Dear Jubilee,

I have recently read an article that indicated there is a correlation between microchips and cancer. We always use microchips so that our dogs will be returned if they are ever lost. Should we stop using them?

Questioning the Safety of Our Microchips

Dear Questioning,

We microchip all of our dogs, and when we were breeding Airedales, we sent every puppy home with a microchip for exactly the reason you use them. We have not heard of any problems with the microchips, and one dog that went off on her own was returned within an hour because of the microchip and the registry. 

Right now, there is a lot of press about microchips because there is a move to make microchips mandatory nationwide for livestock. Whenever something is proposed to be mandated by law, a lot of pros and cons come out depending on the author’s point of view.

Here is an informative article that might help you answer your own question. It was written by Mark Forbes, an electronics design engineer.

Jubilee

ID chips and cancer

I'm an electronics design engineer in "real life", and when I saw the article on cancer related to ID chips, I had to laugh a bit at some of the media hype. But then I stopped to think about it for a bit, and I realize some of where it's coming from.

Most people have no idea how this technology works. They see "radio" and "radiation" and they assume these are somehow related. And they know about "radiation causes cancer" from Hiroshima, and extrapolate from there. This was illustrated by somebody who had a fit here locally some years ago, when the cellphone company put an antenna on top of the local water tower, and protesters were up in arms about how "they're puttin' radiation in the water to poison my babies!" Anybody with a clue about how cellular telephones work knows that this is simply ludicrous.

So, a quick tutorial on RFID chips and how they work, from somebody who's actually in the business. We use 'em though...we don't sell 'em.

The basic chip is a passive device. It has no internal power source, so it does not emit anything at all when it's just sitting around. It's a small electronic circuit that contains a minimal amount of logic and a tiny memory capable of storing a few hundred bits of data. The whole thing is encapsulated in a glass envelope, about the size of a big rice grain. There are some mechanical features on the ends that help it to stay stuck where it's implanted, so it won't wander off.

Connected to this bit of logic is a small antenna and a power conversion circuit. A reader for these chips consists of a device that emits a varying electromagnetic field, typically at a few hundred kilohertz. This is the same band that AM radio can be found at, though of course at a much lower power level....a watt or so. When the ID chip is placed within a few millimeters of the reader, the antenna picks up enough energy from the reader to energize the passive circuit inside. This circuit then produces a tiny signal in response to the reader, and a sensitive receiver circuit inside the reader picks up this faint signal and amplifies it up to a usable level.

The only time any energy transfer takes place is during the read activity, which is not very common. The same technology is used for card-keys to open doors, for no-touch swipe cards at gas stations, inventory control in warehouses and many other things.

Radio waves at this frequency go right through human bodies, and pretty much everything else except the ground. This makes sense; if they didn't, and were instead absorbed, radio wouldn't travel very far before being consumed by absorption. We know that we can hear radio stations hundreds or even thousands of miles away, so this must not be happening. You don't get significant absorption by human tissue until you get to much higher frequencies, and the real fun starts at 2.45GHz, where you hit resonance with water molecules. That's where your microwave oven operates. Since the radio energy isn't absorbed, and doesn't interact with tissue to any significant extent, it's essentially irrelevant. The only interaction comes with the antenna, which is tuned to resonate at the reader's frequency. It's inside the glass capsule, along with the logic circuit.

So what's the big cancer scare all about? Most likely, it's the mere fact that there's a glass-encapsulated foreign body implanted under the skin. Keep in mind that the lab animals used for such research are already bred for sensitivity to pathogens, and some will produce tumors with no more stimulus than the injection of normal saline. That doesn't mean that saline solution is cancer-causing...it just means that for some of these critters, a nasty look is enough to give them cancer. Not a survival trait, IMHO.....but that's what you want when you're looking for really rare disorders.

The Washington Post article mentions in passing that the study which raised these concerns didn't have any implanted controls, so it's not possible to tell how many mice might have developed tumors from having an inert glass envelope implanted, instead of one with an RFID chip inside. I hope somebody's doing that research now. The empirical evidence to date, from chipped cats and dogs, doesn't suggest that there's a correlation between cancers and RFID chips.

Reading the article, I see a reporter with an agenda and a point of view, not merely a neutral news report. I'd be skeptical about this for now, and my own opinion is that the benefits of chipping a dog (to improve ID/recovery) far outweighs the speculative risk of cancer related to chipping.

Mark G. Forbes
Corvallis, Oregon