

Now there's a question....

If you've ever watched Yes Minister and the Greasy Pole episode, it sounds a bit like this.

They want to make a chemical called metadioxin. Which sounds like dioxin. No one has a clue what it means but dioxin (in the series) is dangerous.

The Minister convinces the scientist to write a report which is basically cautious, given the unknowns and the possible effects that haven't been looked at.

TBF - I don't use my phone much anyway and think Wi-fi is great

Well, DH has been running an experiment for about 20 years. He and his handy gang of riggers have been installing the masts that send out the signals for mobile phones.

To add a frisson of danger, they also used their mobiles daily. To be thorough, they all wi fid their homes and offices.

Empirically he can state that none of them have come to any harm. No cancers in any of them.

To be candid he can't say this gold standard research, much like some of the studies previously linked to.

As he points out, all of the 'things' being pointed at as carcinogenic occur naturally... you really can't avoid them!

Empirically he can state that none of them have come to any harm. No cancers in any of them

Considering 1 in 3 people will develop cancer at some point, he could argue it's been protective.

Considering 1 in 3 people will develop cancer at some point,

Cancer's generally a disease of age and poor lifestyle, though, and phone mast riggers tend to be younger and fitter.

I'm ignorant of all this discussion but faintly wonder about one thing.

in the 80's I knew someone who was a professional specialist in radio communications masts (setting them up across the country). Very highly trained in how they work.

He told me that the reason there was a legal limit on the power of CB transmitters was that there were health concerns about the effects of them. Was all that pretty much a misconception? (course, most CB people broke those rules but they were there!)

The power limit on CBers is not a radiological safety rule, it is a rule designed to reduce their potential to disrupt TV reception and other users of radiospectrum.

A radioham in the UK has a power limit of 400 W PEP on many bands, the CB limit on 27 MHz in the UK was for years 4 W I am sure it is still only 4 W.

So if a member of the general public is allowed 400 W transmitter after a moderate level of training then a much smaller transmitter used in a WiFi base station is likely to be even less of threat.

I am sure that a long as you stay a few meters away from the aerial even at 400 W you are safe as long as you do not do something stupid like stand in front of a microwave dish.

So where's my soup?
I've been waiting all day.

Was all that pretty much a misconception?

Yes. You'd never be able to get enough power into a 27MHz transmitter to heat anything up unless you connected it to the national grid and had an antenna system that would look like Jodrell Bank.

In general terms, an antenna capable of forming any sort of beam is several times larger than the wavelength of the stuff you're playing with, and you can only get enough power to do anything useful (or dangerous) by forming such a beam or having immense amounts of input power. Given CB has a wavelength of 10 metres, any attempt to make a dangerously focused beam is unlikely to succeed, especially on a car. Whereas if you're messing about with gigahertz-band stuff, where the wavelength is tens of centimetres, you can get sufficient forward gain to heat things up with quite sensible input powers. Which is why the unlicensed band used for WiFi has stringent limits on power and antenna gain, and even amateur radio licenses (which are pretty free and easy) limit you as to power and have safety recommendations that are a bit lower still.

On wavelengths.

Microwaves, chocolate and the speed of light

Au contraire, Myricales.

When DH started he was in his 30s. The charge hands were in their 50s. The majority of riggers are 30+, many carry on climbing into their 60s. Whilst the intake has changed these days, riggers not being what they used to be, none of DHs counterparts were in their teens or 20s when they started on phone masts.

So yes, it could be argued it has been protective