There is an 85% chance that you are reading this from a smartphone now, and we will not exaggerate if we say that this is the lightest thing you will do with your phone throughout the day, we know that it will often stay close to you for a long time, perhaps extending to the whole day, most of us put the phone next to it before bed, Because it is the last thing he leaves from his hands, and because it is also the main alert tool today, and if we say that the smartphone is part of the modern man, as if, for example, it resembles prosthetic devices, our words would not be an exaggeration.
But that close proximity raises an important set of questions. We are not talking here about a piece of metal, but rather a device that sends and receives signals of different frequencies. These signals pass through your brain and cross it thousands of times and more in less than a second. Is it not possible that this behavior causes Abnormal in medical problems?
And are our smartphones really one of the causes of cancer?
The electromagnetic spectrum
This is an important question for several reasons, the first of which is the popular belief that cell phones do indeed cause cancer in the long run, but before we start to break it down let us first introduce you to the electromagnetic spectrum1, which is simply all the radiation in this universe, and it always passes you, in fact You are actually experiencing it now, every moment, because the visible light band is a tiny fraction of the entire electromagnetic radiation.
But there are other bands that you do not see, yet they always interact with your body. Electromagnetic radiation travels in the form of waves, and for the purpose of approximation, it is similar to sea waves, and the longer the waves (wider) the frequency of the radiation (the number of waves you are exposed to every second) is less, And vice versa, knowing that frequency is the main criterion for the amount of energy you are exposed to, the higher the frequency, the greater the amount of energy, and herein lies the danger.
harmful rays
Scientists divide the forms of magnetic radiation in the form of a spectrum that starts from the longest waves in one side (and therefore the lowest frequencies) and reaches the shortest waves on the other side. Your body absorbs the radiation, but the radiation is too weak to "ionize atoms" and thus damage tissues (non-ionizing radiation), or to be strong enough to ionizing radiation, which is where severe damage appears2.
Ionizing radiation removes electrons from the atoms of living tissues, thus changing their structure, and exposing them to the risk of damage and cancer if it reaches the point of affecting the structure of DNA in our cells. Computerized tomography or positron emission tomography, but there is an important note that we are exposed to these rays to a small extent, which prevents this damage from happening.
In fact, the natural sources of ionizing radiation include radioactive elements that are naturally present in our bodies. A very small part of the potassium in our bodies is radioactive.
Non-ionizing radiation that is absorbed can also cause damage, this happens when there is enough of it and it is converted into heat energy, and excess heat can permanently damage living tissue, but we now know, according to many reliable sources, that most forms of non-ionizing radiation Safe.
But at this point in particular, we need to be a little slower and understand the scientific nature of this process. Some small studies have already monitored a statistical relationship between mobile phone use and cancer rates. For example, 3 one study found an association between cell phones and salivary gland cancer, and another study suggested an increased risk of developing a tumor. Glial, a specific type of brain tumor, was found for overweight mobile phone users, but there was no overall increase in the risk of brain tumors.
But the problem with these studies is that they were conducted on small numbers of people, which allows for types of bias. People usually do not give accurate information about their use of mobile phones. Some biases also occur in the samples, such as the recall bias. In this type of experiments, people are asked Participants reported their smartphone use rates, and those with cancer tended to overestimate it, while those without cancer tended to underestimate it, and this bias affected the results.
A direct relationship between mobile phone and cancer was also observed, but in mice4, and the importance of these studies but they cannot be used as an indication of the existence of the same relationship in the case of humans, in fact it often happens that something is harmful to mice, but not humans.
And here - when the results are disturbed in front of you in this way, especially in medical experiments - it is very important to resort to the so-called “scientist consensus” in this area, which is simply defined as the opinions of the majority of scientists based on solid experiments and results over a long period of time and a large number of subjects.
Three very large studies
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The good news is that the largest studies on this scale indicate that there is no relationship between mobile phone use and cancer.
The “intercom experiment” 5, for example, was conducted on mobile phone users in 13 countries, and the study looked for four types of tumors in tissues that absorb most of the radio frequency energy emitted by mobile phones: brain tumors (glioma and meningioma), and acoustic nerve (schwannoma). ) and parotid gland tumors.
In the study, people were divided into two groups, the first without cancer, and the second with it, and they were asked about rates of mobile phone use. The study found that there is no clear statistical relationship between cancer risk and mobile phone use for up to ten years.
