Answer to Question #2322 Submitted to "Ask the Experts"

Q

I was in the U.S. Navy for four years. I served on the flight line at a Navy Air Station and on the flight deck of a carrier in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Can radar be the cause of my salivary gland cancer?

A

By coincidence, I was in the Navy, too, although a little later than you—I was in the Navy from 1981 to 1989 and on a submarine from 1986 to 1989. It would have been nice to have been able to see the sun from time to time, but I never wanted to be on such a large ship—too far to walk to get to work. I was a Machinists' Mate (MM1/SS, and I later made MMC in the Reserves), so I never worked directly with radars, but I've learned a lot about their effects in the time since I got out of the Navy. The short answer is that the radar couldn't have caused your salivary gland cancer. In order for something to cause cancer, it must have a way to interact with the cells to cause DNA damage, and there is no evidence that radar can do this.

The way that radiation causes cancer is by causing ionizations in the cells, the ionizations help create reactive molecules (called free radicals) in the cells, and the free radicals are what can damage the DNA to cause a cell to become cancerous. To create an ion pair and make free radicals, the radiation has to have enough energy to strip an electron from an atom. The lowest energy of radiation that can do this is UV, and UV is much more energetic than radar radiation. So radar is physically unable to create the ion pairs and, without the ion pairs, cannot cause the DNA damage necessary to cause cancer. There have been studies done of people using radios, microwaves, police radars, and cell phones, all of which use radiation of similar energies. There are always some studies that show increased cancer risk from these devices, and there are also always studies that show no effects at all, and these make up the majority of the studies performed. To me, this whole combination of evidence very strongly suggests that radio- and radar-wavelength is incapable of causing cancer.

I hope this helps. If you need any clarification please contact me through our Web site editor.

Andrew Karam, CHP, PhD