Friday, December 10, 2010
Identifying the cause of disease is the first step in its treatment.
Epidemiology, the branch of medicine concerned with causation, seeks to
establish correlation between exposure to a possible cause and actual
occurance of the disease. Data must be taken over a period of years to
allow for latency; if no effect is seen, a longer latency period is
assumed. Since there is no record of individual usage, people are asked
to recall what they did years earlier. Exposure to electromagnetic fields
(EMF) in modern society is ubiquitous, but with the exception of a few
crackpots it was not thought to be a problem until 1989 when the New
Yorker ran a series of hopelessly misinformed articles by Paul Brodeur
linking EMF to cancer. The articles were turned into a series of books
with lurid titles like Currents of Death. Brodeur had zero background in
science but he managed to arouse the anti-science monster that had been in
hiding since World War II. The media, trained to give both sides of the
story, even if one side is the babbling of an idiot, was no help. It did
not end until 1996 when the National Academy of Sciences, persuaded that
the public would not accept an argument based on quantum mechanics,
released a three-year study that found no effect of EMF on the human body.
Almost overnight power lines stopped causing cancer. The anti-science
monster had been chained, but it was still alive.
With the abrupt emergence of cell-phone technology a decade ago, the anti-
science monster talked its way out of bondage. Devra Davis, who is not
quite a scientist, but has a PhD in something called Science Studies, has
donned the mantle of Paul Brodeur to write Disconnect: The Truth About
Cell Phone Radiation, What Industry Has Done to Hide It, and How to
Protect Your Family. What's missing is what was missing from Paul
Brodeur: the universe is governed by quantum physics. Einstein pointed
out a century ago that electromagnetic radiation behaves like units of
energy called photons equal to Planck's constant times the frequency. They
don't cause any trouble unless their energy matches some natural
excitation. There isn't much to excite until they reach the energy of
molecular vibrations in the microwave region. This is the part of the
spectrum used in cell phones, so in principle your cell phone might cook
your goose, but it would take a very long time. At even higher frequencies
you reach the red end of the visible spectrum, then yellow, green and
finally blue. Not until you reach the extreme blue end of the visible
spectrum is there a problem. At that energy, photons can eject
photoelectrons, creating mutant strands of DNA that can become a cancer.
This is the lowest energy at which an incident photon can induce cancer.
Photons of this energy are about a million times more energetic than a
microwave photon, but cannot penetrate very deeply and therefore induce
only skin cancers. However, in the last few days there have been reports
that children exposed to cell phones radiation while in the womb have an
increased risk of behavior problems several years after birth. At this
point we can expect a wilder and wilder claims of effects from cell phone
radiation.
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