| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| jcmt4 |
Posted - 08/26/2008 : 8:20:48 PM
just how exposed are we;in our use of mobile-phones/computers?
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| 7 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| Diger |
Posted - 09/01/2008 : 10:32:03 AM
Good one Doc, It certanly would weed out the gene pool. LOL
Diger |
| pilot |
Posted - 09/01/2008 : 02:32:51 AM
Had to laugh at ND's post...couldn't agree more!
Here's the text of the scientific misconduct story...
SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT:
Fraud Charges Cast Doubt on Claims of DNA Damage From Cell Phone Fields
Gretchen Vogel
The only two peer-reviewed scientific papers showing that electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from cell phones can cause DNA breakage are at the center of a misconduct controversy at the Medical University of Vienna (MUV). Critics had argued that the data looked too good to be real, and in May a university investigation agreed, concluding that data in both studies had been fabricated and that the papers should be retracted.
The technician who worked on the studies has resigned, and the senior author on both papers initially agreed with the rector of the university to retract them. But since then, the case has become murkier as the senior author has changed his mind, saying that the technician denies wrongdoing. He will now agree to retract only one paper, and he also says his critics have been funded by the cell phone industry, which has an obvious interest in discrediting any evidence of harm from its products.
The contested studies, which exposed cells to EMFs equivalent to those from the most common American and European cell phones, have been widely cited by advocates of tighter regulations on cell phones. Both studies are from the lab of Hugo Rüdiger, who retired this past October after serving as director of the department of occupational medicine at MUV. Other teams have reported only cellular effects of EMFs that are more subtle than DNA breakage, such as changes in gene activation or expression. "If this work isn't solid, then one really has to give up the hypothesis that these fields cause genotoxic effects," says Anna Wobus, a developmental biologist at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research in Gatersleben, Germany, who has studied the effects of EMFs on stem cells.
The first paper, published in 2005 in Mutation Research, was part of a €3.2 million European Union-funded project called REFLEX, designed to investigate the cellular effects of various EMF sources. The paper soon came under strong outside criticism. Leading the way has been Alexander Lerchl, a professor of biology at Jacobs University Bremen in Germany and a member of Germany's national Radiation Protection Board. Lerchl, who has received funding from an umbrella organization that investigates EMFs, which is funded in part by multiple cell phone operators and manufacturers, says he originally noticed something strange about the numbers in a table from the 2005 report. The variation is too low, he says: "They could not be data from biological experiments."
Last year, Lerchl conveyed his concerns to editors at Mutation Research and to MUV officials. In November, the editors responded saying that their experts on the technique and biostatisticians found Lerchl's calculations "suggestive" but that they "do not prove anything as serious as data falsification." Given that the experimental setup was blinded, they said, it would have been impossible to make up data that produced a desired result.
At MUV, a newly established ethics commission eventually decided to look into the matter in early 2008. Their full report has not been made public, but on 23 May, the university issued a press release saying that an independent review body "suggests that the suspicions were justified: The data were not measured experimentally but fabricated." In the press release, the university rector, Wolfgang Schütz, called for the 2005 paper and a 2008 paper by Rüdiger's group to be retracted.
Meanwhile, in April, unaware of the university's investigations, Christian Wolf, the interim head of Rüdiger's former department, was taking an independent look at the data after hearing they were under dispute. Wolf told Science that he and a colleague examined the lab notebook of technician Elisabeth Kratochvil, first author of the 2005 paper and a co-author of the 2008 study. Wolf says that they noticed a column of numbers corresponding to a code from the instrument designed to expose cell lines to EMFs. The code revealed which chamber was exposed to EMFs and which was the control. Rüdiger's team was supposed to receive the key only after sending their observational data to the device's manufacturer in Zürich, but Wolf found that the code could be observed by the turn of a knob to an "unused" channel. After being confronted with the notebook, Wolf says, Kratochvil resigned. Later, Wolf says, they found code entries in laboratory notebooks going back to the fall of 2005.
Rüdiger says he initially agreed to withdraw both papers based on the ethics committee's findings. But several days later, he discovered that the chair of the ethics committee was a lawyer who had worked for a telecom company. He also says that Kratochvil denies any wrongdoing. She quit, he told Science, to focus on finishing an MBA. (Kratochvil did not respond to requests from Science for comment.)
In June, the university established a second commission, this time with a substitute chairperson. After discussion with that body, Rüdiger says, he agreed to retract the 2008 paper, published in the International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health, because he could no longer guarantee that the blinding had been airtight. In return, he says, the committee members agreed that the case would be closed. The 2005 paper is not tainted, he says. That work was done in 2003, before his lab had its own exposure device. Kratochvil spent several weeks in a laboratory in Berlin collecting data for that study, and he says there is no evidence that she knew that device's code.
