[alancalverd]

Which is why I said that we do not know what the Q factor for microwaves is just yet with regarding to tissue damage.

People have been using microwaves in vast quantities since 1910. The only known effect on tissue is heating, with sharp peaks at 915 and 2450 MHz where water has strong absorption bands. Physiotherapists have used RF dielectric heating (generally up to 25 MHz) at kilowatt levels for over 100 years.

Medical physicists are very keen on the protection of clinical staff. As far as we know the only effect of RF radiation in vivo is cooking damage to areas that have a poor blood supply, hence cataract.

[CliveG]

I put  shielding in the roof and the level is about 1/00th of the unshielded radiation

Can you please clarify the reduction in radiation that you measured?
1/10th?  1/100th?  1/1000th?

It  varies according to month, the time of day, the room, the spot in the room. I have taken a number of videos over the past year and would have to average them or give a listing.

The maximum was about 3,000 and went down to about 30. Other rooms went from about 300 to 30. The tenant's apartment was about 30 last August but was about 300 this month. I am putting in shielding because she cannot afford to find another apartment. Her health has suffered the last few months.

One can almost forecast the weather by monitoring the strength around a tower because the amount of water in the air absorbs the radiation and so the tower increases its power output.

[alancalverd]

Is it credible that other causes of respiratory ill health have declined?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_ban_in_England

Irrelevant but entertaining:

A few years ago my company was called to a major fire. Our client was building pallets of radioactive cargo for air shipment, when the hangar caught fire. We were tasked to advise the fire brigade on the location and dispersal of the cargo (it took 24 hours to put the fire out) then to find the residual material and arrange for its safe disposal so the site could be cleared.

The building was the size of a football pitch and almost completely destroyed - roof collapsed, loading ramp doors blown off or melted, total loss (including two vintage cars and fifty tons of roasted rotting mangoes). We knew that one pallet had been placed high on a rack so we brought in a bulldozer, cherrypicker, boots, hard hats, masks  and coveralls, and started scanning the place with a gamma spectrometer.

I arrived on site one morning to find the cherrypicker driver standing in the rain in the  car park, smoking.  I asked him why he wasn't in the wrecked building, out of the rain. "Elfin Safety, mate. It's an enclosed workplace - can't smoke inside the perimeter."   

[CliveG]

And then there's
Carcinogenic effects of NonIonizing Radiation: A Paradigm Shift
Magda Havas*
which seems to be a study of publication bias (Papers that say "We didn't find an effect" don't get published).
It also makes the interesting statement that "Gluthathione is an oxidant" as an "explanation / function".

In the real world, glutathione is a strong reducing agent and an antioxidant.


Do you see why I don't take this sort of "science" seriously?

I needed to do some "catch-up".

Oops. This time I misread. I will have to read the orginal study to check whether they were using the ratio of GSSG to GSH.

Wikipedia:
Glutathione exists in reduced (GSH) and oxidized (GSSG) states. The ratio of reduced glutathione to oxidized glutathione within cells is a measure of cellular oxidative stress.[9][10] In healthy cells and tissue, more than 90% of the total glutathione pool is in the reduced form (GSH), with the remainder in the disulfide form (GSSG). An increased GSSG-to-GSH ratio is indicative of oxidative stress.

And yes, it not an unbiased article. When studies show harm, those are the important ones. Remember one has to look at the science studies themselves when reading an article summarizing studies for the lay person. And one might find the occasional "typo" as in the spelling mistake they made.

[CliveG]

And then there's
Carcinogenic effects of NonIonizing Radiation: A Paradigm Shift
Magda Havas*
which seems to be a study of publication bias (Papers that say "We didn't find an effect" don't get published).
It also makes the interesting statement that "Gluthathione is an oxidant" as an "explanation / function".

In the real world, glutathione is a strong reducing agent and an antioxidant.

I followed up on the study referenced:
pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7109/1fb1ddc3c362dbc16eeed27cb69a130b1b96.pdf
Do you not see that there is overwhelming scientific evidence for the harm being caused?

