TheAgitator.com
News About Cell Phones That Will Make Your Brain Hurt
Tuesday, May 31st, 2011Mobile phones may cause cancer, experts say
But I can’t find anything in the article that shows a link, much less justification for the word cause. The article does note that numerous prior studies have failed to find a link between cell phones and brain cancer. It also points out that studies are limited by the sheer number of people who use cell phones. It mentions one study that “hinted” at a link between cell phones and one particularly rare form of brain cancer, but noted that the study required researchers to ask participants about cell phone use from years ago. The article also explains that cell phones haven’t been around long enough to draw any conclusions about long-term effects.
But I don’t see anything in the article that supports scaring people about cell phone use.
Fun fact: Incidence of the most common type of brain cancer in the U.S. has dropped 0.4 percent per year between 1987 and 2007. This would be about the very same period that we all started using cell phones. That doesn’t necessarily mean the drop wouldn’t have been steeper had we not used cell phones. And it doesn’t necessarily mean cell phones don’t have a long-term effect that we may see in years to come.
It does mean that brain cancer incidence has plummeted just as cell phone use has taken off. Which would seem to contradict the alarmism in the headline. Or at least merit inclusion and an explanation.
It’s the Fear Industrial Complex: it sells newspapers, gives bureaucrats jobs, and keeps politicians in office.
(Well, maybe not sells newspapers. Nothing sells newspapers anymore, but you know what I mean).
I wonder what it would take to get the fearmongers to let go of this one? I suppose some connection is possible, but given the multiplicity of studies dome it seems unlikely.
Technically speaking, until you definitively prove that A does not cause B, it’s correct to state that A may cause B.
In related news, reading Paul Krugman may cause testicular cancer.
This is “everybody knows” reasoning, and “”"science”"” writing (needs three sets of quotations) is full of it. See also: Whole grains are a nutritious, healthy part of a human diet; Eating saturated fat caused heart disease; Second-hand smoke is just as deadly as smoking.
0.4% is not plummeting, I would be surprised if it is statistically significant. It would be better stated as remaining the same.
I think the Krugman/cancer link has more biological plausibility than this bollocks. Cellphones operate in the microwave or radio regions of the spectrum. Anybody with a semester of college science of any kind can tell you that’s a very low energy region. In order for this to make any kind of sense AT ALL this non-ionizing low-energy light would have to be able to break bonds in DNA…not likely. Plus, you know, regular radios would be a huge risk and so would every electronic device ever. ESPECIALLY YOUR OVEN! I mean that’s Infrared! That radiation is a lot higher in energy than cell phones and you’re exposed to it all the time!
0.4% is not plummeting
0.4 percent each year, over 20 years, is pretty significant. Especially after yearly increase over the previous 10 years.
I’m willing to concede that there might be some link, but mostly I see technophobic luddites who see evil lurking behind everything new.
There was recent research that found cell phones cause increased glucose consumption on the area of the brain nearest the phone’s antenna, but it was unknown what health effects that might have, if any.
0.4% per year is 7.7% over 20 years. Add in the increase the the previous 7 years and the fact that 0.4% is an average (did not happen every year), and it would like fail any statistical test.
So … it all depends on where you set your starting point, right MDB?
…it would like fail any statistical test.
If only there were some way to look at the study and see whether it’s statistically significant.
Well, look at that… The entire study is available online! From the peer-reviewed study:
“During the period 2003–2007, incidence rates for five of the 15 most common cancers among men demonstrated a statistically significant decrease: lung and bronchus (lung), colon and rectum (colorectal), oral cavity and pharynx (oral), stomach, and malignant brain tumors” (emphasis added).
I think the public health field is a victim of its own success. The sea change brought about by rigorously linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer (and to cardiovascular disease) was a tremendous leap forward in terms of improving quality and quantity of life. They’ve been trying to slay dragons that big ever since, but so far really nothing else has turned out to be quite that clear. Add to that the systematic bias against negative data at all levels and the fact that no one has ever gotten a Nobel for showing that something doesn’t cause something else, and you set up a culture in which the incentives to inflate the importance of whatever you are studying are damn near irresistible.
["Fun fact: Incidence of the most common type of brain cancer in the U.S. has dropped 0.4 percent per year..."]
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It’s not a “fact” at all… maybe a very, very rough estimate, at best.
