A surprising cause of cancer?

[mooncliff]

I could not figure out where this was going, but it is a great puzzle, and when I got to the punchline, it was WHOA!

It is from the Karolinska Institute, and I assure you that they are extremely careful and do not say things lightly.

Even if it turns out to be incorrect, it is an extremely clever hypothesis.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/bl...-an-2010-07-02

[roxtar]

Re: A surprising cause of cancer?

Seems plausible... As does the hypothesis about cell phone radiation and honey bees.... It's unfortunate that there hasn't been much research done at all regarding the effects of all this RF that we've got bouncing around literally everywhere.

[mooncliff]

Re: A surprising cause of cancer?

Actually, the alternating current in the electrical wiring in our buildings may also be inducing some significant fields.

Personally, I'm not too concerned about cell phones because I think the increased risk is very slight (otherwise it would be very easy to demonstrate), but I only use mine a couple of minutes a day at most anyway.

I think the bees are being affected by diseases because they are being trucked around all over the place, and also are being affected by pesticides.

I have been sleeping on a futon on a wood floor for decades because I actually find it more comfortable, but I could never have expected this!

I wonder if the transition from analog TV broadcasting to digital will drastically alter the field produced by the bed. If so, since analog broadcasting has been discontinued in many places, it will be interesting to see if cancer rates start to drop off in say a decade in the order in which the broadcasting was discontinued, assuming that it is the broadcasting that is inducing the significant field.

From Wikipedia
As of late 2009, ten countries had completed the process of turning off analog terrestrial broadcasting. Many other countries had plans to do so or were in the process of a staged conversion. The first country to make a wholesale switch to digital over-the-air (terrestrial) broadcasting was Luxembourg in 2006, followed later in 2006 by the Netherlands; in 2007 by Finland, Andorra, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland; in 2008 by Belgium (Flanders) and Germany; in 2009 by the United States (high power only), Isle of Man, Norway and Denmark. In 2010, Wallonia, Spain, Wales, Latvia and Estonia completed the transition.[1]
In the United States, high-power over-the-air broadcasts are solely in the ATSC digital format since June 12, 2009, the date that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) set for the end of all high-power analog TV transmissions. As a result, almost two million households could no longer watch TV because they were not prepared for the transition. The switchover was originally scheduled for February 17, 2009, until the US Congress passed the DTV Delay Act.[2] By special dispensation, some analog TV signals ceased on the original date.[3]
In Japan, the switch to digital is scheduled to happen July 24, 2011. In Canada, it is scheduled to happen August 31, 2011. China is scheduled to switch in 2015. In the United Kingdom, the digital switchover has different times for each part of the country; however, the whole of the UK will be digital by 2012. Brazil switched to digital on December 2, 2007 in major cities and it is estimated it will take seven years for complete signal expansion over all of the Brazilian territory. Australia will turn off analog signals between 2010 and 2013, region by region.[4]

[D-Mack]

Re: A surprising cause of cancer?

I wonder if the transition from analog TV broadcasting to digital will drastically alter the field produced by the bed. If so, since analog broadcasting has been discontinued in many places, it will be interesting to see if cancer rates start to drop off in say a decade in the order in which the broadcasting was discontinued, assuming that it is the broadcasting that is inducing the significant field.

I believe they are using the same frequencies.

[we_are_toast]

Re: A surprising cause of cancer?

I doubt this.

I/d^2 The intensity of the radiation is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
There should be a pretty clear pattern of more cancers the closer you are to the transmitter. The same would hold true for workers who spend a lot of time maintaining transmitters. Also, those old Yagi antennas used to receive old TV transmissions needed to be fairly accurately designed, and having spent too much time on the roof twisting and turning them, they needed to be aligned properly. All those springs and angle iron pieces in your box springs make for a pretty poor antenna. But if you're still concerned, ground your box springs.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: A surprising cause of cancer?

I wonder if the transition from analog TV broadcasting to digital will drastically alter the field produced by the bed. If so, since analog broadcasting has been discontinued in many places, it will be interesting to see if cancer rates start to drop off in say a decade in the order in which the broadcasting was discontinued, assuming that it is the broadcasting that is inducing the significant field.

I don't see whether the transmission is analog or digital would make much difference by itself. What would matter, I presume, are the frequency and power. If they use the roughly the same frequency bands and similar power, then same problem.

