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Swedish Study Finds Cell Phone Cancer Risk
dtjohnson writes "A new Swedish
study has
found that heavy users of cell phones had a 240 percent increase in
brain tumors on the side of their head that the phone was used
on. The study defined 'heavy' use as more than 2,000 total hours,
or approximately one hour of use per workday for 10 years. An
earlier British
study was previously discussed
here that didn't find an increased risk, although that study
covered fewer subjects and only followed one type of brain tumor for a
shorter period of time. Or course, the biggest epidemiological
study of all is the one we are all participating in whenever we use our
cell phone. The results from that study won't be available for a
while."
Don't know if you're joking or not, but even in the summary it is mentioned the British article which goes against this, so no, we didn't "know" this 20 years ago. Hell, we still don't KNOW that it causes tumours either. What's significant about this study is the timespan of it.
"The way to get the risk down is to use hands-free," he told Reuters.
How does he know that? Did his study make that conclusion? The article doesn't say anything about use of hands free kits beyond that statement.
I think Mr Mild is making assumptions about the reason for the apparent 240% increase, and factors which he thinks may be important.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
There's got to be some long term damage to putting a radio transmitter which radiates electromagnetic energy right beside your head. I do mean *long term* damage, the only people that really have to worry are yappy pre-pubescent teenage girls, and we have too many of them anyways.
There are 10 types of people in the world; those who can read binary, and those who can't.
Or course, the biggest epidemiological study of all is the one we are all participating in whenever we use our cell phone. The results from that study won't be available for a while.
Not really. The metering is lousy. The control group is corrupted. Heck, the technology is changing, so the signals are different. As a study, the world at large makes a lousy experiment for this.
This article is poor (I would say unethical) coverage of a scientific study.
For example, to say something is associate with a 240% increase in risk can be technically accurate, but horribly misleading to most readers. If one in a billion people get a disease, a 240% increase makes your chance of getting it 2.4/1000000000. That is absolutely nothing to worry about.
Also, with this studay, they found out people who had tumors, then asked them if they used cell phones. The subjects probably had no doubt as to why this question was being asked, therefore this was not really a double blind experiment.
Has anyone ever been able to give a rat cancer by blasting it with amplified cellphone-type radiation? That would convince me of the possibility of cell phone risk much more than digging backward through statistical inormation does.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
You sound awfully bitter, did you fail physics in university or something? :)
Are you BioCurious?
A 240% increase sounds huge, but they never tell you what the original risk is. There is a difference between doubling a 10% risk or a 0.00001% risk.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
when all the shitty drivers that have pissed me off so much get tumors... no, i'll just feel bad for them - yet again. =/
While it has been suspected for some time that cell phones may cause tumors there has been considerable debate over the subject. Telcos and phone makers taking the anti health risk stance for obvious reasons.The phone companies have put large sums of money into reaserch to tell them and us that the phones themselves are harmless. It looks now as if an independant? researcher has added to the body of evidence that there is in fact a real risk. To temper that however it appears you have to be a pretty heavy user to be at risk. Interestingly the mobil phone towers them selves seem to escape the scruting that the handsets have been subjected to.
We have known this since World War 2 and the development of RADAR. Open your eyes fool.
Now we need a study on testicular cancer. They are sensitive, you know. Handedness might not matter as much there, but it can make you blind.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Actually, that is right. But you can understand if you study a little. Which is a more controlled study, particle physics experiments or experiments done on groups of people? It's a no-brainer. Years ago they tried to scare us about power lines, only to find out the guy fudged his data. So 100's of studies say no, and one more crackpot says "Hey... here's a link!!" and now we should all start running. The nice thing about science is the results are repeatable; I can go check for myself. I have checked e-m radiation theory and it checks out.
If I understand Dirac correctly, his meaning is this: there is no God, and Dirac is his Prophet. -Pauli
I don't know why it's not linked to any any of the articles, but here's the scientific paper. If we're going to critique it, we might as well do it right:
H ardell_Article.pdf
http://www.arbetslivsinstitutet.se/pdf/060331Mild
this clearly identifies a weakness in the tagging system
Some brief googling reveals very little about the study discussed in this article; the closest it comes to is a compilation of several different studies.
;)
Link to the former-pdf, now HTML-ized Google cache of the study from the original site, in both Swedish and English: Here.
Even a cursory look at the linked study will show that there have been many, many studies on the effects of RF on animals with conflicting, confusing, and uncertain results. Unfortunately, I'm not a scientist specializing in this field, so I really can't comment one way or the other on the validity of the tests.
It's difficult not to hand-wave this study away without some real, significant, reproduceable results.
An increase from 1 person to 2.4 people getting cancer is serious, if your sample size is 10 people. If your sample size is 10,000 people, or 50,000 people, the difference between 1 and 2.4 is statistical error. To really derive anything further, we'd have to go read the study.