Franz Adlkofer, director of the Foundation for Behaviour and Environment in Munich and a co-author of both papers, has not agreed to the retraction, however. He says that the university declined to send him the ethics commission report, asking him instead to travel to Vienna to see it. Until he does, he says, he sees no reason to doubt Kratochvil, whom he calls an "uncommonly talented and intelligent" technician. Also not satisfied, Lerchl continues to push his case, saying he has additional evidence that data were fabricated, which he has sent to MUV. He has called on the MUV University Council, the university's highest governing body, to undertake a new investigation into all eight papers on which Kratochvil was an author. Lerchl says the chair has promised to bring up the matter when the council meets on 8 September. And an editor at Mutation Research told Science that there is an ongoing investigation into the 2005 paper.
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| NaturistDoc |
Posted - 08/31/2008 : 2:03:12 PM
Not to be mean-spirited ... OK, maybe a little ... but when I see oblivious idiots driving one-handed with cell phones stuck to their ears, or am forced to overhear the details of somebody's recent nasty divorce or drug rehab or colonoscopy while dining with my wife in a romantic candle-lit restaurant, I almost wish that cell phone yakking DID cause some rapidly progressive fatal disease.
There is no question in my mind but that excessive cell phone usage is associated with a marked impairment in the cortical areas responsible for judgement and manners. I just can't figure out which is cause and which is effect.
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| pilot |
Posted - 08/31/2008 : 1:36:26 PM
The two most-heavily cited reports that claim to show evidence that cell-phone radiation causes DNA damage (and subsequent cancer) now are under suspicion of being fraudulent. See http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/321/5893/1144a
I do not mean to suggest that one should be casual about electromagnetic radiation. However, given the widespread use of cell phones for a quarter-century (yes, it has been that long...)their use would appear to pose limited-if any--marginal risks. |
| old hippie |
Posted - 08/31/2008 : 03:17:47 AM
quote:
Originally posted by abstract
quote:
Originally posted by jcmt4
just how exposed are we;in our use of mobile-phones/computers?
One thing that's pretty certain: if "we" means "nudists", we're not getting any greater exposure to electro-magnetic radiation than people wearing typical textiles.
Unless, of course, you want to consider the extra sunlight (EM radiation in the 300-900 nanometer range) that I receive in developing a tan without lines
Dum vivimus, vivamus! |
| abstract |
Posted - 08/27/2008 : 01:08:31 AM
quote:
Originally posted by jcmt4
just how exposed are we;in our use of mobile-phones/computers?
One thing that's pretty certain: if "we" means "nudists", we're not getting any greater exposure to electro-magnetic radiation than people wearing typical textiles.
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| Warmskin |
Posted - 08/26/2008 : 8:51:30 PM
You might use a search engine to find out. I would think there might not be a unified voice from the experts out there.
As an electronics type myself, all I can say is that all those electromagnetic waves will induce a current inside your body, because you are a human antenna.
If there is anything dangerous, it could be a cellphone, which puts out a fair amount of power right next to vunerable ear. The jury is still out on that one. I figure it this way, you can use a blue tooth earphone/microphone set with your cellphone. This device merely has to transmit a few feet to your cell phone, instead of a thousand or more feet to the nearest cellphone tower.
Just ask yourself this: What power do I need (relatively speaking)to broadcast a thousand feet away versus the power needed to broadcast to a cellphone 10 feet away from your headset?
The guide to that is the concept that the power needed is the square of the distance relative to the receiving site. For ezample, if you need to transmit 10 feet at first, then you want to transmit to another site 100 feet away, you would need to boost your power 100 times. The ratio of the distances in this example is 10:1. So, we square that ratio, and the answer is 100. Let's get practical.
If your cellphone tower is 1000 feet away, but your headset for your cellphone is, say, a maximum or 10 feet away, then you need 10,000 times the transmitting power of a headset for your cellphone to work properly. So, if you use a headset on your cellphone you could reduce the radiation within you to one ten thousandth of what it would be by using the cellphone directly.
The numbers I used were much simplified to illustrate a point. If you are a heavy cellphone user, you should consider a headset with your cellphone if you haven't already.
As for other things that transmit radiation, stand away from them to reduce the radiation effects. Use the "square ratio" to good effect.
If you use a microwave oven often, remember that if you move, say, 4 times the distance away from where you first pushed the buttons on the microwave, you have now have only 1/16 the amount of radiation zapping you.
Again look for reports on radiation on your favorite search engine. There are probably many articles and papers on that subject. Remember to stand away from things that radiate a lot, except for a person who radiates kindness. In that case you can be closer.
That government governs best, which governs least - Thomas Jefferson |
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