Whether mobile phone radiation is harmful to human health has been a hot issue in global academic circles for many years. Hundreds of scientific research results show that the use of mobile phones has nothing to do with the incidence of brain tumors and cancer. List some important studies: The Swedish National Institute of Occupational Diseases published its research results in the International Literature of Occupational and Environmental Health in April 2006 through a study of 905 adult mobile phone users, saying that using mobile phones will not increase the incidence of brain tumors. The London Cancer Institute, together with three universities in Britain, conducted a four-year follow-up study on 966 patients with brain tumors and 17 16 healthy people, and published a research report in June 2006. The conclusion is that the use of mobile phones has nothing to do with the incidence of brain tumors. Danish scientists have followed up 420,000 mobile phone users for 2 1 year. ABC News published their research results on February 5th, 2006 at 65438+, saying that cell phone radiation has nothing to do with cancer incidence. According to the report of Japan News from June 5438 to February 2008, Tokyo Women's Medical University compared 322 patients with brain cancer who used mobile phones with 683 healthy people, and found that using mobile phones had nothing to do with the incidence of brain cancer. On June 4, 2002, the United Nations International Health Organization announced that the use of mobile phones has nothing to do with the risk of brain tumors.
It has always been the mainstream view in international academic circles that mobile phone radiation is harmless to human health, but some experts hold different opinions. In March 2005, someone initiated a lawsuit against the mobile phone industry in the federal court of Maryland, USA, on the grounds that they did not protect consumers from unsafe radiation. The prosecution quoted a bioengineering professor at the University of Washington as saying that cell phone radiation can damage people's DNA and may lead to benign tumors. However, including this professor, all the claims that voice phone radiation is harmful to human health have no scientific theoretical basis or experimental results, and are just a hypothesis.
Although the general public doesn't know much about electromagnetism and biology, it is generally believed that mobile phone radiation is harmful. In 2006, an experiment done by a Russian went viral on the Internet. A raw egg was placed between two mobile phones, and the egg was cooked after 65 minutes of talking. Some foreign websites even claim that it can be cooked in 3 minutes, which makes many people very worried that their brains will be cooked like eggs. Anyone with a little knowledge of electromagnetism will know that the power of mobile phone is much lower than that of microwave oven, and it is impossible to produce such strong thermal effect as microwave oven. Some people in China have repeatedly done this experiment, which proves that raw eggs are not only undercooked, but even the temperature has not changed at all. The Russian experiment is just an interesting scam.
The potential harm of mobile phone radiation to human health is mainly the harmful thermal effect caused by the absorption of radiation energy by human tissues. The international standard for testing the harm of mobile phones to human health is SAR, that is, the absorption rate of mobile phone radiation energy by the user's head. The American standard is 1.6 W/kg and the European standard is 2.0 W/kg. The origin of this standard is an industry standard formulated at the beginning of last century to protect the health of workers of wireless transmitting equipment. At that time, the safety of non-ionizing radiation was not well understood, and the standards formulated were also harsh. In fact, even if you have received stronger non-ionizing low-frequency radio radiation for many years, it has never had a negative impact on your health. No one's health has ever been reported to be affected by radiation.
Since 2006, the domestic media has been speculating on SAR standards, and public opinion tends to formulate stricter domestic standards. This view is very one-sided. Let's not talk about whether mobile phone radiation is harmful to human body. Even if the amount of radiation to the human body is reduced, it is likely that stricter standards will be self-defeating. Assuming stricter standards and lower radiated power rate of mobile phones, communication companies need to build more and denser base stations in order to ensure the quality of calls. The radiation power of the base station is much higher than that of a single mobile phone, so the distance between the user and the base station will be closer than before, and the amount of radiation received may not decrease, but increase. And the cost of building more base stations will also be spread out in our phone bill.
Mobile phone radiation is harmful to human health, and those safety suggestions based on harmful assumptions are meaningless or even ridiculous. There is a mobile phone anti-radiation sticker in the shop, which costs ten yuan each. It is said that it can effectively reduce the radiation to the head. The radio wave radiation of mobile phone is omni-directional, and it is not easy to control its radiation. Electromagnetic shielding rooms of more than 100,000 yuan are usually used in scientific research, and a radiation protection film of 10 yuan doesn't play any role at all. To say the least, assuming that the radiation is effectively attenuated, can you still make a phone call?
