Episode: 2812
Title: HPR2812: Is 5G mobile data a danger to your health?
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2812/hpr2812.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 17:09:22

---

This is HPR episode 2008-12 entitled in 5G mobile data and angel to your health.
It is hosted by Klackit and is about 8 minutes long and Karim a clean flag.
The summer is a private origin law of headlines to find out the answer.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by Ananasthos.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at Ananasthos.com.
Hi, I'm Klackit.
The anti-5G campaign has been cooking for many years now and at the epicenter of it all
are two men.
Leonard Hadel and Rheinland Nieberg.
It's a Swedish Finnish phenomenon that is not really making the rounds and spreading
internationally as actual commercial deployment of 5G networks draws nearer.
As a Swede, I apologize.
These two do not represent the Swedish or Finnish cancer or radiation research community
and our media have given them far more space in the public discourse than their work merits.
They are heavily quoted in networks of pseudoscience, including anti-vaccine sites, right wing,
alternative facts sites and Strolquid Stiftels and the Swedish Radiation Protection Foundation.
A private foundation created in 2012 with a deceptive name meant to invoke authority, which
has had to be corrected on multiple occasions by the actual Swedish Radiation Safety Authority
Strolquid's Mindighittern.
Strolquid Stiftels and received the 2013 Miss Leader of the Year Award from the main Swedish
Scientific Skeptic Society, Vietnam's COP, Oxford Building, the Science and Public Education
Association.
For this is my translation from the Swedish, their fear mongering propaganda and biased
reporting on the health effects of mobile telephony use and wireless networks.
There's a link in the show notes, it's in Swedish, but the translated version of the award
text is reasonably easy to understand.
These networks are part of a feedback loop where they get media attention, politicians
pick up on their claims and use them to invoke the precautionary principle and get precautionary
regulation in place or judges rule based on the claims, which then gets quoted by these entities
again as evidence that they were right all along. They make it very hard to find factual information
on whether millimeter wavelength radiation actually has any different effect from the
centimeter wavelength radiation that we have been using for over two decades without any documented
harmful effects. Because wherever you look you just find these sites claiming that we have
definitely had adverse health effects for the last two decades and the new frequency bands
will definitely be far worse. When you dig deep into the claims on these sites you find a handful
of cherry-picked articles leading back to the two men mentioned at the top. To studies with
flawed methodology like self-reported surveys on mobile telephony use among cancer patients or
to the pseudoscience media, politics, law, feedback loop. And it's all about centimeter waves,
which simply have shown no conclusive sign of increasing brain cancers or any other adverse
health effect related to the radiation. For every positive report made you can find one that
reports brain cancer fell as we introduced mobile phones. There is a massive body of data and if
the signal were there we wouldn't see it by now. I know cancer researcher but then neither is
Ryan a newbie. He's a retired professor in pedagogy. He's a concerned citizen.
Lenna Tadell is an actual oncologist and professor who has studied carcinogens.
But his research results on the wireless to cancer connection have been dismissed as non-informative
post-hawk, barely statistically significant and flawed by his peers. At best they're useful
for hypothesis generation but they haven't verified anything. We know that high voltage 16.7
hertz fields increase the risk for leukemia in train drivers but we don't know why.
So I'm open to the possibility that 20 to 50 gigahertz waves have different consequences from
two gigahertz waves but I'd have to hear it from a credible source. Straight up DNA mutation is
out the window and that's one of the center points of these campaigns. This is still frequencies
below visual light. It's not ionizing radiation. No plausible mechanism has been suggested and there
is no clear data on any adverse effects. We use millimeter waves today for the full-body
scans in US airports. Surely the effects of those have been studied. Well you go and search and
the top search results go to truth about cancer and info wars and similar names I won't even bother
to click. I don't want to read another article about how all cancer research after 1950 has been
wrong or we should all just eat chalk to balance our acidity and cancer is a fungus.
Apart from the pseudoscience sites I found one paper on the first results page.
Concluding that x-ray backscatter scanners have well-known risks but radiation levels are far
below safety standards both for passengers and for security staff and also below the background
radiation exposure while flying. And the new millimeter wave scanners while quote alarmingly
small amount of information about its potential health effects and quote is available.
Quote the established health effects association associated with non-ionizing radiation are limited
to thermal effects and quote and quote these scanners operate at outputs well below those required
to produce tissue heating and quote that is we currently don't know of away millimeter waves
might be harmful. They don't seem any different from centimeter waves and that's what we have in
our cell towers today. I have a link to this meta analysis in the show notes.
For a guide on how to spot pseudoscience and how to read scientific papers see a hook as excellent
show 2695 problems with studies on hacker public radio.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every week day Monday through Friday.
Today's show like all our shows was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast and clicking our contribute link to find out how
easy it really is. Hacker public radio was founded by the digital dog pound and the
computer club and is part of the binary revolution at binwrap.com. If you have comments on today's show
please email the host directly leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself
unless otherwise stated today's show is released under a creative comments attribution share
like 3.0 isn't