This 5G conspiracist taking EMF readings thinking it is the same as nuclear.

[helio0centra@gmail.com]

News flash, magnetism and radio waves are not the same as radiation. There will be some radiation right in front of the transmitter, but down on the ground it will be almost nothing extra compared to background.

Also the 6GHz band and beam forming hasn't even yet been added to 5G and probably won't be till 6G. The only difference between 4G and 5G is the old retired frequencies from 1G and 2G were added for more speed.

He also has a lot of other wacky conspiracy videos on his YouTube and I see him posting on Facebook but I didn't want to share that here since you need an account to view it. Here is his website though:

https://blog.nationalcitizensalliance.ca/

[Nominal Animal]

News flash, magnetism and radio waves are not the same as radiation.

You mean "the same as ionizing radiation".

Electromagnetism, including radio waves and light, is definitely radiation.  Ionizing radiation is the "dangerous" kind, because it ionizes atoms and molecules and can thus damage tissues and DNA.  Non-ionizing radiation can heat up materials if sufficiently intense (via dielectric heating – depending on both the material and the frequency/wavelength), and that heat can be damaging if localized or persistent enough.

Of electromagnetic radiation, ultraviolet light and shorter wavelengths – so higher frequencies than say 5 PHz (5,000,000 GHz) – are ionizing, but lower frequencies at sufficient intensity can still heat up dielectric materials like polar molecules.  As an example, microwave ovens typically work at 2.45 GHz or 915 MHz, but when properly constructed (and remember, these are very high-power devices, compared to any RF antenna setups!) a perforated foil in the window is sufficient to keep it localized within the oven chamber.

So, when we talk about the possible health impact of radio waves up to the terahertz range, we really are only concerned with the exact wavelengths and intensity, and how much heat it can induce in biological tissues (and other materials, I guess).  At the energies actually used, we can say that you might not want to embed a cellphone or WiFi antenna in your skull, but keeping it a foot away from your head (and gonads) most of the time should be safe.

I would love to see more research on how "hot" a spot at a specific distance from an beamforming array is achievable, because we know anything built by humans can fail in spectacular fashion; but given the total power and size of current arrays, I'm not worried.

As usual, the nutjobs get their nut-fuel from the little kernels of truth: here, that beamforming is still new technology, and some aspects, especially the maximum energy density at hot spots, are still being worked out.  (Most teams are still trying to find ways of creating those hot spots efficiently.) Even the aluminium foil thing is based on the fact that any conductive foil, even if very very thin, suffices to block most RF radiation; even rebar in concrete buildings (which could be considered a "foil" with huge, square-feet sized holes in it) is often sufficient to block cellphone and WiFi antennas.

(The text in the attached image, is just .  In particular, most high-performance computing clusters, and a lot of servers I've worked with, use fiberoptic cables for network communication.  If you use TOSLINK S/PDIF cables, you use fiberoptic (plastic!) cable for transferring sound (in digital format).  No cellular towers involved... Fiberoptic cables do not "power" anything, they are just a way to transfer data.)

Me, I'd worry more about drinking water from plastic bottles or cups every day right now.. but not nearly as much as for example refined sugar intake.  That stuff is poison.

[MikeK]

Also - and I'll bet this has been pointed out before - 5G is still less energetic than VISIBLE LIGHT.

[helio0centra@gmail.com]

Near the end of the video he approaches the bottom of the tower and comments he can hear a hum. It is the unmistakable 60Hz hum of a big transformer. Then freaks out about how high the EMF meter has gone. What do you expect standing next to what is essenciallty a giant electromagnet running on AC? EMF means Electromagnetic Frequency.

[pcprogrammer]

Also - and I'll bet this has been pointed out before - 5G is still less energetic than VISIBLE LIGHT.

But sunlight can cause skin cancer

(To cover my back, the lol is not to the fact that skin cancer is caused by sunlight, it is because people might think it is just the sunlight and forget that it is the invisible part of it that is the actual cause)

[AndyBeez]

Take a geiger counter around the UK county of Cornwall; you'll be surprised just how ionizing the fresh air really is. It's one of the world's Radon hotspots due to the natural Uranium oxide deposits. Spoiler: Cornish pasties are not radioactive.

Regarding the video, this is the same kind of *tard who takes a thermocouple into an abandoned theatre and "omg!" claims he has detected ectoplasm. That's an S-type thermocouple for young players, the type that detects spectral radiation.