Some experts suggest hanging your mobile phone around your waist and answering the phone with a Bluetooth headset. It is said that keeping your mobile phone away from your brain 1 m can reduce the radiation by more than half, and some even say it can be attenuated by 99%. Although radiation energy will accelerate with the increase of distance, it will never reach this level. Otherwise, can you get a signal two or three meters away from your mobile phone? Can the signal reach the base station several kilometers away? The fact is, whether you put your mobile phone next to your head or waist, the communication effect is the same, and there is basically no difference in the radiation to your head. Furthermore, if you put your mobile phone on your waist because you are afraid of hurting your brain, why not hurt your kidneys? At least the brain has skull protection, which can play a certain shielding role, but the kidney can't.
Public panic about radio radiation is a common phenomenon, whether at home or abroad. On the basis of speculation and hypothesis, an American expert concluded in 1979 that children living near high-voltage lines are three times more likely to suffer from leukemia due to radiation than ordinary people. This statement caused widespread concern in the United States, and in the following 20 years, the United States lost as much as $25 billion in social costs. The National Academy of Sciences published the research results three years later in 1996, and thought that the high-voltage line environment had nothing to do with leukemia. After seven years of research involving 1200 people, the National Cancer Institute of the United States issued the same conclusion in 1997. In a lawsuit against high-voltage lines and leukemia that attracted national attention, the court hired 16 top experts, including 6 Nobel Prize winners in physics, pathology, biochemistry and medicine. Their conclusion is that the high-voltage line environment has nothing to do with the onset of leukemia, and finally this farce has been quelled. In fact, the expert who claimed that he was more likely to get leukemia under high-voltage lines may have real statistics, but he didn't find the real causal relationship. The mainstream view in academic circles is that families living near high-voltage lines are usually poor, and the reason for the high incidence of leukemia is poor living and sanitary conditions, which has nothing to do with the high-voltage lines themselves.
Mobile phone penetration rate is very high. Even if some mobile phone users are found to have brain tumors, it means that it is caused by mobile phone radiation. For example, the annual incidence of brain tumors in the United States is about 6/ 100 00, and 6000 cases of brain tumors among the 65438+ billion mobile phone users in the United States are normal. Even if it obviously exceeds 6000, it can be concluded that cell phone radiation will increase the incidence of brain tumors, similar to the example of high-voltage lines. Compared with people who don't often use mobile phones, people who often use mobile phones have greater work pressure, tense interpersonal relationships, faster pace of life and more nervous mood, which may be caused by these factors and have nothing to do with the use of mobile phones. Hundreds of statistical studies have been carried out in developed countries such as Europe, America and Japan, and it is found that the incidence of mobile phone users is basically abnormal compared with that of non-mobile phone users, indicating that there is a possibility that "mobile phone radiation will increase the incidence of brain tumors".
The public in our country has a very interesting view on electromagnetic radiation, that is, it is generally believed that electric wave radiation is harmful to human body, while magnetic field radiation is beneficial to human body. So-called health products such as magnetized cups, magnetic therapy pants, magnetic therapy pillows and magnetic therapy slippers are very common in the market. The statement that magnetic field is beneficial to human body is also groundless. Fang once wrote: "Can magnetic therapy really cure diseases? The scam of magnetic therapy was deeply analyzed and exposed, and CCTV also exposed this scam on March.15, 2009. For this scam that has been rampant for many years, it can only be said that the voice of the authoritative media appeared too late. You don't need much professional knowledge to identify the scam of magnetic therapy. Only by questioning the spirit and common sense can we do it. Many docks and factories have magnetic gourds. After electrifying, the crane generates strong magnetic force, which can suck up iron plates and containers weighing tons. Lifting workers work in this strong magnetic environment all the year round, and the radiated magnetic field intensity is tens of thousands of times that of magnetic therapy products, which has never caused any health problems. Are some small magnets in magnetic therapy products useful?
During the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, a 10 watt radio station in Zhongnanhai was able to communicate with Pyongyang. If we use such a radio station again, I'm afraid we can't even reach 30 kilometers, because the number and power of wireless devices have increased rapidly in recent decades.
Can lead to cancer
A large-scale study on the relationship between cell phone use and cancer was released this week, but the media have different interpretations of the results.
