You're being exposed to radiation right now.
It's coming at you from both space and the soil; from water and food.
Your body itself is radioactive.
And you're being exposed to microwaves and radio waves, both natural and
human made.
Wi-Fi, TV, radio stations, cellphones, 3G, 4G and now 5G.
And 5G is just getting started.
Qualcomm, Samsung, Verizon, LG, Sprint, all these companies and more are
right now working to build out the 5G ecosystem.
So the question is, what are all these things doing to you?
The connection between your cellphone and your cancer risk.
It's being absorbed by your head.
More than 99% confident that there is no such effect.
Brain cancer warning labels on cellphones.
You should be least concerned about 5G.
People like Joel Moskowitz are concerned and see cellphones as a massive
risk factor to public health.
We have no assurance that 5G is safe.
For that matter, if 4G is safe.
I've only found three studies on 4G.
They came out of China and they all indicated changes in brain function.
And Moskowitz isn't alone.
Camilla Rees has spent the last 12 years of her life trying to educate the
public on what she sees as a risk greater than climate change.
I've been really amazed at the resistance to learning the truth.
The spin that the industry puts out, learning that the exposure guidelines
that the FCC uses are totally not protective.
Really, I would call them fraudulent.
Right now, the FCC requires that every phone on the market be tested and
given a value corresponding to the amount of radiation it emits.
It says that value is well below the point at which adverse health effects
could occur.
But still, these kinds of concerns about health risks, usually cancer,
associated with cellphones, and especially 5G are everywhere on the
internet. Most of us are not radiation scientists, oncologists or medical
physicists. So how do we know what's going on?
The International Agency for Research on Cancer or I ARC, is the World
Health Organization's cancer agency.
Since 1971, it's had a program that convenes groups of experts to look at
whether specific things cause cancer.
It then defines those things' cancer risks as either definite, probable,
possible, uncertain or not probable.
In 2011, as a result of one of those groups, it classified radiofrequency
electromagnetic radiation, the kind that comes from cellphones, as
possibly carcinogenic.
The chair of that particular group was Jonathan Samet, a pulmonary
physician and epidemiologist who is now Dean of the Colorado School of
Public Health.
There were several human studies, epidemiological studies, pointing to a
possible link but the rest of the evidence, of the laboratory evidence and
very limited animal evidence didn't provide much of a link between the
electromagnetic radiation exposure and cancer.
So put into the IARC scheme it ends up in this possible bin.
This is something that wireless safety advocates like Moskowitz and Rees
often bring up.
We know there's tremendous evidence in connection with brain tumors, which
is why the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research
on Cancer classified this radiation in 2011 as a possible carcinogen.
But Samet is clear that the classification does not mean we know cellphones
cause cancer.
These studies are reason enough to keep investigating, but not convincing
by themselves.
To me, it provides a warning and says, you know, we should take this
serious enough to do more research.
His position boils down to the old aphorism, "Absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence."
Just because we don't currently have evidence that cellphones are causing
cancer doesn't mean they're not.
Scientists don't know of a way they could be, but if they are though, it
would have to be through a mechanism we don't currently understand.
Scientists often describe things in ways that make sense to other
scientists, but are confusing to everyone else.
The WHO's classification from 2011 is a good example of how that can lead
to misunderstandings.
When RF energy was classified as a 2B carcinogen, that's number 2 and then
the letter B, you know, most people just heard RF and carcinogen and you
know, didn't care if it was 2B or 1A or whatever, you know, whatever.
It's a carcinogen.
So that's bad and let's stop it.
But, you know, when you look at the actual definitions of what a 2B
carcinogen is and look at other things that are classified as 2B
carcinogens like pickled vegetables and coffee.
And the next level up is probable and so it's not probable because then it
would be 2A, so it's possible.
The problem is that if laypeople hear that, possibly carcinogenic, they
tend to forget the possibly and they just focus on carcinogenic.
So possibly becomes likely and then it's completely forgotten at all then
they say, well, WHO says it's carcinogenic.
And that's just a wrong conclusion.
In support of that interpretation is the fact that the WHO's official
stance is that to date, no adverse health effects have been established as
being caused by mobile phone use.
And if you look to other agencies and scientific institutions that have
studied this, like the Centers for Disease Control, the Federal
Communications Commission, the Food and Drug Administration and the
National Cancer Institute, they all agree.
We don't have good evidence that cellphones are doing anything bad to us.
Critics say these conclusions are not based on science, but rather a
result of ignorance and lobbying from the telecommunications industry.
So let's try to take a clear look at the science behind cellphone
radiation and what we know about it.
Radiation is just a form of energy, but it comes in different strengths.
You've got low energy radio waves on one end of the spectrum and super
high energy gamma rays on the other.
Even visible light is radiation.
And understanding the effects of radiation at different energy levels is
key when thinking about risk.
The wavelengths of radiation, like the distance between crests of ocean
waves, can differ.
It's these differing wavelengths that define how high energy the radiation
is. The shorter the length between crests, the higher the energy.
Another way to describe radiation is by using hertz, a unit of frequency
which tells you how many crests in that wave are happening per second.
So for example, 3G and 4G radiation is around 1 to 2 billion hertz or 1 to
2 GHz.
5G moves up in the spectrum using frequencies from 1 GHz all the way up to
70 GHz.
And if you were exposed to enough of any of these frequencies, it would
affect your body by heating it.
That's how a microwave oven works and why there are limits on how powerful
cellphone radiation can be.