Just ask yourself– what is the margin-of-error in that supposed ‘measurement’ of cancer incidence ?? It’s easily plus or minus 50% of the actual number… and probably much higher.
The 0.4% number is absurd. The process of collecting the underlying data is loaded with problems/errors. How many death-certificates accurately state the true cause of death (if there even is a death certificate)?
Do you really think medical bureaucrats can correctly measure national rates of any disease to tenths-of-a-percent. Absolutely not. It’s B.S.
Would you agree that rates were skyrocketing in the early/mid 80s when they increased 7.7% in 8 years. That is a faster increase than plummeting decrease of 7.7%/20 years. Yes, the authors clearly cherry picked a starting point, if they went 25 or 30 years instead of 20, there really wouldn’t be anything to report.
@ #12
Check your time periods. Apples and oranges.
0.4% per year is 7.7% over 20 years. Add in the increase the the previous 7 years and the fact that 0.4% is an average (did not happen every year), and it would like fail any statistical test.
But, isn’t that kind of the point? The increase came when no one was using cell phones. The decrease came (or, if you prefer, the increase stopped) over a period when just about everyone begin to use one.
Again, I’m not saying cell phones prevent brain cancer. I’m not necessarily saying they don’t cause it. I am saying that if your’e going to state that they do cause it, it seems like you should address those figures.
Science reporting as a whole sucks because of pressure for stories to be more sensational than the facts warrant. Not understanding that facts are necessary is a byproduct of science illiteracy.
@14, re: It’s easily plus or minus 50% of the actual number… and probably much higher.
The 0.4% number is absurd. The process of collecting the underlying data is loaded with problems/errors.
Um, you know people spend entire careers doing just that sort of thing, right? Yes, it is hard, yes, there is error inherent in any form of data collection. But it isn’t unknowable, which is what you’re unsupported assertion of “easily plus or minus 50%” seems to imply…
Clearly, Cellphone usage can easily be linked to Obesity. Studies have shown (Not scientific ones, mind you.) that Pizza delivery closely follows Cellphone usage, generally within 30 minutes.
And everyone knows Pizza is a direct causal artifact of Obesity. Except, of course, when used responsibly as part of a comprehensive and balanced eating plan.
Hell. I ate Pizza today. And I’m on a 2000 calorie a day diet.
OH MI GHOD! It might be possible that cancer really is largely random, and that obesity is caused by subconscious programming that make you hungry 24/7.
Radley, you work for HuffPo now. You’re going to have to get used to these sorts of “health” stories.
A rate is independent of any particular cause unless there is only one cause. What if one cause of brain cancer decreased, while cell phone use increased and cell phone usage caused brain cancer? Would the rates stay the same? decrease slightly? increase? If you are going to link cell phone use to brain cancer, you should show cell phone usage causes brain cancer. The nonsense about everyone uses cell phones so you can’t design a good study is stupid. Unless cell phone usage is like second hand smoke and no amount is safe – there will be a noticeable gradient of cancer incidence with increased cell phone usage. This has been bandied about for at least a decade, they could have started a study 10 years ago tracking usage and cancer rates. Right now, they are probably afraid of being arrested on man slaughter charges (this is the EU http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/05/27/scitech/main20066827.shtml).
The increase that Radley is talking about is very relevant to the conversation. Despite being respected scientists, the panel falls victim to some of the most basic logical fallacies – particularly confirmation bias.
They ignore numerous studies that contradict their conclusion, the study they reference ignores its own evidence that cell phone use causes a decrease in brain cancer (because that’s not plausible), but they cherry-pick the data to find a particular sub-point in the data that supports their supposition (very, very weakly).
This is not science. This is pseudo-scientific woo-woo. The best they could even theoretically say with the data they have is that there is a particular sub-population (heavy cell phone users for over 10 years) that warrant further investigation. But epidemiologists are often susceptible to this kind of fallacy. Statistics is hard. Neutral analysis is hard.
Large data sets with random noise can easily be over-handled to produce a result when none exists. This is why there are statistical rules for how this sort of data is analyzed. They fail terribly in this. You don’t get to just toss data you disagree with and keep data you like. That’s statistics 101 (and basic scientific research 101 too).