[tszaboo]

Gamma radiation is electromagnetic radiation. It's on the same spectrum as your Wifi or your phone, or visible light for that matter.
Beta is electrons.
Alpha is bigger particles, ionized helium. Smarter people than me can probably explain why this is a thing, instead of spitting it out in pieces. Probably it's less energy?

And what's damaging to you? As far as we know the human body doesn't react to magnetic fields, but if you place your head in large enough magnetic field, you can become temporarily blind. Or if you drink to much water, that can kill you. In the end I think stress is more likely to kill you than any of these things.

[Nominal Animal]

In the end I think stress is more likely to kill you than any of these things.

Yup, definitely.

That reminds me:

Humans, as well as all other animals, have evolved to deal with environmental stressors, like radiation (there is a constant background of ionizing radiation from radioactive materials, like uranium, radon, thorium, and so on, within Earth) and parasites and bacteria and viruses.  The idea that we should somehow remove it all to be 'safe' is ridiculous and utterly misguided.  Even now, we've got a lot of problems with allergies and such: these are nothing but a too strong immune system finding nothing significant to fight against and thus targeting non-problems.

Hell, even our own bodies are radioactive, because of a radioactive isotope of carbon, ¹⁴C.

Have you noticed how reputable, correct medical literature never says things like "radiation causes cancer"?  It is because even ionizing radiation doesn't, it just increases the probability.  You do not actually need any kind of external/environmental stressor to get cancer, because it can occur completely randomly during DNA transcription in your cells.  In fact, it does happen all the time; it's just that your cells detect it and die, or are killed by your own immune system.  Cancers are just the result of all those systems failing somehow!

We could also talk about how human skin, when 'burned' in the sun, gets very red and sore, and then sloughs off the topmost layer, and how that too is one of the mechanisms we humans have evolved (rather recently, too) to deal with it...  Just like when you soak your hands and feet, and they become all wrinkly, it is actually an effect generated by your own body to increase grip in very wet conditions; very few animals have this.

We shouldn't try to isolate ourselves from the nature and the natural stressors we've evolved to deal with; and this does include all kinds of radiation, magnetic fields, and even electricity.  (It's not just vertical, i.e. lightning and related phenomena; there are also natural currents within the bedrock due to induction and whatnot, as the magnetic field of Earth is not static, and is constantly in motion due to changes in solar wind et cetera.  Hell, there are even natural nuclear reactors, although the ones we know have "burned out" millions or billions of years ago.)

Keeping track of them, their correlation with statistics about human health, is of course important and a good thing.  But, if we start banning things because they're new or we fear them, we should just go back to the savannahs and brackish water deltas to our omnivore roots.

[AVGresponding]

It doesn't help that there's a perfect storm of poor education provision and social media being full of utter bollocks passing itself off as "facts".

[pcprogrammer]

We shouldn't try to isolate ourselves from the nature and the natural stressors we've evolved to deal with

And yet that is what they try to promote on a daily basis in adverts for selling anti bacterial products for cleaning your worktops and hands.

I heard an argument about why children where less receptive for covid due to the fact that their immune system is more active because they are exposed to more germs, by playing in a sandbox or on the streets.

So lesson here is don't be to clean

[TimFox]

Near the end of the video he approaches the bottom of the tower and comments he can hear a hum. It is the unmistakable 60Hz hum of a big transformer. Then freaks out about how high the EMF meter has gone. What do you expect standing next to what is essenciallty a giant electromagnet running on AC? EMF means Electromagnetic Frequency.

"EMF" in this context means "electromagnetic field".
In the vicinity of a transformer, there will definitely be 50/60 Hz magnetic fields, possibly of easily measurable strength.
In the immediate vicinity of a transmitting antenna, there is a "near field", which is not radiation, where substantial energy is stored in an oscillating field.
In MRI systems, which are smaller than the wavelength of the radio frequency (typically 64 MHz), the patient will absorb power from the oscillating magnetic field, and the regulations limit the "specific absorption rate" (SAR) in W/kg to avoid over-heating of tissue.
Similar SAR-limit regulations apply to cell phones, which are held next to the head, so the user is in the near-field region of the phone.

[Nominal Animal]

So lesson here is don't be to clean

It is quite true.  Kids who have pets have statistically fewer allergies as adults.  (And many environmental allergies –– pollen, animal dandruff, etc. –– can be thwarted using allergen immunotherapy, which is basically flooding your system with it in a pattern that makes your overactive immune system realize it's not dangerous, and is not worth that strong an immune response.)