The trouble with doing scientific studies on real, moving people is that it's exceptionally difficult to control external variables. For instance: GSM cell phones (Cingular, T-Mobile, a few minor regional carriers) have a total of four bands they operate on, 850, 900, 1800 and another band that escapes me. CDMA phones (Verizon, Sprint, etc) operate on others, and iDen (Nextel, Southern LINC, etc) phones operate on yet another. Each type varies in wavelength and power output, so it's a vast generalization to say "Cell phones are bad for your brains", because of the vast differences between the services, the cell phones, and the effects of different frequencies on different parts of your brain.
Random appeal to authority: I'm a ham radio operator, and they make us learn interesting things about what too much RF does to you. But at the frequencies we operate, site surveys start being required when you're pushing more than 50 watts at 146 MHz (for instance). 50 watts is something like 50-100 times the amount of power that cell phones push, but, again, at different frequencies, so I'm not really sure I said anything relevant there. It's just hard to tell.
By the time the studies start showing reproduceable evidence, I'll be out of college and far away from the wireless industry, hopefully reducing my chances of being sued
'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'
Potentially true! But, like the tobacconist, I don't hold a gun to anyone's head and make them buy a cell phone. If they wanna rot their brain / not, or rot their lungs / not, it's entirely up to them. I just profit. ;)
'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'
Yes, I'm a physicists and I resemble your comment.
You could do better. You might have something if you point to the known link between cancer and chronic irritation and then prove cellphones irritate nerve tissue. There should also be a rise in auditory canal and skin cancer of the ear at that rate, not to mention head and neck cancers. Hell, you might even score some points if you cited the 85 heavy cell phone users of 905 brain case numbers and told us, which the article fails to explain, how that's 240% higher than the general population. But some other smart ass would tell you you could prove anything with such tiny numbers. Both of you might ignore everyone's advice and take a smoke break.
What would you like to know about ionizing radiation or radio biology? The general principals are not difficult, but as you noted are not related to microwaves. Everyone wants you to know the causes of cancer but here's the short and sweet:
except for the increase in cancers caused by smoking, and a remarkable decrease in stomach cancer, the incidence of the most common cancers for individuals of a given age has not changed very much during the course of the twentieth century figure
Cell phone, schmell phone. It might be true, but I'm not going to give up my cell phone.
If people quit smoking other relations would be easier to spot, so cut it out already! You are killing me.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
oh god. my poor brain. make the numbers stop.
'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'
Please use the !word to negate a tag.
While off-topic from the article perspective, I think this comment has some merit given that at the time of this comment, the tags for this article include 'gay', 'straight', 'bi'.
I suspect the 'straight' is to offset the 'gay' tag which appeared on all April 1 articles, and overflowed into April 2 articles. The system, I don't believe, knows that 'straight' is opposite of 'gay'. It does however know that '!gay' is opposite of 'gay', and will (likely) drop the tag that people vote against. Please use the '!word' tag to negate a word.
Just an FYI.
(don't mod me off-topic please. =] )
Isn't that a bit like saying
The American study is automatically suspect. I don't think the country that gave us Intelligent Design can be trusted with anything scientific. Ever.
I'm not even going to touch the German/Human Rights issue. Europe doesn't have its own PATRIOT act or Guantanamo yet, you know.
Exactly! Cell phones are transferring data so fast these days, you get all these bits flying around and smashing into your peptide bonds and shit like goddamn billiard balls... pretty soon you've got 1s and 0s mixed in with your As, Ts, Cs, and Gs and its all a just big fucking mess. Somebody stop the madness!
No it wouldn't. The incidence of brain tumours are so low that even a doubling in the risk would not pose a significant risk to the general population. There are far more severe health issues related to pollution that doesn't receive a fraction of this attention. Cell phones are new ( and hence scary ) which is why we get all this media attention and poor articles about their risks.
I read the PDF detailing the study and there are a couple of gaping holes in this whole thing.
First off, despite multiple studies done that prove no correlation between brain tumours and mobile phones this claims to have found something. Now I guess other factors may have come in to those other studies some bias etc. However, this article details an initial study that also showed _no_ connection. It was only after they altered the questionaires and retested people that they found something. Whats more, they then did no further alteration to the questions and simply ran with the same test only on a bigger scale.
There may be a detailed explanation of why that occured but with currently released information weve no idea how many times they were willing to alter the questions to get the answers they wanted, and no explanation of which questions were altered or why. What adds to the suspicion is the fact that the only reason the first test was thrown out was 'short latency' and 'low numbers' of people. Neither of which affect the questionaire.
So what we have is a group of people who rely on getting a result for there funding. (No differently to the previous studies.) After they got no real results from a first test, altered it in a way that appeared to have no bearing on that initial test. They then found they got results... Doesnt really inspire any confidence in there impartial testing.
Secondly, something others have pointed out already, asking a bunch of people with tumours when they started using mobile phones and then roughly getting rid of other factors that could have caused them based on a questionaire... Not a great method of working this out.