As for the "Danish experiment" 6, it was conducted on more than 1,400,000 people, in which people were asked about their rates of using smartphones, and then they were followed for 18 years.
In the latest update of the study, no relationship was found between rates of cell phone use and the incidence of central nervous system cancers, such as glioma and meningioma. In all cases, the study was conducted on people who used cell phones for periods of ten and thirteen years.
The “Million Women Experiment”7, on the other hand, focused specifically on women. The experiment tested 1 out of 4 British women with a total of 800,000 women in the first stage, which started in 1999 and until 2005, then completed the million in 2009. In the study, the women were asked about The rates of their use of smart phones, and then they were followed for 7-10 years, the study - like its predecessors - did not find a relationship between the use of mobile phones and the increased rates of brain cancers than the normal rates in the known references.
to the fifth generation (5G)
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But with the emergence of each new generation of communication networks, a new wave of frightening health claims appears, beginning by saying that humans have never been exposed to this type of radiation before, and scientists have not proven that this new network is safe for humans, and that the World Health Organization announced in one of Times that the radiation from it "may be cancerous".
To examine these claims, let us highlight the microwaves emitted by mobile networks of all kinds.
These waves are part of the electromagnetic spectrum (note the attached design), and include a mixture of natural and astronomical signals (rays from space), and even the residual glow from the Big Bang along with radio, radar, satellite, Bluetooth and GPS signals. , and other man-made signals such as Wi-Fi, and also includes the three most popular “second generation” (2G), “third generation” (3G) and “fourth generation” (4G) networks with radio frequencies in the range between 0.7-2.7 gigahertz (GHz), and the latest sister of all, "fifth generation" (5G) networks with frequencies up to 80 GHz.
For these networks in particular (apart from the smartphones themselves), the experiments in this range also indicate that the rates of gliomas in adults in the United States, northern European countries and Australia during the past several decades have been stable without change with the increasing use of phones in these geographical areas With the development of the same types of networks (from the second generation to the third to the fourth), the incidence rates of children's brain tumors in the United States were stable in the period 1993-2013, and we are talking about one of the world's most used countries and networks.
In the case of the fifth generation (5G) networks specifically, their towers actually emit radiation in the non-ionizing range, but its quantity is weak and cannot cause a harmful effect on human health, and it is classified with its companions in the non-ionizing range of the spectrum.
In fact, if you hold a radio in your hands, you receive much more radiation of similar frequencies than you would get from a 5G device in your pocket.
Therefore, the agreement of scientists8 is that the risk is potential but low. Consider, for example, the response of the World Health Organization9 to a question about the safety of 5G: “So far, after much research, no adverse health effects have been associated with exposure to wireless technologies. Conclusions are drawn Health related studies have been conducted across the entire radio spectrum, but so far, only a few studies have been conducted on the frequencies that 5G will use.”
The organization adds that heating human tissue is the main mechanism of interaction between radiofrequency fields and the human body, and that levels of radiofrequency exposure from current technologies lead to a slight rise in human body temperature, and ultimately, if the total exposure to this radiation remains below international guidelines, no Public health consequences are expected.
understanding science
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Well, you must be having some hesitation now and that's understandable, the whole idea is that we have a degree of difficulty understanding the language of science, and that's basically what allows conspiracy theorists to creep into our minds, someone will tell you that international organizations are saying that cell phones and their towers "may" cause cancer , but the word “may” does not express the exact scientific meaning of the research, which cannot easily be denied on the basis of it, but it builds its conclusions in the language of probability.
When scientists say that “the evidence is limited” and that “the odds are weak” of a relationship between cancer and mobile phones, this means that there are research papers that have already indicated the existence of this relationship, but all these studies when they enter into the overall research work within the scope of this relationship is not Strong enough, so that we as ordinary citizens can make a decision based on this result, no need to be absolutely sure that something is safe, because in fact nothing can be 100% safe at all.
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Sources:
1- Introduction to the Electromagnetic Spectrum
2- Radiofrequency (RF) Radiation
3- Is there any link between cellphones and cancer?
4- Cell Phones and Cancer Risk
5- THE INTERPHONE STUDY
6- Use of mobile phones and risk of brain tumours: update of Danish cohort study
7- Mobile phone use and risk of brain neoplasms and other cancers: prospective study
8- Why 5G is safe
9- 5G