Dutch study on cell phone EM radiation

Svante

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I just read about this Dutch study. It's a double blind experiment where subjects are exposed to different types of EM radiation from cell phone base stations. They get quite a few statistically significant effects. It appears to be well done and I'd like to hear what the physics and statistics people on the board think of it.

English version of the study
 
That's one hefty report. Apparently 89 pages.

Sorry, Svante, but I'm on a dial-up. Any chance you could quote the conclusions?:)
 
Briefly scanned through it. Can't copy out of it since it's PDF, but the basic gist is that they set up a double blind experiment to detect short term cognitive effects from a simulated exposure to base station EM radiation in GSM900, GSM1800, and UMTS bands. Note that this is not the sort of exposure you'd get from using a cell phone, it's more like the worst case scenario of short term exposure from proximity to a base station. They found numerous statistically significant effects for UMTS-like radiation. They have no plausible cause for this effect as they found no heating effects occuring. They quite reasonably point out that this study needs to be reproduced before any more conclusions can be drawn. This study consisted of a total of 72 participants.

In particular, the following caveat is mentioned (any typos will be mine):
It is noted that the dimension of the changes observed in the Well Being for UMTS-like exposure, though statistically significant, is relatively small. On the other hand, factors such as carry-over between sessions and the relative short exposure that is used might limit the effects observed.
Click to expand...

Apologies for any inaccuracies above, just skimmed most of the report.
 
Aoidoi,
you can usually cut and paste from pdf files. Look for the button with a T and a little box made from a broken line on it.

It is possible to encode pdf files. If this was done you couldn't cut and past from the file.

Here's a link to a story about the issue
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030930/tc_nm/health_mobile_damage_dc_6

One thing I noted was that the test was about radiation from the base stations. All testing in the past that I know about has been done on the phones themselves.

One thing about testing on the base stations is that if you get close to a base station the power levels can be very high. Perhaps the study assumed that people were very close to the base station and so used very high levels for their testing.

This is the first study that I have ever heard of that has found that human beings can be effected by an electronmagnetic radiation that has power levels below the level where heating is an issue. It's pretty well established I think that sticking your head in front of a high power radar antenna is not a good thing. I hadn't heard of anything but ambiguous results on lower power levels.

What is the difference between these 3G signals and the current ones? The article seems to suggest that current cell phone signals from base stations aren't a problem.
 
davefoc said:
Aoidoi,
you can usually cut and paste from pdf files. Look for the button with a T and a little box made from a broken line on it.

It is possible to encode pdf files. If this was done you couldn't cut and past from the file.
Click to expand...
I think that this file is, as you put it, encoded. Cut is disabled. Also, if one attempts to print-to-file and then redistill, Acrobat informs one that redistilling an encrypted PDF is not allowed.


_Q_
 
I thought it should be possible to defeat the encoding by printing to a file using the generic text only driver. Alas I can't get any pdf files to do more than print one byte file using this idea. Obfiously if there was a text file you could cut and paste from that.

Does anybody have any ideas on this?
 
If the worst comes to the worst, print it out then run the pages through an OCR scanner?

Rolfe.
 
Yikes! The test subjects were only three meters from the high power antenna. Not that that should be dangerous, and it should be replicated, but that's not too representative of real world exposure.
 
garys_2k said:
Yikes! The test subjects were only three meters from the high power antenna. Not that that should be dangerous, and it should be replicated, but that's not too representative of real world exposure.
Click to expand...

Well in Sweden there no regulations against putting up antennas on the side of a building. The company simply agrees with the owner of the building where it should be. You only need a permit to put up the antenna on a big tower and the permit is for the tower and not the antenna then. You can imagine what happens if a person prone to hypocondria feels when he/she looks out the appartment window and sees a antenna aimed at her like a tank gun. This study is kind of a blockbuster study for me since I have been pretty convinced that there is nothing to electric hypersensitivity. I'm not totally convinced now though since the material that speaks against electric hypersensitivity is so much larger. The results are not easy to interpret for me after just looking over the report quickly but I find it strange that just one kind of radiation would have an effect. Electric hypersensitivity has been around for like 10 years now so there should have been an effect for the old GSM also.
 
I think electromagnetic sensitivity is similar to "multiple chemical sensitivity" which is known to come from a very common mental illness. We are exposed to a lot of EM, both natural and human caused. I also find it ironic that many known causes of both cancer and memory loss- mainly alcohol, are not even mentioned, yet cell towers/technology are in the spotlight. Talk about a moot issue. This is like claiming pesticides causes cancer, no evidence is given, and yet cigarettes, old age and tanning are not mentioned in the argument. Give me a break. When are people going to wake up and tackle the real problems?
 
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