One of the primary causes of brain cancer is undiagnosed melanoma. Until there was a concerted effort to begin promoting early detection of melanoma (going on 12 years free of the vile disease) quite often when a person had brain cancer, there was little linkage to melanoma. It was just “brain cancer”. The final stage of melanoma will either be brain cancer or bone cancer, but primarily brain cancer. Today it will be listed as melanoma, even thought the disease has spread to the brain. It is all terribly confusing.
I suspect the emphasis on early detection of melanoma is the reason for the drop in brain cancer. It this is the case, then the best way to prevent death by brain cancer is to have your dermatologist’s phone number in your cell phone! This should be accompanied by a six months total skin check-up, every six months, no exceptions.
It’s kept me melanoma free for 12 years. I highly recommend it.
SJR
The Pink Flamingo
“The panel falls victim to some of the most basic logical fallacies”
This should come as no surprise seeing that we are talking about the World Health Organization. That is, the same folks who headlined their report on secondhand smoke “Secondhand smoke linked to illness” despite the fact that the only statistically significant relationship the study actually found was a slightly prophylactic relationship between exposure to secondhand smoke and childhood asthma.
The people behind this study have a history of being fundamentally dishonest regarding their actual findings. They may have found a correlation, but they are going to have to cross their t’s and dot their i’s to prove it to me.
Unless cell phone usage is like second hand smoke and no amount is safe…
There it is! I’m done taking you seriously, now.
I see you suffer from both confirmation bias and inability to spot sarcasm
There was recent research that found cell phones cause increased glucose consumption on the area of the brain nearest the phone’s antenna, but it was unknown what health effects that might have, if any.
Having done some actual biology, I find that result hinky. It sounds like a Texas-sharpshooter conclusion: find a bright spot on the PET scan, then report it as “nearest the phone’s antenna” rather than, say, Wernicke’s area.
Controls for this study need to include, at minimum:
- Cell phone vs. normal phone handset (or just an earbud with someone talking)
- Cell phone making calls with its speaker disabled
- Cell phone making calls while its antenna is somewhere unusual on the subject’s head, like taped to their forehead or inside their mouth
And, ideally:
- Cell phone with someone speaking a language the subject doesn’t understand
The time resolution of PET measurements is not great, so you probably can’t measure the change from immediately before to after hearing a voice on the phone, but you can at least control for having an active antenna there.
Back to normal topics for agitation: Salon tells me thatObama’s justice department is cleaning up big city police civil rights violations, unlike the Bush administration. As evidence they hold up cases that were opened under Bush… cause… well, Bush!
They highlight a couple of big-city police abuse cases, but they don’t really point to any evidence of increased scrutiny by the Obama Justice Department other than their say-so and a quote from a New Jersey ACLU activist who says she’s never been contacted by the justice department about a case before. So there ya go.
It would be nice to think there was actually some sort of increased scrutiny from the DOJ to go with all of the video evidence we have been accumulating of late. But somehow I’m not all that optimistic. A DOJ that helped ram through the USA PATRIOT act renewal explicitly because it helped them track and arrest drug offenders doesn’t exactly engender much confidence in their civil libertarian protection credentials.
Mark Z. – Having also done basic biological research, I share your skepticism of that result. Your analysis points to the need for an experimental design witch blinds the analysis as well as the subject.
Similar work has been done to investigate “electromagnetic field sensitivity”. This work showed that “sensitive” subjects could not detect hidden electromagnetic fields and detected non-existent fields that were accompanied by appropriate messages of magnetic fields being turned on.
In this case they need a way to ensure that the researcher is properly controlled. The person reading the scans must not know whether the phone is on or not, whether there is a land line call or a radio call, whether the radio is on and the subject is not talking, what the location of the phone and antenna are, etc. PET scans are notoriously noisy by their very nature. It would be extremely easy to see a result where none exists if you were told what to look for and where/when to look. The image they chose to release as the best evidence of their result would seem to confirm this bias – the result on their hand picked image are hardly conclusive.
Aside from all of those control issues, I wonder what the EM field of a PET scanner is? You’ve got dozens of high voltage photomultiplier tubes arranged all around your head… that has to have some sort of EM field. All of those electronics have to have some radio noise emissions. These guys say cell phones mess with sleep by modulating brain oscillations and affecting sleep spindles. They don’t seem to think a PET scan with gamma ray emitting radio-nuclides directly incorporated into brain tissue is much of a problem though.
Who knows, there may be a lot to this. But it sure feels…. hinky.
“But I don’t see anything in the article that supports scaring people about cell phone use.”
