A family WhatsApp group has confirmed that 5G mobile networks cause the common cold, after one member forwarded a message saying so, in red letters, with three exclamation marks.
“It was sent by a very educated person,” said the member, a retired uncle, who could not name the person. “Also it had a photo of a tower.” He added that he had caught a cold the same week the new tower went up on the building opposite, and also, he admitted when pressed, the week after his grandson came home from school with one. “The tower was more suspicious,” he said. “My grandson is a good boy.”
The group, which has 47 members and has previously confirmed that onions in socks cure fever and that a famous industrialist is giving away free laptops, voted to accept the finding unanimously, with two thumbs-up emojis and one ”🙏”.
Scientists, contacted by a nephew who works in Bengaluru and was immediately removed from the group, pointed out several problems. The first is that colds are caused by viruses: more than two hundred different kinds, most often rhinoviruses. A virus is a tiny package of genes wrapped in protein, and it cannot do anything at all on its own. It has to get inside a living cell, usually in your nose or throat, and hijack the cell’s machinery to make copies of itself. Those copies leave in the droplets of a sneeze, or on a hand that wiped a nose and then opened a door. Colds travel from person to person. They do not come down from towers.
The second problem is what radio waves actually are. They belong to the same family as visible light, X-rays and the warmth from a heater: electromagnetic waves, differing only in their wavelength. And light, physicists discovered a century ago, arrives in tiny packets of energy called photons. The energy of each packet depends only on the wave’s frequency. Ultraviolet light, with its high frequency, carries packets energetic enough to break the bonds in a molecule, which is why it can burn skin. A 5G signal at 3.5 gigahertz carries packets hundreds of thousands of times weaker. And crucially, a brighter or stronger signal doesn’t make the packets stronger, just more numerous. A million feathers thrown at a window will not break it the way one stone will.
“So radio waves can’t break a molecule,” the nephew wrote, before his removal. “They certainly can’t build a virus, which is a precise machine made of hundreds of thousands of atoms. And they can’t carry one, because there is nothing to carry. A virus isn’t a signal. It’s a thing.”
The scientists did confirm that radio waves strong enough can warm things up, which is exactly how a microwave oven heats food. But the oven pours hundreds of watts into a small metal box, while a phone’s signal is a tiny fraction of that, spread out in every direction, and international safety limits are set well below any level at which warming would matter.
At the time of going to press, the family group had forwarded the scientists’ statement with the message “See, even they are worried”, followed by a video of a tower with dramatic music. The uncle’s cold has since cleared up. His grandson is said to have a new one.
Try it yourselfCheck the forward
- Write down exactly what the message claims causes what.
- Write down what evidence it gives. Is there a named study, a named scientist, or just "doctors say"?
- Think of one other explanation for the same thing. (A cold the same week as a new tower? What else happened that week?)
- Search for the claim with the word "fact check" and compare.
What's going on?
Two things happening at the same time does not mean one caused the other. Scientists test a cause by looking for a mechanism, a way it could work, and by comparing groups that differ only in the suspected cause. A forward that gives neither has not shown anything yet.