Here is my article published in Herald: http://www.epaperoheraldo.in/Details.aspx?id=15574&boxid=17028312&uid=&dat=5/4/2014
A fuller version of the article is the following: The health-food craze, the environmental movement and other left-wing and right-wing political activist movements have generated many bogus conspiracy theories among regular educated folk in recent years. Fifty years ago this type of paranoia was found only in a few isolated people confined mostly in western countries – such things as the government is using fluoridation of the public water supply to make people sick and create business for pharmaceutical and other commercial enterprises. But easy access to the internet and spam email has turned large number of people in any corner of the world into conspiracy theorists. For some reason, today most of these irrational beliefs have to do with medical issues and technology. The Journal of American Medical Association, for example, published a research article recently quantifying the percentage of Americans who believe in various conspiracies. The two most popular conspiracy theories turned out to be: 1) “The Food and Drug Administration is deliberately preventing the public from getting natural cures for cancer and other diseases because of pressure from drug companies,” and 2) “Health officials know that cell phones cause cancer but are doing nothing to stop it because large corporations won’t let them.” More than 50% of the people surveyed believed in at least one conspiracy theory. These people were found to be those who avoided regular health checkups, standard medical treatment and preventive measures such as vaccinations. Instead, they dosed themselves with vitamins, herbal supplements, the so-called “organic” foods and various alternative medical remedies. It appears therefore that the paranoid belief in medical conspiracies can drive people to take chances with their health in general. Coincidentally, about the same time that this article appeared I was alerted on Goan online forums to the fact that the unwarranted scare regarding radiation from cell phones and cell phone towers had found a foothold among Goans, particularly the residents of Saligao. I understand that many of these residents are objecting to the construction of a cell phone tower because they believe that the radiation arising from it would harm their health. It is very likely that they have been influenced by local environmental activists who are suspicious of the government or large corporations, and consequently buy into the latest anti-establishment scare that appears on the internet or through a mass email campaign conducted by activists in other parts of the world. The internet has literally thousands of websites devoted to propagate all kinds of wild anti-establishment plots and doomsday scenarios. It is very hard for any lay person to discern whether the claims made on these websites are legitimate or just pure hoaxes, unless one is specialized in the particular medical, scientific or technological field in question. In many cases it requires one to have an educational background in more than one field. In the case of the cell phone scare, for example, one has to be familiar with physics, biology and medicine. Furthermore, the activists promoting these conspiratorial causes have access to the technical scientific literature in these areas because of the internet. They are therefore able to pick and choose only the studies that appear to support their cause, like a lawyer in a court of law or a politician in a political campaign. Invariably, they have a poor understanding of this literature, and no clue as to how science works and how scientific consensus is arrived at. That is why, in order to see through the deception, in addition to the knowledge of physics, biology and medicine, one has to be conversant with the scientific approach and method. As it turns out, I happen to have the right background to be able to debunk the misinformation on cell phone and cell phone tower radiation. I am a medical scientist and professor whose current scientific research involves using electromagnetic medical devices and studying the effects of electromagnetic stimulation of the brain. In the early 1990s when cell phones were just beginning to be popular, the U. S. government convened a panel of scientists of the stature of Nobel Prize winners to apply their understanding of physics and examine the literature to investigate whether cell phone radiation could produce any adverse effects on the human body. After a thorough investigation they concluded that there was no evidence for any harmful effects to human health from this radiation, but that we need to be vigilant for any evidence that may turn up in the future due to long-term effects. One of these eminent panelists was an advisor to our graduate studies program, and one of my role models. His name is Dr. Charles Stevens. He, along with others, is responsible for one of the most fundamental discoveries of brain science, namely that cells have tiny channels that carry ionic electrical currents across their membranes. It has now been two decades since that panel met. There is still no evidence and no rational mechanism for any detrimental effects of radiation from cell phones and towers on the human brain or body. The claim that this radiation causes brain cancer, has been belied by the fact that after three decades of widespread and increasing use of cell phones, there has not been any increase in the incidence of brain cancer in the general population. The latest large-scale study published in March 2012 in the British Medical Journal found that the incidence of brain cancer remained constant from 1992 through 2008 in the U.S., a period during which cell phone use went from almost 0% to 100%. If cell phones caused brain cancer, there should have been a measurable increase in its incidence. There is one prior study done in Sweden, which claims a slight increase of incidence in heavy users of cell phones. But this study has not been replicated. In other words, nobody else has repeated the study anywhere else, and confirmed its findings. In science, unless a result is reproduced it cannot be taken seriously. The reason for this is that such clinical studies are statistical surveys, where there is always some probability of finding a small spurious effect by chance alone, even if the study is conducted properly. Dr. Charles Stevens has nicely pointed to this and other problems with such non-replicated studies in this succinct quote: “To date, however, none of the studies that reported an association between EMF (electromagnetic field) exposure or cell phone use and cancer (or a biological change related to cancer) has been independently replicated. In most cases, the positive association can be traced to statistical artifacts, systematic errors (such as heating tissue), or fraud.” On my part, I have gone through all the human clinical trials on cell phone radiation effects that have been published in the medical literature so far. It is only these human studies that count because if there are no significant detrimental effects in humans then all the non-human animal, plant tissue, cell culture dish and test tube studies are pointless from a public health standpoint. I read all the abstracts of research papers in a medical research literature database maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, and made a note of the results and final conclusions in terms of presence or absence of any effects. The findings from this exhaustive and comprehensive search of the world peer-reviewed medical literature on the effects of cell phone radiation of human beings of all ages are as follows: 1.As many as 44 of the 68 trials showed no harmful effects of cell phone radiation on human health. Indeed, a few of them showed beneficial effects, such as improvement in cognitive skills, memory and action response times. 