It’s right there at the top of the page, where it says “CBS News.”
I’d work on your delivery, especially in a written medium.
I could see how that could be; if one talks on the phone all day, some radiation seeps into the brain. Any radiation will cause some DNA damage. It’s pretty difficult to establish conclusively that anything causes cancer, but I’d be interested to see further studies. As to scaring, well, some people are cowards and scare easily and others don’t.
Yes ,and it has also been proven that experts also cause cancer. Salt was bad ,now its good sugar was horrible now it may help prevent cancer, eggs were good then they were bad now they bare good again either make up your god damned minds or STOP making pronouncements.
“I could see how that could be; if one talks on the phone all day, some radiation seeps into the brain. Any radiation will cause some DNA damage.”
This statement is false. There’s a difference between ionizing (like xrays and high energy UV) vs non-ionizing (microwaves). Non ionizing radiation will result in cell damage (ie- dialectric heating), but it’s not capable of damaging DNA within a cell while leaving the rest unscathed.
Here are the issues with the logic of those who believe there is a cellphone cancer risk:
1. Correlation != causation
2. No study has even shown statistically-significant correlation
3. The underlying science doesn’t even support their theory
Just like the creationists, they’re starting with a premise they believe is true (not merely a hypothesis, but actual gospel) and trying to find anything they can to back up their twisted beliefs.
That’s not how science is done.
That said, I wish Penn & Teller did a Bullshit episode about this very subject. I know they did a “Safety Hysteria” episode that briefly touched upon cell phone radiation, but didn’t spend any effort to refute the pseudoscientists that claim that cellphones are making men impotent and giving them testicular or brain cancer with no research whatsoever.
That fact that so many journalists listen to these quacks truly boggles the mind…
Radley – there is a study showing that cellphone in the pocket can cause temporary sperm dysfunction.
As a biophysicist, my speculation is as follows:
DNA is well-known to be a conductor of electricity (although this finding took a ton of controversy to gain scientific acceptance). It’s possible that DNA error-correcting enzymes use electrical signals to scan for mutations. DNA is actually coiled up into nice little loops called histones which would be wonderful antennas (and the right size too) to convert that EM signal into a miniscule current; so the function of error-correcting enzymes might be messed up by cellphone radiations.
But that’s just speculation, and AFAIK, no one has tested my theory.
http://articles.cnn.com/2008-09-18/health/cellphone.sperm_1_cell-phone-sperm-quality-oxidative?_s=PM:HEALTH
Don’t forget, breathing air causes death!
(after all, if you never take your first breath, you’ll never take your last one)
@ Mark Z: The study I referred to simply tested with the phone on and off, without having the subject engage in any conversation. The researchers did indeed fear conversation could alter the results. Link here:
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/737860
@ Cyto: In the link above it says one of the authors of the study has also done work to see if PET or MRI scans themselves can affect brain function. So she is likely aware of the issue.
While I haven’t read this study, I have read some previous ones (at least abstracts) and if I recall correctly it’s something like, “May be dangerous, can’t conclude it is or it isn’t, studies have given conflicting findings, further study and examination of incidence over next 10 years etc. will give better answer, at moment it looks like 30 minutes+ per day may be dangerous and texting or hands-free is safer.” Which makes sense.
Which is NOT “they’re safe”. Just a”May cause cancer” may be a misleading headline “they’re safe” would also be misleading, but misleading headlines (and often articles) occur all the time especially with scientific and legal stories.
Similar to second-hand smoke. There are all sorts of good reasons with freedom etc. for not wanting restrictions on smoking. But to take that further and argue that second-hand smoke is “safe” is idiotic. It may or may not be particularly dangerous, but it is not “safe”. If it makes my eyes water and induces coughing fits and headaches (it does), I may be open to principled arguments over why I should put up with such unpleasantness (just as I put up with unpleasant speech) but don’t tell me it’s “safe” absent proof. Don’t confuse principles with science.
What’s incontrovertible is that there’s no good research that shows a link, our present understanding of physics, chemistry and biology shows no mechanism for a link, and if it was a serious, big-deal risk we’d have found out by now.
Meanwhile, we ignore big-ass risks (cancer and otherwise) all around us.
Cancer doc Orac knocks the study out of the park http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/06/the_bride_of_the_son_of_the_revenge_of_c.php
http://xkcd.com/925/