I don't use "antibacterial" soaps or detergents, they're just not worth it.  If I have whites that need whitening, I prefer chlorite (ClO₂⁻) and drying in the sun (so bleach + UV bleaching).

Here in Finland, during "Mätäkuu" (Month of the Rot, roughly equivalent to English "Dog Days"), a survey in 2002-2005 in Töölö Hospital in Helsinki found out that not only were wound infections more common during this time, on average 16% of patients required surgery due to infections, compared to 12% at other times.

To me, that means that if it happens to be July or August, I'm pretty careful even with small scratches.  I use mild alcohol based antiseptics, and for finger and toe scratches and wounds, plasters/bandages with silver or aluminium infused into the padding; specifically, Hansaplast "Silver Shield" or "Bacteria Shield" (Universal).  My immune system is aggressive, and such scratches otherwise easily get inflamed.  I've mentioned these bandages before, as I'm such a sausage finger that I often get paper cuts especially from PC chassises, sharp stamped metal edges, when modding them, and these significantly reduce the probability of a finger scratch getting red and inflamed for me, compared to "plain" bandages.  Unfortunately, Finland has decided that they're too antibacterial, and at least "Silver Shield" is no longer sold here... which is utterly ridiculous.  Silver is antibacterial because it destroys the bacterial cell wall structures in a similar way that acids or bases do, not via a biological reaction that the bacteria can evolve to withstand (like antibiotics and such).

Which is to say there is a time and place to be extra careful and use the antibacterial/antiseptic/antibiotic stuff, and not just splooge them on everything all the time.

[pcprogrammer]

A bit off topic, but allergies can come and go. 30 years ago I found out that I, at that time was allergic to hazelnuts, so I try to avoid them as much as possible. But the reactions I had then, don't happen now when I accidentally eat something with hazelnut. And in the beginning it only took a piece of pastry with some hazelnut cream to bring a violent reaction. Before it came up I have had things with hazelnuts without problems, so go figure.

[AVGresponding]

So lesson here is don't be to clean

It is quite true.  Kids who have pets have statistically fewer allergies as adults.  (And many environmental allergies –– pollen, animal dandruff, etc. –– can be thwarted using allergen immunotherapy, which is basically flooding your system with it in a pattern that makes your overactive immune system realize it's not dangerous, and is not worth that strong an immune response.)

I don't use "antibacterial" soaps or detergents, they're just not worth it.  If I have whites that need whitening, I prefer chlorite (ClO₂⁻) and drying in the sun (so bleach + UV bleaching).

Here in Finland, during "Mätäkuu" (Month of the Rot, roughly equivalent to English "Dog Days"), a survey in 2002-2005 in Töölö Hospital in Helsinki found out that not only were wound infections more common during this time, on average 16% of patients required surgery due to infections, compared to 12% at other times.

To me, that means that if it happens to be July or August, I'm pretty careful even with small scratches.  I use mild alcohol based antiseptics, and for finger and toe scratches and wounds, plasters/bandages with silver or aluminium infused into the padding; specifically, Hansaplast "Silver Shield" or "Bacteria Shield" (Universal).  My immune system is aggressive, and such scratches otherwise easily get inflamed.  I've mentioned these bandages before, as I'm such a sausage finger that I often get paper cuts especially from PC chassises, sharp stamped metal edges, when modding them, and these significantly reduce the probability of a finger scratch getting red and inflamed for me, compared to "plain" bandages.  Unfortunately, Finland has decided that they're too antibacterial, and at least "Silver Shield" is no longer sold here... which is utterly ridiculous.  Silver is antibacterial because it destroys the bacterial cell wall structures in a similar way that acids or bases do, not via a biological reaction that the bacteria can evolve to withstand (like antibiotics and such).

Which is to say there is a time and place to be extra careful and use the antibacterial/antiseptic/antibiotic stuff, and not just splooge them on everything all the time.

In contrast, I never use dressings, I just let it bleed, and I nick myself quite frequently at work (local authority sparks) and at home when I'm hobbying. The only exception to this is when I've had cuts that needed stitches.

[Nominal Animal]

I use mild alcohol based antiseptics, and for finger and toe scratches and wounds, plasters/bandages with silver or aluminium infused into the padding; specifically, Hansaplast "Silver Shield" or "Bacteria Shield" (Universal).  My immune system is aggressive, and such scratches otherwise easily get inflamed.