2.Only 14 of 68 trials showed some effects that were either deemed to be harmful, or effects whose health significance was not clear, such as slight changes in brain wave activity. 3.The few papers that claimed to show slight increases in the incidence of serious health effects have not been replicated. In cases where a replication has been attempted, it has produced a negative result or a failure to replicate the initial result. In summary therefore, there is no conclusive scientific evidence for cell phones or towers to cause any harm to human health. The few studies that show a small effect are likely to be due to one of the three spurious errors that Dr. Stevens mentioned in his quote. In general, when you are looking for two alternative outcomes such as an effect or no effect in a study, or a series of studies, there is a 50% probability of seeing an effect by chance alone, like the tossing of a coin yields heads or tails 50% of the time. That is why statisticians require that an effect be seen in more than 95% of observations in order to claim that there is a significant effect. From the standpoint of physics and biology the lack of an effect is not surprising at all because there is no plausible physical mechanism by which radiation from these devices can cause a measurable effect on any biological tissue. The radiation waves that emanate from cell phones and towers are electromagnetic waves, just like sunlight. But the energy of cell phone or tower waves is a million times less than that of sunlight. The extremely low energy means that cell phone radiation cannot break chemical bonds, unlike ultraviolet rays, x rays and gamma rays, which are known to produce cancer. Consequently, it cannot cause cancer, because in order for any radiation to cause cancer the chemical bonds within DNA need to be broken by that radiation. To get around this hard fact the cell phone radiation activists speculate that it causes its bad effects by heating the tissues of the body. But if this were the case then sunlight should be more than 7000 times as effective in producing those effects because we are that much more exposed to heat from sunlight. In fact, since 3% of sunlight that hits the ground is the cancer-producing ultraviolet light, we receive three and half times greater amounts of ultraviolet radiation compared to cell phone tower radiation. Ordinary sunlight therefore ought to be a much bigger and more real cancer risk. What is more, if heating of body tissues was the cause of cancer and all the other serious problems then daily physical exercise would have caused cancer, and would have killed people from all other serious effects that are attributed to cell phones and towers by the activists. This is so because even normal daily physical activities can generate nearly 84 times more heat in the body than cell phone tower radiation at the base of the tower. Another activist canard is that cell phone-like microwaves are used in microwave ovens to cook food. This is easily debunked by the fact that microwave ovens produce 500 – 1000 times more powerful microwaves than a cell phone, and they focus and concentrate these waves inside a small box. It is the same as focusing and concentrating sunlight with a lens to set fire to a pile of papers. A final red herring raised by the activists is what the World Health Organization has done for political reasons, namely that it has designated cell phone radiation as a “possible” carcinogen (cancer-producing substance). It has also lumped in this category coffee, coconut oil and pickled vegetables. Dried salted fish is classified as carcinogenic, and shift work and wood as probably carcinogenic. WHO often does this sort of a thing to respond to the petitions of environmental activists who point to some study that shows a small carcinogenic effect without looking into its scientific merit or lack of replication. For all of these reasons, all responsible public health organizations in the world have alerted people not to believe in wild scary scenarios and conspiracy theories regarding cell phone and tower radiations. They have provided balanced factual and reliable scientific information. I will end by providing internet links to, and pertinent quotes from, two of these organizations. Here is one from Public Health England: http://www.hpa.org.uk/Topics/Radiation/UnderstandingRadiation/UnderstandingRadiationTopics/ElectromagneticFields/RadioWaves/MobilePhones/info_HealthAdvice/ QUOTE There are thousands of published scientific papers covering research about the effects of various types of radio waves on cells, tissues, animals and people. The scientific consensus is that, apart from the increased risk of a road accident due to mobile phone use when driving, there is no clear evidence of adverse health effects from the use of mobile phones or from phone masts. However there is now widespread use of this relatively new technology and more research is needed in case there are long term effects. UNQUOTE Here is another from the U.S. National Cancer Institute: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/cellphones QUOTE What has research shown about the possible cancer-causing effects of radiofrequency energy? Although there have been some concerns that radiofrequency energy from cell phones held closely to the head may affect the brain and other tissues, to date there is no evidence from studies of cells, animals, or humans that radiofrequency energy can cause cancer. It is generally accepted that damage to DNA is necessary for cancer to develop. However, radiofrequency energy, unlike ionizing radiation, does not cause DNA damage in cells, and it has not been found to cause cancer in animals or to enhance the cancer-causing effects of known chemical carcinogens in animals. UNQUOTE What I have written above is meant to honestly inform lay people in Goa about the scientific facts pertaining to cell phone and tower radiation. Whether they use this information to make decisions in their own lives or not is up to them. Cheers, Santosh On Saturday, May 3, 2014 2:46 PM, Gabe Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZZOR-Qd3QSg >-- >DEV BOREM KORUM > >Gabe Menezes. > > >
