Mobile phones and Cancer (on-going)

I’m usually, except for climate change & AGW in my view a special case, a bit of what may be termed a “conservative/main stream" thinker when it comes to technology issues - probably due to my scientific /engineering background and of course a comfortable suburban life in that bustling metropolis of radicalism otherwise known as Billingshurst .

So on being prompted to consider the potential dangers of 5g comms I was a bit surprised to find that one of my existing “perceptions” or “starting points” - I’m using those terms to mean something one thinks but couldn’t say exactly why one thinks it or where they got their position from - was that the mainstream position on non-ionising radiation i.e type of Radio Frequency Radiation (RFR) produced by mobile phones, Wi Fi Television broadcasts etc did not cause cancers .

However on actually checking - Groupthink not happening here my boy 😇, the World Heath Organisation WHO position on mobile phone type RF, which I will take as mainstream, is actually 

“possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B), a category used when a causal association is considered credible, but when chance, bias or confounding cannot be ruled out with reasonable confidence..”.

 http://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/electromagnetic-fields-and-public-health-mobile-phones

Now decomposing that statement .  

1. It does not say, nor can it by itself be used to support an argument, that “mobile phones do cause cancer”   
2. It does not say “mobile phones don’t cause cancer”
3. It does say “possibly  mobile phones cause cancer”

So even in a mainstream scientific sense it is perfectly legitimate to have and to voice concern /uncertainty about the safety of 5G, RFR  and mobile phone use in general

So digging bit deeper ...

Why do the WHO have this concern ? Well partly it is due to recent studies by the National Toxicology Program (NTP) of the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences e.g as reported in an alarmist media piece below . 

https://www.independent.co.k/news/health/mobile-phone-cancer-radiation-rats-tumours-research-science-toxicology-study-a8612641.html

Pretty scary stuff ! and reported, but with more detail on the study also in :

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181101133924.htm

However and back to my theme on remaining highly sceptical of alarmist media representation of "scientific studies" when you look at at some more independent reviews of the original NTP study a pretty different picture emerges (my highlighting )

-----extracts---

1. The animals exposed to radiofrequency fields  lived significantly longer than the controls (and cancer risk increases as you get older).

2. The radio frequency fields are not relevant to mobile phone use (they were strong enough to increase body temperature in the rats by over 0.5 degrees, whereas a mobile phone can’t increase body temperature at all).

3. The results were only reported for male rats, but not female rats, or male or female mice (which makes the relevance of any results to humans questionable).

And most importantly…

4. There is no indication that any of the results are statistically significant (i.e. not merely due to chance). This is particularly important as sensible patterns were not observed within or across rodent groups, and also because the reported findings are inconsistent with previous research findings. If chance was ruled out using statistical techniques, the reported ‘evidence’ of carcinogenicity would vanish.

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ref
https://www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/2018/11/02/mobile-phone-cancer-link-in-rats-expert-reaction/

So my current position  :

• I agree with some reviewers concluding statements  i.e 
• "The NTP rodent carcinogenicity study does not provide evidence that the radiofrequency fields relevant to mobile telecommunications can cause cancer.”
• "So here we have a study that found evidence, some of which is pretty weak, of effects of mobile phone radiation on tumours in rats, and which tells us pretty well nothing direct about risks of actual phone use in actual humans. I’m not going to stop using my mobile phone in the light of this.”

• but also support the WHO statement from the earlier ref: above that : 
• "While an increased risk of brain tumors is not established, the increasing use of mobile phones and the lack of data for mobile phone use over time periods longer than 15 years warrant further research of mobile phone use and brain cancer risk. In particular, with the recent popularity of mobile phone use among younger people, and therefore a potentially longer lifetime of exposure, .."