Can anyone direct me to studies, research, etc. from credible sources?
I don’t think you’ll find credible sources that make that claim.
What about studies, research that addresses the topic?
Hasn’t the California Health Department issued warnings about dangers from cell phone devices? What were their warnings based on?
I think it’s an urban myth. I remember these stories making the rounds in the early days.
I think you have to distinguish two potential effects of radiation here.
One is that radiation can potentially act as a mutagen, i.e., causing damage in a person’s DNA, which can cause cancer. For cellphones, this risk is zero; the frequency of cellphone signals is far too low to have that effect (X-rays, on the other hand, can act as mutagens; that’s why you shouldn’t get X-rayed too often - but cellphone signals have a frequency that’s many orders of magnitude below that of X-rays).
Another effect is that radiation can be absorbed by the water molecules in your body, and thereby heat up your tissue, much the same way a microwave oven cooks food by expposing it to radiation that is absorbed by the water molecules in the food. But the transmitted power of smartphones is way too low to have any effect of that sort. A modern smartphone transmits with a power of one or two watts at most. Plus it’s subject to the law of inverse squares - even a few centimetres of distance between the phone and your body tissue means the power absorbed by your body goes down by a high factor.
I’ve not seen any peer reviewed research that demonstrates a connection between a health issue and cell phone radiation. The documents you mention seem to be speculative.
Unfortunately, I suffer from being told dozens of times that things are bad for me; only to find out there was no science behind the claims or it was crappy science, and the people originating the warnings were not really well versed in science and more interested in spreading unfounded fear. So forgive me for trying not to, once again, be pulled into a fear/panic/conspiracy. I’ve been burned enough to be more critical in thought.
I remember when mobile phones were banned from hospitals on the grounds that they might interfere with sensitive equipment and also when Garage forecourts had big signs warning that using a phone near petrol fumes was dangerous.
I wonder if the early phones were a danger. Primitive tech (by today’s standards), more power needed because fewer masts etc.
Even if they have (which I’m not sure) it wouldn’t necessarily mean anything. California has a history of requiring warnings about health dangers that may or may not actually exist.
The short answer is that there’s no convincing evidence that cellphone usage is hazardous to health.
For example, the idea that cellphones are linked to brain tumors has not been supported by accumulated evidence.
“The NCI data clearly demonstrate no widespread rise in brain and other nervous system cancers in the last (nearly) three decades despite the enormous increase in cell phone use during this period. The Pew Research Center estimates that from 2002 to 2019, the percentage of the population owning a cell phone or smartphone has risen from 62 percent to 96 percent, and yet there is a small decrease in brain and other nervous tissue cancer rates…
Published in vivo studies have yielded no clear evidence that radio frequency energy exposure at levels experienced by the public from cell phone use leads to tumorigenesis.”
http://fda.gov/radiation-emitting-products/cell-phones/scientific-evidence-cell-phone-safety
Of course, people spreading alarms about cellphones have moved on to warning that 5G causes a variety of harms (including Covid-19), so I anticipate it will take more time and studies ad nauseum to debunk those claims as well.
In an extremely indirect manner the radiation from cell phones poses a risk to human health because the cell phones wouldn’t work without emitting radiation and people wouldn’t cause car accidents or walk into lamp posts while talking on a cell phone. But if they could work without emitting radiation the same problems would exist. That’s how far you have to go to find evidence of the harm from cell phone radiation.
This whole mess got its start with power lines. Starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s, some insurance folks figured out that people who live next to power lines didn’t live as long on average as people who didn’t. Exactly how long people live factors in to insurance payouts, so some insurance folks get paid big bucks to figure these things out.
For a long time, no one but insurance folks really cared much about this. But then in the 1970s there was a study that linked power lines and incidences of childhood leukemia. That study has since been discredited, but that let the genie out of the bottle, so to speak. People had it in their mind that power lines were dangerous.
In the 1980s, things really went nuts. The thing is, there hadn’t really been any long-term studies done about the effects of power lines, so nobody really knew if there was anything to the supposed dangers or not. Though to be fair, at that point no one had any really plausible explanation for how power lines could cause harm either. But people feared lawsuits, so almost overnight an industry of sorts sprang up where some “expert” would go around with a field strength meter and would proclaim what areas were “safe” and what areas were not. Of course, the “safe” level was generally a rectally generated number (i.e. someone pulled it out of their ass) with no basis in science whatsoever.
Cell phones were just becoming a big thing at the time. At the beginning of the 1980s, cell phones were the size of bricks and were expensive toys featured on shows like Miami Vice. By the end of the 80s they were becoming much more affordable. It didn’t exactly take a huge leap for people to start thinking that if power lines could be bad then cell phones must also be bad. After all, they all emit this evil horrible invisible radiation stuffs that people didn’t understand so it must be dangerous, right?
So anyway, tons and tons of research money started being poured into figuring this stuff out. One of my college professors was one of the early researchers into this stuff. One thing he noted is that it was entirely possible that people who lived healthy lifestyles could have just chosen not to live next to power lines, which might explain the statistical anomalies that the insurance folks had figured out.
Now here is where you need to understand how modern science works. You do studies, and sometimes you get a result and sometimes you don’t. If you get a result, you need to do follow-up studies to find out if there really is something there or not. But, all of this science stuff needs funding, and the way you get funding is to publish exciting results. So studies are published that indicate that they found something, even though follow-up studies haven’t been done yet to support it. That’s the way things work.