Extract:
Oxidative effects and non-cancer health effectsof RFR
A new medical condition, so-called electrohypersensitivity(EHS), in which people suffer due to RFR exposure, has been described (Johansson, 2006). ... This disorder is growing continuously: starting from 0.06% of the total population in 1985, this category now includes as much as 9–11% of the European population (Hallberg and Oberfeld, 2006). In Sweden, for example, EHS has become an officially recognized health impairment.

...Likewise, a number of psychophysical and preclinical disorders including fatigue,irritation, headache, sleep disorders, hormonal imbalances were detected in high percent of people living nearby cellphone base transceiver stations (Buchner and Eger, 2011;Santini et al., 2002).

...An allergy reaction to RFR in humans has been confirmed by a significant increase in the level of mast cells in skin of persons  under  exposure  to  electromagnetic  devices (Johansson et al., 2001).


I had not mentioned that a lady who lived 3 houses away and sold and moved 2 months after the first power-up said that when the tower was powered up she began suffering terribly from allergic sinus issues. It cleared up in less than a week after relocating.

As for the possibility that my symptoms are psychosomatic, I was focused on the illegality of the tower and suffered these effects without having researched the health issue first. So the sequence is: I get a symptom and I look it up - not the other way round.

[Bored chemist]

So we are down to assigning probability to each of hypothesis.
1) - 98%

Until you stop begging the question, there is no way we can make progress.

Using strict logic, it rules out none of them.

Correct.
And yet, you are apparently using it as a reason to exclude 3 of them.

I only have problems if I visit my home for more than a few hours. I cannot shake the mantra of "cause and effect".

.
You have already said that you know better.
Why do you keep doing it?

[Bored chemist]

I followed up on the study referenced:
pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7109/1fb1ddc3c362dbc16eeed27cb69a130b1b96.pdf

So did I
Do you remember me previously explaining why this
". Accordingly, any intensity of RFR under the ICNIRP limits can be referred to as low-intensity. "
is wrong?

Do you not see that there is overwhelming scientific evidence for the harm being caused?

I saw that they were not doing science.
They say things like
"The non-thermal mechanism of the
interaction of RFR magnetic fields with ferritin is supposedly
mediated by an inner super-paramagnetic nanoparticle
(9H2O  5Fe2O3 with up to 4500 iron ions)"
Well, there is no Fe2O3 in ferritin so...

And
"Although RFR exposure (930 MHz) did not induce detectable
intracellular ROS overproduction, the same exposure in the
presence of FeCl2 in the lymphocyte suspensions induced a
significant overproduction of ROS."
So, what they say is that RF doesn't cause harm unless there's FeCl2 present.
Well, gosh!
 Fe(II) compounds are known to be quite toxic due to the production of reactive oxygen species.

And some of the papers they cite are also "interesting".
I noted this one
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01039308
It talks of "n the experiments with f = 2.5 GHz, for specific
absorbed energies of > 400 J/mliter the water was heated to a temperature of 100 ~ and during irradiation was partially
evaporated from the cell, which was also taken into account in estimation of the absorbed energy. "

That's 400,000 K/Kg, and really would (at temperatures of 100C) correspond to boiling the rats.
It also, more importantly, fails to mention what they did about dissolved O2.

So, having looked briefly at the paper you cited I conclude that there is little or no evidence of teh effect you are talking about.

So, once again, I find myself asking why didn't you spot that they were talking sh1t?

[CliveG]

The Ramazzini study exposed 2448 Sprague-Dawley rats from prenatal life until their natural death to “environmental” cell tower radiation for 19 hours per day (1.8 GHz GSM radiofrequency radiation (RFR) of 5, 25 and 50 V/m). RI exposures mimicked base station emissions like those from cell tower antennas, and exposure levels were far less than those used in the NTP studies of cell phone radiation.

so we can ignore the NTP study on the basis that cooking a rat will certainly kill it - no surprise - and boiling it in utero is not a good start in life.

So how reliable is Ramazzini?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/splenda-testing/

[The problem hanging over the Splenda finding is that which hangs over the Ramazzini Institute in general: Quality control. No matter what substance the Institute tests for cancer, the results always seem to be positive, whereas other laboratories testing the same substances repeatedly fail to come up with the same findings. […] All of this has made the Ramazzini Institute something of a joke in European and American science. But, of course, there’s nothing to laugh about when you use a charity conference on childhood cancer to promote an international cancer panic.

