On Wed, 14 Apr 2010 09:45:17 +0100, "Arfa Daily"
wrote:

So general genetics don't
seem to have been a major player for coronary heart disease, in the case of
his family, although obviously, it's a complex subject, and quirks of fate
in these respects, clearly happen.

Agreed.

Interesting though, how closely he seems to parallel you.

Well, it is possible that a career in RF causes so much stress from
overwork and company politics that a heart attack is probable.
However, that's conjecture.

I wonder if your
other radio club members who died, were 'casual' radio users just from a ham
perspective, or professionals working around this stuff for 10 hours a day
for many years.

Mostly casual but there were two broadcast engineers among the mix.
One of these died from liver cancer, the other from a nasty virus that
literally ate his heart. If you want to get some real RF exposure,
there's nothing like working in a broadcast studio (near the xmitter
tower), or on a mountain top radio site, or at a military radar
station. I had a few years of such exposure back in the 1970's, but
mostly, it's been ocassional yacking on VHF/UHF with minimal power.
Basically, the sample of local hams that have died is not sufficient
to get a decent correlation. The only factoid that're really relevent
is that none of them died from coronary issues. Although I have some
obvious coronary problems, I expect to meet my end in the supermarket
parking lot, run over by some lunatic driving diagonally across the
lanes, thinking all the rules of the road are suspended in the parking
lot.

I wonder if there's any research or collated statistics on
this out on the big bad interweb ?

Actually, yes. There was a study about 10 years ago attempting to
correlate cancers with RF exposure using hams as a population sample.
The results indicated that there was a greater probability of
contracting leukemia if one was involved in ham radio, than the
control group (non-hams). The study was horribly flawed, both in it's
data gathering and sampling methods. I'm too lazy to find it.
http://www.hamradio-online.com/faq4.html
Other than mess, I don't know of any studies.

45 years ago, when I first got into ham radio, I had a full head of
hair, a positive attitude, a steady hand, and a fairly decent bank
account. After 45 years of RF exposure, the hear is almost gone, my
attitude is very pessimistic, my hand shakes, and my bank account is
depleted. Obvious, all this must be caused by RF exposure.

--
# Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060
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