In contrast, I never use dressings, I just let it bleed, and I nick myself quite frequently at work (local authority sparks) and at home when I'm hobbying. The only exception to this is when I've had cuts that needed stitches.

Yup, that sounds normal and good to me.  I too get small nicks in my fingers a lot.  I repeat, unless I do this, even small scratches tend to get inflamed (red and puffed up/swollen), I suppose because of the benign bacteria on ones skin (which you definitely do want there!) getting into the wound and pissing off my aggressive immune system; and they also take longer to heal.  So I'm blaming my immune system here, behaving somewhat similar to how allergies work. What I do not do, is use antibiotics or such; those should be reserved for the very serious cases only.

[trash]

Another conspiracy nutter. A normal person might have some concern about their radiophobia and buy an EMR meter and take some measurements to entertain their fears. But once they have collected the data they carefully analyse it and look for references from authorities and government standards and make a rational and logic determination of their results. What should happen is they understand the readings on their equipment and discover the levels they have measured are well within the safety limits and guidelines determined by government authorities. Life goes on because they understand there is nothing to worry about.

 Conspiracy nutters go down a different path. They buy the equipment which "empowers" them. They have no idea what the readings mean, only that more is bad and if the device has red lights or warning alarms, then it can satisfy their worst fears. There's no rigorous evaluation of the data, presentation of good evidence or reference to any kind of standards.   

These people want to be afraid and they want everybody else to be afraid too to validate their own wacky fears.
In a lot of cases these people have some kind of back story where they feel wronged or hurt or just left behind and they want somebody or something to blame. 5Ger's are just one form of these damaged people.
We have plenty of people here in Australia who have been sipping the sipping the bong water.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh-ZuLI1ThM8YWPDa4wzZGw

Once you know their back story it can be used to hose them down. A classic example I ran into was a woman who camped under a mobile phone tower in a NSW Northern Rivers town to protest against a telco installing 5G in "her" town. She found plenty of support in those towns because there are a lot of Luddites in the region. I might have helped her get moved on after I dropped a rumour in town that she was not from the area and there was no plans by the telco to install 5G on that tower and that she was actually just squatting and getting free camping in the center of a nice town taking advantage of the residents stupidity.

And that's just the tip of the batshit crazy iceberg. My favourite nutters are the crystal healing hippies.
These people are mostly harmless but they harbor a lot of fears about radiation in all its forms. They generally don't have irrational fears of mobile phone towers but they do entertain the fears that they are bad in some way. I often get asked questions about them and I give them simple an honest answers. Often they don't like the answers I give them but they are strangely re-assured when I tell them, "If there was something to be afraid of, I'd take great delight in telling you."
  And the reason these fringe believers trust what I say is because I'm their anti-christ. They used to be terrified of me because I would be at shows looking for radioactive items with a geiger counter and these people are scared shitless of anything nuclear or radioactive.
Naturally I couldn't help myself but tease them. They would point at me and whisper to each other, "That's him!"
 The reason for this was they claimed their crystals are all magical and healing. When I ask if they have any evil or bad crystals they are shocked. "What, you though crystals were only nice? NO, I collect the ones that cause death, disease and destruction."
"No crystal does that!" 
"Oh really? Let me introduce you to my little friends, chrysotile, cinnabar, galena and autinite!"

 But as time went by the got used to seeing me and became much less afraid to the point where they would start asking me questions.
And like any good science outreach, I gave them simple accurate answers which they could understand. It took a long time but they stopped rejecting the answers they didn't like and started asking more and more sensible questions. If they didn't like the answer, I reminded them I take delight in their fear of something true and lying to them doesn't achieve that.
  These days they're used to me and they even ask me to check their wares for "bad auras" which I'm more than happy to do. Anything with a bad aura that is radioactive, I am more than happy to pay them to remove.

Which brings me to ionising radiation.
Non-ionising radiation is everything with a wavelength longer than about 400nm. This is pretty much a deep purple colour light.
Everything with a shorter wavelength is Ultra violet light and ionising radiation. Though as you might imagine with RF there is no demarcation frequency on the spectrum. The difference between UHF and microwaves isn't a hard difference at 1GHz or 3Ghz, it's a very gradual change over a over a broad range. The transistion from non-ionising to ionising is no different and above 400nm as the wavelengths get shorter any one photon has more energy to break stronger chemical bonds. 350nm can barely excite an electron in the outer shell of a cesium atom while 250nm can crack oxygen molecules and create ozone. And higher up in X-rays we're all well aware that these photons can break most chemical bonds very easily. 
 