PS:

A 1972 study compared neoplasms in Sprague Dawley rats from six different commercial suppliers and found highly significant differences in the incidences of endocrine and mammary tumors. There were even significant variations in the incidences of adrenal medulla tumors among rats from the same source raised in different laboratories. All but one of the testicular tumors occurred in the rats from a single supplier. The researchers found that the incidence of tumors in Sprague-Dawley rats from different commercial sources varied as much from each other as from the other strains of rats. The authors of the study "stressed the need for extreme caution in evaluation of carcinogenicity studies conducted at different laboratories and/or on rats from different sources."

So you need to do your epidemiology carefully even with rats!

I will agree - there is no such thing as a "standard lab rat". But one could use this argument on many studies that use rats. There is no such thing as a perfect study. There is always the possibility of error or an overlooked factor.

The NTP study and the Ramazzini study were taken in the scientific community as of a high standard. The cell industry did their best to discredit these. One can choose to believe the biased critiques which were shown to be mostly "fake news".

Commentary on the utility of the National Toxicology Program study on cellphone radiofrequency radiation data for assessing human health risks despite unfounded criticisms aimed at minimizing the findings of adverse health effects Ronald L. Melnick

...The results from these studies provided the basis for the selection of the RFR exposure intensities used in the subsequent chronic studies in rats: SAR = 0(sham), 1.5, 3.0, and 6.0 W/kg. The maintenance of core body tem-perature (increases < 1 °C) and the lack of an effect of whole-body RFR exposures at 6 W/kg on rat body weights indicate that these exposure conditions did not create thermal effects that might have impacted the overall physiology of the animal leading to increased tumor incidencesin the brain, heart, or other organs of exposed animals.

A temperature increase of less that 1 degree Celsius. How can you claim that the rats were boiled? Heck I raise my temperature more than that with some intense exercise - never mind fevers which can raise temperatures from 37 to 42 degrees.

The subsequent pathology peer review of the heart and central nervous system was first performed by two quality assessment pathologists, and then by Pathology Working Groups involving 30 pathologists from NTP and external to the pro-gram.In May of 2016, NTP released partial findings from the chronic study of RFR in rats (NTP, 2016). The findings in that report were re-viewed by 8 expert peer reviewers selected by the NTP and the NIH.

He went further in this article : ehtrust.org/us-scientist-criticizes-icnirps-refusal-to-reassess-cell-phone-radiation-exposure-guidelines-after-us-national-toxicology-program-studies-show-clear-evidence-of-cancer-in-experimental-animals/

7) Criticism by ICNIRP concerning the consistency between the NTP studies (NTP 2018a) and the Ramazzini study (Falcioni et al., 2018) is disingenuous. The fact that both studies carried out in independent laboratories in Italy and the U.S. found increased incidences of heart schwannomas and Schwann cell hyperplasias in Sprague-Dawley rats under different exposure environments and different RF intensity levels is  remarkable. Without knowledge or analysis of the true dose-response relationship between RFR exposure and the induction of schwannomas and Schwann cell hyperplasias of the heart, it is unreasonable to expect a linear dose-response by combining data from these two separate studies.

10) The issue raised by ICNIRP on the lack of cardiac schwannomas in control male rats in the NTP study and the expected incidence (0-2%) based on historical control rates had been raised before by others and is addressed in my paper (Melnick, 2018) for both schwannomas and gliomas:
“Gliomas and schwannomas of the heart are uncommon tumors that occur rarely in control Sprague-Dawley rats. It is not unusual to observe a zero incidence of uncommon tumors in groups of 50-90 control rats. In experimental carcinogenicity studies, the most important control group is the concurrent control group.

