Cancer/Cell Phone Connection Challenged
In the letter, Davis and Balzano, who each have more than 35 years of research experience in the biological effects of wireless telecommunications technology, offered a critique of a paper …. that had been published in a previous issue of JAMA. Davis and Balzano pointed out that the highest temperature elevations that occur in the brain during cell phone use as a result of radiofrequency fields from the cell phone are on the order of 0.1 degrees C to 0.2 degrees C, and that these temperature elevations are smaller than those resulting from physical activity. They also argued that the study did not evaluate the exposure of the brain to the fields from the cell phone correctly, so a causal relation between the radio frequency signal and the effect detected … has no valid experimental support.
See our previous post.
The report from the WHO basically said researchers could not find any connection between cell phones and cancer but that didn’t mean there isn’t one. If there was a slight correlation, it could be the nature of the people who use cell phones as opposed to the cell phone itself.
From Science magazine and Scientific American I gather that scientists are upset that the public doesn’t follow their advice (including policy advice that is outside of their field). Maybe if they stopped publishing junk science they could improve their credibility. Indeed, the fact that people take these spurious scare stories seriously is sign of their overwillingness to defer to authority figures –especially guys in white coats.
Almost everyone I know uses a cell phone, but I’ve never known anyone who died from brain cancer. If WHO is right, shouldn’t there be a lot of brain cancer deaths?
These cell-phone-cancer stories pop up every couple of years like the Loch Ness Monster and then disappear without any real evidence coming out of all the discussion.
For my money, there are much worse side-effects from living each day with your thumbs and/or your eardrum stuck to a phone…like missing out on what’s actually happening in and around your own life.
The original paper uses a cross over study design, which brings into question the study time period and the sample size. The study was performed on 47 different individuals and over a year time span. Although the authors were looking at the acute effects, was there a sufficient “wash out period” to limit confounding variables?
Darn, all this time I’ve been laughing at everyone that walks by with a bluetooth in their ear.