No Strong Evidence Points To Cell Phones As Hazard
Sunday, July 18th, 2010Health experts say there’s no consistent evidence that cell phone radiation emissions pose a medical risk.
The most significant long-term study to date — a 13-country analysis initiated in 2000 and published in May by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer — found that cell phone users overall had no increased risk for glioma or meningioma, two common brain tumors.
The new study found a slight increase in brain tumors in a tiny subset of people who used cell phones six to 12 hours a day. Authors cautioned not to make too much of that finding, because they found it hard to believe that people really spent that much time on the phone, says Peter Inskip an epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute.
Analyses based on small subsets like these are notoriously unreliable, says Otis Brawley, chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society.
But he notes that “we’ve never studied” potential problems that could arise from more than 10 years of cell phone use. And since all previous studies have focused on adults, Brawley says scientists need to study long-term cell phone use by children, whose brains are still developing.
Brawley notes that it’s really hard to study long-term effects of technology that’s constantly evolving. Today’s phones emit much less energy than phones in the late 1980s and early ’90s, he says.
A European study, launched in March, will attempt to answer some lingering health questions by following 250,000 people for 20 to 30 years.
Scientists say radiation from cell phones is different than the kind known to cause cancer — called ionizing radiation — which is emitted by X-rays, nuclear bombs or even the sun. Mobile phones emit radio-frequency energy, or radio waves, a form of electromagnetic radiation also used by radios and TVs through their antennas, according to the NCI.
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