He concludes:
Based on numerous incorrect and misleading claims, the ICNIRP report concludes that “these studies (NTP and Ramazzini) do not provide a reliable basis for revising the existing radio frequency exposure guidelines.” The data on gliomas of the brain and schwannomas of the heart induced by cell phone radiation are suitable for conducting a quantitative risk assessment and subsequent re-evaluation of health-based exposure limits. The ‘P’ in ICNIRP stands for Protection. One must wonder who this commission is trying to protect – evidently, it is not public health.
Ronald L. Melnick Ph.D

[alancalverd]

"n the experiments with f = 2.5 GHz, for specificabsorbed energies of > 400 J/mliter the water was heated to a temperature of 100 ~ and during irradiation was partially evaporated from the cell, which was also taken into account in estimation of the absorbed energy. "

Note what I said in  reply #100 above

The only known effect on tissue is heating, with sharp peaks at 915 and 2450 MHz where water has strong absorption bands.

which is why domestic microwave ovens are tuned to around 2.5 GHz - it's designed for cooking. 400 J/ml will boil water from 20 deg C (school physics) and most biological tissue undergoes rapid and irreversible change at 70 deg C (school cookery). 

[CliveG]

The bias in the industry:
Comments by Hardell following the NTP and Ramazzini studies
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ONCOLOGY  54:  111-127,  201
Comments on the US National Toxicology Program technical reports on toxicology and carcinogenesis study

Unfortunately,  WHO  itself  has  constantly  refused  to  acknowledge the carcinogenicity of RF radiation. In fact, WHO seems to rely on the conclusion of the non-governmental organization International Commission on Non-ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) instead of the IARC evaluation. That organization is even declared to be their in-house experts.

ICNIRP is  a  private  non-governmental  organisation  (NGO)  based  in  Germany. New expert members can only be elected by members of the organization. Many of the ICNIRP members have ties to the industry that are dependent on the ICNIRP guidelines.

This creates a conflict of interest, since the former leader of the WHO International Electromagnetic Field (EMF) Project is also the founder and honorary member of the ICNIRP. The guidelines are of huge economic and strategic importance to the military, telecom/IT and power industry.

[alancalverd]

The NTP study and the Ramazzini study were taken in the scientific community as of a high standard.

Not by me, as you so kindly quoted.

Even if your assertion were supported by an actual majority vote of this mythical community, the history of science is that of consensus being overturned by calculation, which is why there is no "scientific community", just a whole bunch of guys trying to disprove each others' hypotheses. True, we drink together (hence "symposium") but so do opposing Rugby teams.

[alancalverd]

Commentary on the utility of the National Toxicology Program study on cellphone radiofrequency radiation data for assessing human health risks despite unfounded criticisms aimed at minimizing the findings of adverse health effects Ronald L. Melnick...The results from these studies provided the basis for the selection of the RFR exposure intensities used in the subsequent chronic studies in rats: SAR = 0(sham), 1.5, 3.0, and 6.0 W/kg.

6 W/kg is about 4 times the normal heat dissipation of mammals. How long would you survive in a continuous 600W oven? The answer is about 3 hours, thanks to several highly unethical experiments.   

[Bored chemist]

A temperature increase of less that 1 degree Celsius. How can you claim that the rats were boiled? Heck I raise my temperature more than that with some intense exercise

OK, so just do that continuously for 18 hrs and see how you feel.

[alancalverd]

Schwannomas of the head and neck are a fairly common occurrence and can be found incidentally in 3–4% of patients at autopsy

  So if the normal occurrence in rats is of the same order of magnitude, you'd need to find at least 10% more than the expected number for 100 rats in order to even think there may be an effect.

  Schwannomas are relatively slow-growing.

so you'd need to sacrifice your experimental rats about half a lifetime after exposure to infer a correlation. Was this done in either study? 

[alancalverd]

Humble apologies. I forgot to look at dimensions!

6W/kg is 7 degrees per hour temperature rise. As I said, 3 hours' exposure at this level is known to kill humans and I have no doubt that it doesn't do rats much good. So it's worth looking at the Ramazzini and NTP studies a little more closely.

[evan_au]

One can almost forecast the weather by monitoring the strength around a tower because the amount of water in the air absorbs the radiation and so the tower increases its power output.

You know that towers change the power and direction of the signal based on the actual distance and attenuation of the signal between the tower, and the currently-active users?