The British "Daily Telegraph" believes that this study "found that people who talk on their mobile phones for more than 10.5 hours a day are more likely to develop brain cancer within10 years". For the same research report, the French news agency AFP said that this study shows that "there is a clear link between the use of mobile phones and brain cancer".
This controversial research report was reviewed by the British magazine Nature.
What kind of research is this? Never heard of it before?
This research is an international cooperative research called I NTERPHONE, which was conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, under the World Health Organization (WHO). As a case-control study, researchers will interview various cancer patients and ask about their mobile phone use. And compared with the data obtained by interviewing similar people without this cancer.
Mobile phones will emit low-level wireless electromagnetic waves, and people are worried about whether it will affect their health. This study hopes to confirm whether using mobile phones will increase the risk of two main types of brain cancer, namely glioma and meningioma. The study included 2708 patients with glioma and 7658 patients with meningioma, and 7658 controls.
This study involves 13 countries, and some research results have been published before, but the latest paper published in the International Journal of Epidemiology is the first paper that integrates all the research results of 13 countries. This research has been funded by some mobile phone companies, but the walkie-talkie project has complete scientific independence, which can ensure the scientific rigor of this research.
What did the study find?
Unfortunately, the research results did not give a very straightforward conclusion. According to the study, "overall, no signs of increasing the risk of glioma and meningioma by using mobile phones have been observed."
Traditional cell phone use actually seems to reduce the risk of cancer. However, 10% of the respondents who used their mobile phones the longest seemed to have a 40% increase in the possibility of developing glioma. However, this study points out that there is reason to doubt this obvious correlation.
So can using mobile phones protect us from cancer, or will it cause us cancer?
The study found that the risk of glioma and meningioma of ordinary mobile phone users seems to be reduced by about 20%. However, Anthony Swerdlow, an epidemiologist at the London Cancer Institute who participated in the British branch of the study, said that the design of the study itself probably affected the research results. He said, "There is evidence that people who refuse to serve as the control group are people who don't use mobile phones", which shows that when choosing people in the control group without cancer, there are relatively more people who have used mobile phones, and the proportion is more inclined to this. Among real people, among those who don't have cancer, there should be more people who don't use mobile phones. The proportion of using mobile phones in the control group is too high.
Similarly, Swerdlow believes that among the people who use mobile phones the longest 10%, some people report that their mobile phone use time is "incredible", such as using mobile phones 12 hours a day.
Research on the effectiveness of data collection methods used in INTERP HO N E project found that it is more accurate to ask participants how many phone calls they made than how long they used their mobile phones. When using the telephone number for analysis, the highest number of people (10%) showed no signs of increased cancer risk.
What did the previous research find?
Some animal and fine cell studies clearly show that the probability of cancer increases after cell phone radiation, but these findings are difficult to replicate.
Patricia McKinney, an epidemiologist at Leeds University who participated in the British branch of INTERP HONE project, believes that "generally speaking, biological and cell tests are not convincing because there is no consistent evidence or mechanism to explain this phenomenon".
It should be said that the research on people failed to establish the connection between cell phone use and cancer. Swerdlow said that a team in Sweden found that using mobile phones increased the risk of cancer, but he also called it "an abnormal value in the data".
In addition, although mobile phones have become ubiquitous, the total number of brain tumor reports does not seem to increase because of the use of mobile phones.
The question is still unanswered?
There is no doubt that even the researchers involved in the project do not fully agree with the significance of their work. Some researchers obviously suggest using mobile phones with caution, and builders should restrict their use.
McKinney said, "We haven't reached a complete conclusion yet, and we feel that we are on the side of most people who think that mobile phones are not risky."
In addition, INTERP HONE only investigated the use of mobile phones by adults, but failed to provide any information about whether it is risky for children to use mobile phones, which is a more controversial topic.
Similarly, due to the time limit of the study, the study failed to provide any data on whether using mobile phones for more than 15 years will bring risks, and the study said that "the possible impact of long-term frequent use of mobile phones needs more research".
So what is the causal relationship between cell phone use and cancer?
No connection was established.
Swerdlow said, "There is a unified evaluation standard to evaluate whether epidemiological investigation reflects causality. The results of this study failed to meet this evaluation standard and failed to show whether there is a causal relationship. "
Source: Nature website reported in may 17, international journal of epidemiology reported in may 17.