On the other hand, the digital transition moved some stations around to different channels and took some stations off certain channels. Analyzing the total affect of those changes on mattress re-radiation would be difficult, and vary by location.

[ASH]

Re: A surprising cause of cancer?

I could not figure out where this was going, but it is a great puzzle, and when I got to the punchline, it was WHOA!

It is from the Karolinska Institute, and I assure you that they are extremely careful and do not say things lightly.

Even if it turns out to be incorrect, it is an extremely clever hypothesis.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/bl...-an-2010-07-02

The epidemiology about the occurence of cancer could well be right, but the tie-in to radio waves and the bed isn't even vaguely plausible.

I can see how the metal bed frame or box spring would act as an antenna, but all that does is generate a minuscule amount of alternating current in the bed frame. That current will in turn generate a minuscule amount of heat, or re-radiate radio waves. But there's no separate power source here to amplify the radio waves -- it isn't actually part of a receive/transmit circuit -- so no more electromagnetic energy is going to come out of the bed frame than went into it. At worst, the antenna would change the direction of the radio waves, and being somewhat larger than a human, it could intercept somewhat more radio energy than a human body by itself. My point is that although the dimensions and composition of the bed frame enhance its coupling to FM transmissions (the whole half-wavelength thing), it doesn't actually add any energy to the radio waves (it doesn't "amplify"), and there is no mechanism to couple the energy it captures into a nearby human body other than re-radiation. If the human body didn't stop the radio waves efficiently the first time, the effect of lower intensity radio waves re-radiated from the bed frame will be marginal.

As we_are_toast points out, if there was a tie-in to cancer, you'd see a much stronger effect with proximity to radio and TV transmission towers. It simply isn't possible that the small increase in re-radiated radio waves from a bed frame could have such a strong effect on cancer rates, yet we wouldn't see a MUCH larger effect with proximity to radio towers.

Never mind the fact that we're talking about 1-10 meter radio waves. First of all, there is no plausible damage mechanism to cause cancer for this wavelength. Secondly, it doesn't make sense that you'd see any difference in cancer rate across the human body over a distance much smaller than the wavelength.

EDIT: Since writing the original version of this post, I realized that I had mis-read the linked article. It doesn't say there's a 10% difference in rate of occurrence between left and right sides of the body, but rather that the rate of prostate cancer in Japan is only 10% the rate in the UK and US. In my opinion, that makes this even less likely, since the supposed effect would have to be huge.

[c1ue]

Re: A surprising cause of cancer?

Even for a blog, this is a very weak article.

To focus on bed springs as a symbol of the difference between Japan and the US is ludicrous.

Some of the statements there are just so silly as to defy belief:

For unknown reasons the rates of breast cancer and melanoma have both increased steadily in the last 30 years. Exposure to the sun elevates the risk of melanoma, but the sun's intensity has not changed in the last three decades. Stranger still, melanoma most commonly affects the hip, thighs and trunk, which are areas of the body protected from the sun. What is responsible for the left-side dominance and increasing incidence of these cancers?

Uh, Suntanning perhaps? 30 years ago it wasn't particularly hip to suntan - now it is a common commercial service offering.

An intriguing clue comes from the Far East. In Japan there is no correlation between the rates of melanoma and breast cancer as there is in the West, and there is no left-side prevalence for either disease. Moreover, the rate of breast cancer in Japan is significantly lower than in the West; only 3 percent of what is seen in Sweden, for example. The rate of prostate cancer in Japan is only 10 percent of that in the U.K. and U.S.

Gee, what about dietary differences? Lifestyle differences?

Japanese in general, especially the women (outside of the now passe gangaru fashion group) avoid the sun like the plague.

Furthermore in Japan, the cars are right hand drive.

Maybe the left hand preference is due to the US cars being left hand drive, compounded with driving more and suntanning.

And then there's the breast size difference. Is anyone going to argue that the average breast size in Japan is smaller than in the US - even pre-augmentation?

[mooncliff]

Re: A surprising cause of cancer?

Yes, of course it might just be completely wrong. The reason I posted it is I thought it was a good example of how complex an issue could be. You cannot dismiss something out of hand because it sounds implausible, nor can you accept something simply because it sounds reasonable. The next step is to measure the fields carefully. Electromagnetic fields can, and I emphasize "can", have huge effects on cells because they can for example cause ion channels to open or close abnormally. Pulses of EM applied to the right part of the brain can relieve depression, for example.

