Metaverse and the New World of the Internet

 

Can cell phone radiation damage DNA?

Do cell phones cause brain tumours? When trillion-dollar companies, such as Big Food, Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, or Big Telecom, get involved; There is a lot of money that can manipulate science.

And when it comes to the potential human health effects of mobile phone use, you can almost certainly end up with a stiff neck if you overuse the phone, or even break your neck or the neck of someone you might shock if you text while driving.

On the other hand, think of how many lives are saved on the road; That's because people are now able to quickly dial in an emergency, but what about cancer? Since the turn of the century, there have been studies indicating a doubled risk of brain tumours as a result of using a mobile phone to talk.

This is important; Because radiation penetrates up to a few inches into your brain, and images of the head and top of the head show why you have cancer on one side of the head but not the other, and because it's a localized effect, you can see why there are recommendations for a loudspeaker or headphone feature, which can reduce Brain is 100% compromised, and this includes the option of using a Bluetooth headset, which can be important, especially for children; That's because they have a thin skull.

However, mobile phone radiation is not like nuclear radiation, it does not directly damage DNA, like gamma rays from the atomic bomb, however, it appears that it can damage DNA indirectly by generating free radicals.

In a comprehensive study published in 2015, in "Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine", of the 100 studies that looked into this, 93 confirmed the oxidizing effects of low-intensity radiation from mobile phones.

Another comprehensive study published in the Journal of Pathophysiology in 2009 looked at 101 studies, 49 of which found that this oxidative effect causes DNA damage and leads to signs of genotoxicity; They damage our genes, DNA or chromosomes.

While a smaller group of 42 studies did not find a genotoxic effect, many of these studies were conducted in Petri dishes or on laboratory animals. Some population studies have found an increased risk of cancer, But other studies have not.

 

The effect of funding on the results of studies:

Could the source of funding for these studies have anything to do with the different findings? Some studies have been funded by mobile phone companies, and researchers at the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Bern in Switzerland hypothesized in an interview published in the journal Environmental Health Perspective in 2009: “It would be unlikely that these studies would show Negative effects if financed by telecom companies, which have a vested interest in demonstrating that the use of phones is safe.

They found that studies funded exclusively by companies were actually less likely to report statistically significant effects.” In fact, most independently-funded studies showed an effect, while most telecom-funded studies did not.

Studies funded by phone manufacturers were about 10 times less likely to find negative effects of mobile phone use, worse than a similar phenomenon observed in the pharmaceutical industry.

Big Pharma-sponsored studies of its products had only about four times the odds of improving drug specifications than independent researchers, according to a review published in the British Medical Journal in 2003. Big Tobacco continues to be the worst offender when it comes to bias in Big data results.

Why have research articles on the health effects of second-hand smoke come to different conclusions? It turns out that the probability of studies funded by the tobacco industry to conclude that tobacco is harmless was 88%, according to an analysis published in JAMA, "Journal of the American Medical Association."

The results of telecommunications studies are about 10 times worse than the results of the pharmaceutical industry in terms of bias. There is a conflict of interest on both sides of the debate. If the cause is not a financial conflict, it may be intellectual; It may be human nature to display a bias towards evidence that supports your personal position.

As such, you'll see published bad scientific studies, like one published in Neuro-Oncology in 2011, which appears to have found little correlation between brain tumour cases and mobile phone subscriptions.

But one can think of a lot of reasons why states like New York and Texas have more brain tumours for using cell phones than Dakota, and that these reasons have nothing to do with cell phone radiation.

Sometimes, you may see outright fraud claims from the academic researchers who have authored two of these genotoxicity papers, and the review itself I mentioned above is implicated in corrupt scientific behaviour; These allegations are denied, noting that the main accused was a lawyer working in the telecommunications industry.

When there's a trillion-dollar industry, whether it's the food industry, the tobacco industry, the pharmaceutical industry, or the communications industry, there is a lot of money that can manipulate science.

Take the nuclear power industry for example; An article in the International Journal of Health Services notes that for the past decades there has been high-level institutional blindness regarding the health consequences of the Chernobyl disaster.

Official estimates of the resulting health problems were 100 times, or even 1,000 times, lower than those of independent researchers; So did only 4,000 people or close to a million eventually die? It depends on who you ask, and who happens to be funding research studies.