The other important thing is that SCIENTIST FIND THAT CELL PHONES KILL PEOPLE!!! is a great headline,where SCIENTISTS DID A STUDY AND DIDN’T FIND ANYTHING isn’t. So preliminary studies that find some result tend to get a LOT more press than studies that don’t get a result. The end result is that there is a huge bias in what we read in the news.
Now you might think that a lot of the studies that found results were funded by horrifically biased groups like the People Who Want To Ban Cell Phones Forever Coalition (that’s a fake group in case the sarcasm doesn’t show through) but actually a lot of the studies that did find results were actually not biased. But that’s the way science works. Sometimes you get a result, but then follow-up studies don’t support it. That original result gets published and is front page news. The follow-up study that finds nothing gets buried deep in the newspaper, if anyone bothers publishing it at all.
So yes, you can find all kinds of small studies that find some link between cell phones and cancer (or power lines and cancer).
The important thing here is that, to date, there has not been a single study that has been supported in follow-up studies that link cell phones to anything bad at all.
There have also been some incredibly huge studies done, and those studies have also not found any statistical correlation between cell phone use and anything bad.
It is very difficult to prove a negative, but the bulk of the scientific evidence so far is that any link between cell phones or power lines and anything bad has not been proven. You can’t prove a negative so it’s almost impossible to say it has been disproven, but there is currently no proven link between cell phones and anything bad.
After decades of research and bizillions of dollars being thrown into the problem, you’d think that if there were something there that someone would have found a link by now. So while nothing is proven, it’s really starting to look like there really just isn’t anything there at all.
Also, no one has yet come up with a plausible mechanism by which cell phones could cause cancer or other ill effects.
This gets into what “radiation” means. Electromagnetic radiation is a lot of different stuff. At the low end of the frequency spectrum, you have long waves, which are useful to transmit energy at very low data rates through polar ice (it’s how military subs communicate over huge distances) but have few other uses. At higher frequencies than that you get radio waves, used for AM radio, FM radio, and broadcast TV, and a whole bunch of other stuff. As the frequency goes up the wavelength goes down, and higher frequency radio waves have very short wavelengths and are therefore called microwaves. Cell phones use microwaves. So does wifi, some traffic light detectors, supermarket automatic doors, and all kinds of stuff. Also, your microwave oven, obviously.
Above microwaves you get into infrared light, then visible light, and ultraviolet light. Then above that you have X-rays, gamma rays, and cosmic rays.
Part way through the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, electromagnetic radiation becomes “ionizing”, meaning that it is high enough in frequency that it can strip the electrons off of atoms and create ions. This is very damaging. If you leave stuff outside and it is permanently damaged and faded by the sunlight, that is caused by the ionizing effects of ultraviolet radiation. UV light also damages your skin and causes cancer. Higher frequency electromagnetic radiation like X-rays and gamma rays will also cause cancer.
It is this “ionizing” radiation that most people think of when they hear the term “radiation”. It doesn’t mutate animals into Godzilla, but ionizing radiation is very harmful. It’s why X-ray technicians wear lead aprons. In small doses it’s not too harmful, so it’s reasonably safe to use to take a picture of your bones, but you don’t want to get a lot of dosage of the stuff or it will kill you.
But here is the important thing. Cell phones are way down below the ionizing portion of the spectrum. If cell phones were dangerous, you’d expecting something higher in frequency, like a flashlight, to be much more dangerous. And yet no one thinks flashlights are dangerous.
Now sure, if you get enough radiation in one place you can cook things with it. That’s how your microwave oven works, and it’s also how you can burn ants on the sidewalk with a magnifying glass and just the visible light from sunlight. Keep the power levels low though and there’s no harm.
The long and short of it is that based on our current knowledge and understanding, using a cell phone is no more dangerous that shining a flashlight onto your skin.
Sunlight contains UV ionizing radiation, so ironically, simply walking outside during daylight hours is actually more dangerous to you than using a cell phone is.
Finding studies that say cell phones are dangerous is easy. Finding studies that say cell phones are dangerous but have also held up to peer review and additional follow-up studies is impossible. There aren’t any.
That doesn’t mean that the first studies were garbage. That’s the way science works. Sometimes you get false positives. That’s why we do peer reviews and follow-up studies.
But to date, there are no proven links between cell phones and anything bad, and to date no one has yet suggested a plausible mechanism by which cell phones could cause harm.
The statistical link between power lines and lifespans is still there. It’s starting to look like my old professor was right, though, and that the statistical anomaly is probably caused by the fact that people who are more particular about their health and choose to live healthier lifestyles also simply choose not to live next to power lines.
Excellent writeup, ECG.
Put another way… the null hypothesis is that cell phones are not harmful to human health, and the null hypothesis has not been rejected.
I have to remember that phrase. Beautiful.
Not only that, but we can tell when something is heating up our flesh to the point that it could cause damage. It feels hot. If your cell phone feels hot, then yes, by all means take it away from your face (there are, in fact, some ways that cell phones can malfunction that could cause burns, but they have little to do with the radio waves they emit). But if your phone doesn’t feel hot, then it’s not cooking your face.
Ref ecg’s excellent writeup about scientific research there’s also this expert’s writeup on statistics as used in studies
That tells me there’s something about green pigment food coloring that needs to be investigated.
IOW … It’s grant-funded statistically underpowered studies all the way down!
I knew I shoulda been an academic!
Back in the 80s when I was in college working on my EE degree, my favorite professor was pregnant. She was cautioned by other professors to avoid sleeping with an electric blanket.
I think the studies weren’t conclusive by then or perhaps the professors were acting from an abundance of caution, but even specialists weren’t as certain at that time.
It’s interesting has science works.