I was sitting in a subway station with a compass I just bought, and when the train came, the needle spun around, which shouldn't have surprised me, but it did.

Anyway, they should go off and test and test and test. And argue and argue and argue. Maybe in a few years we will say it is unlikely or maybe be intrigued...

I don't think they think all the difference in cancer rate is due to this, but it could be a part of it. One clue would be to watch cancer rates in 5 years, say 10 years after some countries went digital.

I suppose one test would be to put mice above such a metal bedframe and compare them to controls.

And yes, Japanese girls are pretty flat!

[ASH]

Re: A surprising cause of cancer?

Normally, I'd support the idea that more testing would be worthwhile, but I think the idea of VHF radio waves interacting with metal bed frames to enhance prostate cancer rates by 10x is on the same level as looking for leprechauns. If this was only a question of not knowing a damage mechanism, or making a plausibility argument based upon basic physics, that would be one thing. But a 10x enhancement of cancer rates is a pretty big deal -- the fact that we don't see a big effect around radio and TV transmission towers empirically rules out the possibility of such a strong effect due to a bed frame.

EDIT: I just realized I misread the linked article when I wrote the original version of this post. The article actually says that prostate cancer rates in Japan are only 10% the rates in the US and UK; it doesn't mention the size of the left/right bias. However, I think that actually means the supposed effect is much stronger, and therefore even further out of line with the lack of any known effect from being close to transmission towers.

[touchring]

Re: A surprising cause of cancer?

anyone worked in server rooms? I heard you can get a headache after working in one for too long? would that be too much radiation?

[ASH]

Re: A surprising cause of cancer?

anyone worked in server rooms? I heard you can get a headache after working in one for too long? would that be too much radiation?

I hear that you can give someone a headache (or blind them) by microwaving them with a military grade radar transmitter -- or so my father said -- but that is an awful lot of power. I would think that in a server room you'd have to contend more with high-pitched noises from disk drives, fans, heat, and volatile chemicals exuded by hot electronics?

[we_are_toast]

Re: A surprising cause of cancer?

anyone worked in server rooms? I heard you can get a headache after working in one for too long? would that be too much radiation?

I would guess the cases and racks in a server room are so well grounded that they would shield from any small leakage in the upper end of the UHF band. Don't worry, the noise from the fans and cooling units in a server room will probably drive you crazy long before you notice any cancers.

Just as I was getting ready to post this I saw the comment by ASH, we're in agreement.

[D-Mack]

Re: A surprising cause of cancer?

I still wonder what role viruses like sv40 play.

In 1961, SV40 was discovered by Dr. Bernice Eddy of the National Institute of Health, Division of Biologics when she took the material used to grow polio vaccines and injected it into hamsters. Tumors grew in the hamsters. Her discovery was subsequently validated by Drs. Maurice Hilliman and Benjamin Sweet of Merck.

http://www.sv40foundation.org/

Vaccine virus 'cancer link'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1860042.stm

Or why are sharks successful against cancer? They have an organ for detecting electric fields called Ampullae of Lorenzini, so sleeping near a sea cable would probable irritate them.

A: While it is not true that sharks do not develop cancer, they do have a remarkable cancer shield. Of the thousands of fish tumors in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, only about 15 are from elasmobranchs (The Smithsonian is an amazing place - where else can one go to see thousands of fish tumors?), and only two of these are thought to have been malignant.
http://www.elasmo-research.org/educa..._on_cancer.htm

[ASH]

Re: A surprising cause of cancer?

I still wonder what role viruses like sv40 play.

I don't know anything about SV40, but surely the connection between human papilloma virus (HPV) and cervical cancer is well established. Viruses, at least, interact with genetic material, so the tie-in to cancer is pretty obvious.

Or why are sharks successful against cancer? They have an organ for detecting electric fields called Ampullae of Lorenzini, so sleeping near a sea cable would probable irritate them.

The ocean is big, and the area of influence around undersea cables is tiny in comparison. I'd bet that the sharks benefit from something in their biology that makes them better able to deal with cancerous cells, rather than something that makes them avoid cancer-causing environments. I wonder if the fact they are predators (and therefore biologically concentrate whatever toxins might be in their prey) -- and the fact that they continuously grow teeth -- has caused them to evolve some biochemical mechanism for dealing with run-away cell growth. (I'm no biologist, so this is just bullshit on my part.)