Alpha is bigger particles, ionized helium. Smarter people than me can probably explain why this is a thing, instead of spitting it out in pieces. Probably it's less energy?

So yes, gamma rays are electromagnetic radiation the same as radio waves or light. They are photons, but with enough energy to break chemical bonds and ionise atoms. They aren't much different from X-rays but the source of X-rays is from electrons while gamma rays are usually created by an atomic nucleus.

Beta radiation is slightly different, it's not really on the electromagnetic spectrum even though clearly it is made of electrons.
These electrons however carry more than enough energy to ionise molecules and atoms and create X-rays as secondary radiation.
Most of us are familiar with a Cathode Ray tube. Electrons are accelerated toward a phosphor target. These are basically not much different from beta particles created by the weak nuclear force when an atom decays. And like beta particles when they hit the glass or metal mask at the end of the tube, the sudden deceleration can create X-rays (braking radiation). The glass of the tube often provided enough shielding to stop the X-rays but that didn't stop your mum from telling you not to sit so close to the tele.

Alpha particles are basically ionised Helium nuclei. They're mostly produced from radioactive decay of heavier elements but some lighter elements like Platinum are also slightly radioactive and emit alpha particles. Alpha particles are the most ionising form of radiation and are roughly 10 times more ionising than gamma rays. They carry a +2 electron charge and their large mass and very high energy up to about 8MeV naturally makes them heavy hitters.  Most high school science students are taught that despite the high energy, alpha particles are easily stopped by a sheet of paper. While it's not technically try, it's a good generalisation.

Most people's exposure to Alpha particles comes from Radon gas or dust in the air which carries a tiny amount of uranium.
There is also a small amount of Uranium Thorium and Radium in the food we eat. Radium in Brazil nuts makes them the most radioactive food.
Second on that list is probably going to be Bananas (the anti-matter food) which have Potassium some of which decays with positrons, or beta decay and producing gamma rays and X-rays, all in very tiny amounts.
 Most people's exposure to beta comes from cosmic rays in the form of muons. Hundreds of them passing through your body every few minutes.
If you take a geiger counter on a commercial flight, it's interesting the increase in background radiation above 30,000ft.

Most gamma exposure comes from the ground from Uranium and Thorium decay series secondary radiation.

But while we're on the subject of ionising radiation, my personal favourite at the moment is Australian pubs. If you see a pub with tiles on the outside wall, chances are they're radioactive. Impressively radioactive, but still harmless. As I type this some people are losing their shit over this on tik tok where there is a growing community of paranoid radiophobes.

 

[TimFox]

In radiation safety, alpha-emitting radioactive elements are harmful when ingested, since the range of the alphas is short and do their damage (deposit energy) in tissue immediately adjacent.
They do not get much further than the skin when external to the body.
Betas have a "medium" range, and can be harmful inside and outside.
Gammas have "long" range in biological material, and are harmful as they pass through.
When x rays or gamma rays are used on purpose in radiotherapy, they deposit energy along their track; to concentrate this in the volume of interest (tumor, etc.), the therapy ordinarily sends collimated beams from a source that rotates around the patient, with the geometry carefully centered so that these beams intersect at the selected points in the patient.
Charged particles, such as protons, are used in therapy to exploit their well-defined range in tissue, where the energy is deposited mainly near the very end of the track.
"Therapy planning" is a very important component of using ionizing radiation in place of a scalpel--both need to be wielded carefully.

[Nominal Animal]

Charged particles, such as protons, are used in therapy to exploit their well-defined range in tissue, where the energy is deposited mainly near the very end of the track.

Similarly in ion implantation (which is commonly done at wafer factories to get very specific semiconductor properties through doping).  The track itself is very narrow, often just a few atoms wide (and can be "healed" via annealing), with a droplet shape at the end of the track; with the track length/depth very easily controlled via energy ("impact velocity").

It is a major reason why the semiconductors we have have so specific, well-controlled properties, including even dopant distribution.

