Monthly Archives: February 2015

Cellphones and gliomas (cancer): correlation?

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So this weekend we (family) were discussing – as usual – various pseudo-scientific myths, and we stumbled on the topic about cellphones and brain tumours, and cellphone towers and cancer. So as my “he who must be reckoned with” rambled off and jumped off the cliff of myth bombing, I paused to remember the medical thesis of one of my friends Eric: already in 1984, he was trying to find out if there was a correlation between high voltage wires over our hospital in Lille, and cancer increase in patients at that hospital, and residents living in the vicinity. Eric didn’t find any correlation between the high-voltage travelling overhead and cancer, although “people” were very worried, and everyone had a bias against these high-voltage wires.

Now correlation isn’t causation, it is just finding out if two “things” fit together/ mirror each other statistically. Correlations are quite easy to find nowadays because Excel does the work; basically if you have x as a time axis, then the peaks and troughs of the quantities of lets say “cellphone use” and “rate of cancer” follow each other. These studies require to go back in time. In other words, one is analyzing historical data.

My Youtube blogger friend Veritasium has just prepared a video on the topic of possible correlation between cellphones and glioma, and I hope that friends, students, and family will enjoy it, and find this report instructive.

Veritasium declares that cellphones don’t emit ionizing radiation: radiation that can harm the DNA in the nucleus of cells. In the study cited, the Swedish team was only talking about correlation, not at all causation as so many “people” seem to think; and the final graph proves without a doubt that we don’t need to worry, as the following video will explain.

Myth debunked.

Where do we get exposed to radioactivity?

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I was watching this video by Veritaserum and started sharing it since it sounded so crazily interesting. Was the conclusion true? – I’m 60 and I didn’t know this?

So I looked up the assertions about cigarette smoking, and what we need to know is that the radiation hits hot spots in the bronchi of the smoker, not his or her whole body as an astronaut would get; however, the radiation is very high in these hot spots. But where does this radioactivity come from? How does tobacco get radioactive but not – say potatoes or barley?

The United States Environmental Agency writes:
“The tobacco leaves used in making cigarettes contain radioactive material, particularly lead-210 and polonium-210. The radionuclide content of tobacco leaves depends heavily on soil conditions and fertilizer use.

Soils that contain elevated radium lead to high radon gas emanations rising into the growing tobacco crop. Radon rapidly decays into a series of solid, highly radioactive metals (radon decay products). These metals cling to dust particles which in turn are collected by the sticky tobacco leaves. The sticky compound that seeps from the trichomes is not water soluble, so the particles do not wash off in the rain. There they stay, through curing process, cutting, and manufacture into cigarettes.Lead-210 and Polonium-210 can be absorbed into tobacco leaves directly from the soil. But more importantly, fine, sticky hairs (called trichomes) on both sides of tobacco leaves grab airborne radioactive particles.

For example, phosphate fertilizers, favored by the tobacco industry, contain radium and its decay products (including lead-210 and polonium-210). When phosphate fertilizer is spread on tobacco fields year after year, the concentration of lead-210 and polonium-210 in the soil rises.”

And here is a prof from UCLA talking about his team’s research in 2011 …