At the levels that are used, for example, on wireless communications or
that are used for transmitting AM and FM radio or 5G technology, the
amount of RF energy that's being transmitted is very, very low and would
need to be thousands of times greater to even be felt by the body as as a
heat source, much less cause any particular harm to the body.
But there's a certain point at which radiation has enough energy to do more
than that and actually makes changes to the atoms in your body.
If it reaches that point, it becomes ionizing, which means it has enough
energy to knock electrons out of atoms and do things like give you cancer
and damage your DNA.
This process is also the reason radiation therapy can be used to treat
cancer by beaming ionizing radiation at cancer cells and damaging their
DNA. This is the kind of radiation you probably think of when you hear the
word.
If I, for example, took in enough energy to raise the temperature of a cup
of coffee by 1 degree, but I took that in the form of ionizing radiation,
I would be dead within probably half an hour from a very horrible acute
radiation syndrome.
But if I took that same amount of energy in in terms of radiofrequency
energy, my body would be easily dispel or easily normalize that additional
heat because it wouldn't produce any permanent damage.
It would just be in the form of thermal energy which my body can easily
adapt to.
So there is a point at which radiation switches from being non-ionizing to
ionizing. And the question is, how close are we getting to that when we
move up to these higher 5G frequencies?
The answer, it turns out, is not very close at all.
While 70 GHz is certainly higher than 2, radiation isn't ionizing until
about 2.4
million GHz.
There's clear epidemiological evidence that ionizing radiation causes
cancer, but it's this lower energy radiation used by things like
cellphones that's provoked controversy.
Wireless safety advocates say that not only do we already know this kind
of radiation can cause effects beyond heating but that research is being
influenced and suppressed by the telecommunications industry.
I wouldn't risk my board certification for which I went to school a long
time for and took a lot of exams to get to say something for the telecom
industry. It just would not be worth it.
ICNIRP has always been and will always be a completely independent group of
experts. We are also very transparent in affiliations of our experts.
We don't want any influence of the industry on what we do at all.
If it's true, then where are all the brain cancers?
Where are all the gliomas?
You know, you look at study after study of cancer rates and you look at the
incidence of brain cancers since the induction of wireless technology and
cellphones and you don't see any significant change in the incidents.
If you look at the energy that's coming from current cell towers like from
3G and 4G, it's mostly not very much more than a couple of voltz per meter
that you measure in residential areas.
So that's comparable to the the amount of energy that comes out of an
incandescent light bulb.
From all of the Wi-Fi exposure and the 5G and the other types of exposure
that we talked about, visible light and radiofrequency, there should not
be any adverse effects.
One thing often brought up is that cellphones are a relatively new
technology and 5G is brand new.
How can we possibly already understand how they're affecting us?
Really wireless telecommunications is actually the combination of three old
technologies that we have a lot of experience with.
It's the combination of the computer, the radio and the telephone.
We have been exposed to artificial radiofrequency energies for over 100
years now and we've been studying biological effects of RF energy for over
70 years.
And have over 3,000 publications in the literature specifically devoted to
biological effects of RF energy at various levels of various frequencies.
It's absolutely useless to do a lot of research, for instance, with the
particular frequencies that 5G is going to use to see whether those
frequencies will result in any health effects because they're not that
much different from the frequencies that have been studied a lot already
in the past.
Again, Moskowitz disagrees.
Thousands of peer reviewed studies have found biologic and health effects
from chronic exposure to non-thermal levels of microwave radiation and low
frequency fields.
There are several thousands of papers altogether that have studied the
effects of non-ionizing radiation.
There may be a couple of dozen papers that give some indications for a
possible carcinogenic effect but there are not very many studies that give
some indications of a possible carcinogenic effect, certainly not
thousands. So that's absolutely not true.
Most of the studies that have been published do not show any indication at
all for a carcinogenic or whatever health effects.
So we've got two people claiming to be experts who have access to the same
collection of scientific research.
Most of us aren't scientists studying this, so how do we know who to
believe?
I go back to the literally dozens and dozens and dozens of these national
and international panels that have been set up over the last decade or two
that have brought together the experts with a necessary complement of
expertise; with epidemiologists, with engineers, with microbiologists,
with all of the necessary cadre of expertise necessary to really
completely analyze the literature.
Their view holds more weight than individual opinions, more than my
opinion, more than any one scientist's opinion or a collection of
scientists that you can find and select on a tally.
And this is the crux of how you should approach things here.
When faced with big, complicated scientific questions, scientific
consensus is your best option.
If you rely on just one person, you could hear this.
We have some indications from from some studies that there might be an
association with mobile phone use and an increased risk of brain cancers.
But then also this.
If you look at a possible carcinogenic effect of radiofrequency radiation,
I'm more than 99 percent confident that there is no such effect.
And this is not a case of van Rongen flip-flopping.
It's an example of a scientist talking about science the way scientists
talk about science.
Deliberate, but not necessarily understood by non-scientists.
To get the whole picture, you need more than a soundbite.
So radiation can be scary and deadly.
But according to so many reputable organizations, we just don't have good
evidence cellphone radiation is causing us harm.
It can heat up your body if it's powerful enough, which is why the FCC
sets limits on it.
But beyond that, right now, there's no good reason to think that it's
doing anything else.
And according to Bushberg, we have even less reason to be worried about
5G.
The nature of 5G and the so-called millimeter waves, they don't penetrate
the body.
In fact, they don't even penetrate beyond the skin surface.
And so they can't get to our internal organs.
There's no RF energy that is going to hit the liver or the spleen or the
lungs or or any of our internal organs.
So I'm not really sure why people should be more concerned.