[TimFox]

This is an important difference between the interaction of heavier charged particles (alphas, protons, ions) and photons with matter.
Bethe's formula  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethe_formula  for the linear rate of energy loss dE/dx gives a further result that most of the energy loss of a charged particle traversing matter occurs at the end of its range, the distribution of ranges is called "straggling"  and the region of maximum energy deposition is called the "Bragg peak".  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_(particle_radiation)
Photons (such as x rays and gammas), to oversimplify, lose energy in big jumps and the flux falls off exponentially with distance, depositing energy along the track.  https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1122/ML11229A667.pdf

[The Electrician]

Hell, even our own bodies are radioactive, because of a radioactive isotope of carbon, ¹⁴C.

From Wikipedia: "⁴⁰K represents the largest source of radioactivity, greater even than ¹⁴C. In a human body of 70 kg,"

So, don't eat too many bananas.

[TimFox]

Luckily, there is only 96 mg of potassium in 12 fl oz of beer, compared to 422 mg in a "medium" banana.
The dose to the eater from the ⁴⁰K in one banana is roughly 0.01 mrem, well below my threshold of interest.

[Nominal Animal]

Hell, even our own bodies are radioactive, because of a radioactive isotope of carbon, ¹⁴C.

From Wikipedia: "⁴⁰K represents the largest source of radioactivity, greater even than ¹⁴C. In a human body of 70 kg,"

Ah, right! 

So, don't eat too many bananas.

White beans and potatoes contain more potassium than bananas!

In all seriousness, not getting enough potassium (about 3.5g daily for adult males) is actually somewhat of a problem in Europe at least: people don't eat enough potatoes and bananas and other stuff rich in potassium, risking hypertension and even hypokalemia.  Any avoidance of potassium intake will bite one in the ass very quickly, so do not avoid eating bananas and potatoes if you don't have to!

Besides, hyperkalemia, having too much potassium in your system, is quite rare among healthy adults.  The body regulates the amount of potassium in the blood, so there is no reason to worry about having too much potassium in your diet (unless you have a health condition or quirk, in which case your doc will tell you about it).  Again, it's the insufficient potassium intake that one should worry, because that will slowly kill you.

[iMo]

As a child I was wearing an old mechanical wrist watch for many years I inherited.
Also as a child I tried sometimes to suck the air through my mouth from an old WWII altimeter (from an Junkers bomber I was told) trying to achieve the highest altitude possible.
Aprox 30 years afterwards I built myself a Geiger counter and looked at the watch and the altimeter. I do not understand why I am still alive..

[coppercone2]

I find it mildly interesting because unlike some natural ionizing radiation that was around for earth evolution, there was not much microwaves and RF on the surface of earth. However it seems pretty obvious right now that we got lucky with strong immunity.

[AVGresponding]

There are lots of things we don’t know yet, guys. But there are even more things we’ll never know about. I think EMF is one of those things. It’s literally everywhere, and if we knew about the problems it can cause, we’d immediately throw away our phones, computers, and other electronics.

Just because there are lots of things that you don't know yet, doesn't mean that other people don't. This subject is very well researched, and if you want to be seen as anything other than just another conspiracy nut, I would suggest you read some of it (by which I mean proper, peer reviewed research conducted by academic institutions, and not some random youtube/facebook ramblings).

[james_s]

There are lots of things we don’t know yet, guys. But there are even more things we’ll never know about. I think EMF is one of those things. It’s literally everywhere, and if we knew about the problems it can cause, we’d immediately throw away our phones, computers, and other electronics.

It's been studied for decades, why do you think we may never know about it? It's already well understood.

Regardless, human lifespans are longer today than ever before in history. Even if EMF did cause some negative impact, electricity and the resulting EMF is still a net positive.

[james_s]

As a child I was wearing an old mechanical wrist watch for many years I inherited.
Also as a child I tried sometimes to suck the air through my mouth from an old WWII altimeter (from an Junkers bomber I was told) trying to achieve the highest altitude possible.
Aprox 30 years afterwards I built myself a Geiger counter and looked at the watch and the altimeter. I do not understand why I am still alive..

Radiation is not nearly as dangerous as the fear the word invokes would suggest. Yes it can harm you, but the radiation you'll get from the radium in a watch or altimeter is not generally going to cause problems. If you fly on an airliner or visit an area such as Colorado you'll be exposed to quite a lot more radiation than is typical at sea level yet it doesn't typically harm people. Where you get into trouble with radium is if you ingest it. The radium will be in the paint on the dial and hands of the watch and altimeter which is fairly well sealed.