Hypothesis re: the "Ten Tumors" story
Post #1223
In this post, it was reported that up to 10 brain tumors occurred in nurses in a single hospital over a few years. One hypothesis explaining the excess of brain tumors is electromagnetic fields (EMFs). Though an isolated case, there is a report in Japan about a hospital situated near an airport running radar, getting hit with very high EMFs:
That value of 199.53 V/m is tremendous, though the paragraph above says the probable source is nearby airport radar systems. That much EMF can create havoc in your body. But even if Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Massachusetts doesn’t sit next to an airport, I discovered 3 cell towers very close to it:
The nurses were all maternal care nurses and on the 5th floor, and both of these details could prove relevant. For one thing, devices such as incubators can give off EMFs which exceed normal levels:
But perhaps more important is the height of being on the 5th floor. EMFs tend to rise with height, peaking at around the 4th or 5th floor of a building with a nearby cell tower (aka “base station”):
In the study above, the 4th floor got the most EMF, due to a slight downward direction of radiation coming in from a nearby cell tower. In Brazil, higher risk of cancer was found as you get closer to the cell tower (base station). Here are the cancer deaths found when fanning out in all directions:
[click image to enlarge]
These raw counts of cancer deaths need to be divided by the number of people residing in each ring, forming a cancer death rate per 10,000:
I marked the ring which goes out to 200 meters (m) because the cancer death rate there jumped by so much that it was statistically significant even from the very next ring (out to 300 m):
[click image to enlarge]
Starting out and moving in toward the cell tower, by the time you get within 700 meters of the tower, the cancer death rate was significantly higher than that found beyond 1000 meters away from the tower. But even just the jump from being 300 meters away to being 200 meters away was a significant difference.
The marking “LB95-Rate” stands for the 95% lower bound of the cancer death rate, and “UB95-Rate” is the 95% upper bound. The orange-shaded lower bound for 200 m was higher than the yellow-shaded upper bound of the next ring away from the tower (300 m) — indicating high statistical significance.
Using data from another study in Nigeria, the amount of radiation to expected to be behind this significant jump in cancer death is about 0.2949 Watts per square-meter:
That night-time exposure at 200 meters away from a base station (cell tower) is equivalent to just over 10 V/m:
[click image to enlarge]
In that Brazil study, they found up to 12.4 V/m when doing surveys of different locations. These details all add together to make it possible that EMFs can be at least a contributing factor to the high rate of brain tumors found among the nurses. But due of bias, it is likely that the hospital did not even measure EMFs during follow up.
Reference
[200 V/m at a hospital near an airport in Japan] — Hanada E. The electromagnetic environment of hospitals: how it is affected by the strength of electromagnetic fields generated both inside and outside the hospital. Ann Ist Super Sanita. 2007;43(3):208-17. PMID: 17938450. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17938450/
[cell towers near Newton-Wellesley Hospital] — https://www.antennasearch.com/HTML/search/search.php?address=Newton+Lower+Falls%2C+MA
[hospital devices like incubators can put out EMFs] — Meier M, Mohler E. Elektromagnetische Felder im Spitalalltag [Electromagnetic fields in the hospital everyday]. Z Med Phys. 2012 Jun;22(2):87. German. doi: 10.1016/j.zemedi.2012.02.001. Epub 2012 Apr 4. PMID: 22480606. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22480606/
[35% more cancer death when living near a cell tower] — https://www.cga.ct.gov/2021/etdata/tmy/2021HB-06442-R000309-Lynch,%20Margaret-Exhibit%20D-TMY.PDF
[10.5 V/m overnight at 200 meters from a cell tower] — https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2034/1/012009