It only responds to what has already happened.

The cell tower does not read (or generate) the weather forecast.

[CliveG]

Quote from: CliveG on 25/08/2019 13:36:49

    Do you not see that there is overwhelming scientific evidence for the harm being caused?


I saw that they were not doing science.
They say things like
"The non-thermal mechanism of the
interaction of RFR magnetic fields with ferritin is supposedly
mediated by an inner super-paramagnetic nanoparticle
(9H2O  5Fe2O3 with up to 4500 iron ions)"
Well, there is no Fe2O3 in ferritin so...

This is a bit out of my league and I have to research your unsupported statements. The one above seems to be wrong. And it it not unreasonable to study the effects of MW on iron.

Ferritin: The Protein Nanocage and Iron Biomineral in Health and in Disease
Published in final edited form as:Inorg Chem. 2013 November 4; 52(21): . doi:10.1021/ic400484n

The major iron proteins in humans are globins, hemoglobin and myoglobin, followed by ferritins and then by a variety of heme and iron-sulfur proteins and iron cofactors bound directly to protein, e.g. ribonucleotide reductase. Ferritin is a superfamily of protein-caged Fe2O3•H2O biominerals. They are ancient (in Archaea), ubiquitous (in marine and terrestrial organisms,both anaerobic and aerobic) and, have a rare quaternary structure: folded, polypeptide subunits (4 α-helix bundles) that self- assemble into hollow cages; interior cage spaces(biomineral growth cavities) are ~ 30% of the cage volume.

[CliveG]

And
"Although RFR exposure (930 MHz) did not induce detectable
intracellular ROS overproduction, the same exposure in the
presence of FeCl2 in the lymphocyte suspensions induced a
significant overproduction of ROS."
So, what they say is that RF doesn't cause harm unless there's FeCl2 present.
Well, gosh!
 Fe(II) compounds are known to be quite toxic due to the production of reactive oxygen species.

And some of the papers they cite are also "interesting".
I noted this one
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01039308
It talks of "n the experiments with f = 2.5 GHz, for specific
absorbed energies of > 400 J/mliter the water was heated to a temperature of 100 ~ and during irradiation was partially
evaporated from the cell, which was also taken into account in estimation of the absorbed energy. "

That's 400,000 K/Kg, and really would (at temperatures of 100C) correspond to boiling the rats.
It also, more importantly, fails to mention what they did about dissolved O2.

So, having looked briefly at the paper you cited I conclude that there is little or no evidence of teh effect you are talking about.

Sorry - which paper are you looking at for these extracts you are taking issue with?

[CliveG]

Why do you think the NTP and Ramazzini studies decided that heating was not a factor?

And who do you think has more credibility? ICNIRP or these scientific organizations?

Why is 1 deg Celcius considered an upper limit when humans can take temperature rises of 5 degrees?

Why are you so sure you can discount and ignore the many studies showing cellular harm that are not heat based?

So far I have not seen you reference a credible scientific article that takes the top 5 key non-heat studies showing positive harm and showing why the study is flawed so badly that it is unacceptable. ICNIRP criticized the NTP study but they are not cellular microbiologists and their criticisms were easily debunked.

You are throwing out heating and boiling statements willy-nilly and I cannot follow your logic or your references.

[Bored chemist]

Why do you think the NTP and Ramazzini studies decided that heating was not a factor?

Because, if they accepted that it was, all their paper said was " Heating rat cells is bad for them".

And who do you think has more credibility? ICNIRP or these scientific organizations?

The international committee; two heads are better than one.

Why do you not seem to think that way?

Why is 1 deg Celcius considered an upper limit when humans can take temperature rises of 5 degrees?

Because 5 degrees is bad for us.

Why are you so sure you can discount and ignore the many studies showing cellular harm that are not heat based?

Because I have yet to see a well conducted study which shows (rather than just claims) that.

You are throwing out heating and boiling statements willy-nilly and I cannot follow your logic or your references.

It's very simple.
Do you accept that heating cells in a petri dish, where they have no capacity to "sweat" will damage them more than in an intact animal where active cooling can be used?