Whatever you thought of the study seen on the BBC site it raised a very good point about something that would cause a bias. 'reporting from brain tumour sufferers who knew what side of the head their tumours were on.' etc. This test doesnt even begin to try clamp down on these kinds of bias. Even if this test was entirely fair, the results are far from dramatic. With excessive use it shows only a relatively small increase in cases. With a potential for people to be increasingly suspicious of there mobiles the more they use them this could easily be put down to false assumptions.
As far as im concerned this study is severly flawed. The other studies are also flawed, to a degree, but until someone actually has decent evidence that these things are causing damage then its not going to stop the millions of people who use them. I certainly wouldnt say mobile phones are safe but there is still little to no evidence suggesting they harm us. (and arguably more evidence to suggest that they dont.) The presure is definately on those who have to prove a link.
You seem to think that this very small risk is something that can be overlooked. However, I could point a few million people who believe otherwise.
I think you see where I'm heading - while it's true that there are higher risks than the one mentioned here (or in the article), the whole point is that these are risks that we can easily avoid. And the increase in relative risk has nothing to do with the actual incidence of the disease in the studied population.
Incidentally, this "there are worse things to die of" argument was -and still is- used by a lot of smokers. Not that I would compare using cell phones to smoking (there is still too little data concerning the risks -or lack of them- associated with cellphones), but it is interesting to see how the human mind tends to follow certain patterns...
You could be right, but I suspect not. If -- and I emphasize if -- there is a problem, it seems more likely to be caused by the relatively high powered radiation from the cell phone antenna, not the probably relatively low powered leakage from the cell phone circuits. As far as I know, newer phones don't put much, if any, less power into their antennas than older phones. If they did, their range would probably be shorter which cell phone companies and cell phone users would regard as undesirable. It's true that the wiring in the cell phone could be emiting radiation at different frequencies than the RF link to the cell phone tower. But few people really think that we know of any danger from any radiation that is likely to be coming out of a cell phone -- whether intentional or accidental -- that is likely to be dangerous to users. That's why this study is possibly important. If cell phones can cause any physiological change -- whether rare tumors or increased sexual potency -- it is important to understand how. Who knows, if cell phone radiation can really affect physiology, cell phone users might be cooking the neurons in their brains. That might be a problem as it seems to me that an awful lot of cell phone users don't have all that much cranial capacity to spare.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Those aren't "brain tumors" - not the familiar cancerous growths. They're neural phone links our brains are growing to directly interface the phones. Rather than shielding radiation or moving phones away from our heads, we should be investing in more and faster growths. Because this development is the fastest way to move phones inside the head, where annoying ringtones and semversations don't bother bystanders.
--
make install -not war
If you read the study (and know anything about experimental design) you will see that the "results" aren't nearly so impressive as they claim. The short of it: they looked at a bunch of people who already had brain cancer, and then determined how many of them used a cell phone (roughly) an hour per day. I don't know about you, but most people I know use cell phones that often on average, and so it comes as no suprise to me that approx. 85% of the people in the study had high cell phone use. What this shows is ALMOST NOTHING because it doesn't compare what the rate of high cell phone use is among the general population. All it proves is that in a group of people who had brain cancer a lot of them used cell phones. In case it seems like I'm talking circularly, think of this analogous example: if I took a group of people with brain cancer and surveyed them we would probably find that a very high percentage of them (1) drink coffee every day (2) watch television every day (3) breath air every day, but you wouldn't immediately say "OMG, [Coffee, TV, Breathing] causes brain cancer!" Anyone who believed this story without at least reading a description of the study should stop breathing now so that they don't get cancer.
I will not argue that the CNet article represents this study very well, but if you are going to complain so casually about coverage of this study -- even calling it unethical -- it would help if some of your supporting arguments and complaints weren't so lousy.
You seem to have no notion of the differences between a retrospective case-contol study (which is what the researchers conducted) and a prospective clinical trial (where you could reasonably employ double-blind methods).
If you look past CNet and find the original article in the International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health you will see that the study included over 2000 control subjects.
It is possible to design lousy studies of any type. There are also reasons to be cautious in interepreting the results of retrospective studies, but particularly in the case of low-incidence disease, they are often the only way to start looking at risk factors -- give policy makers at least something to start working with. So, until you come up with 3 billion dollars and an ethical design for a perfect double-blind cell phone study, I would encourage you to be a bit more forgiving.
I will now retire to consider what a placebo cell phone would look like.
No, the argument applies equally well to public health. Better in fact. If the rate is so tiny then public health money and attention is FAR better spent on other areas.
For example, should we introduce new regulations on cell phones that force cell companies to build twice as many towers which will statistically save ten lives over the next twenty years or use the same amount of money to introduce subsidized prostate and breast cancer screening programs that will statistically save a thousand lives per year?
Public health is all about the economics. You put your money where it will do the most good. Not that any of these studies are actually conclusive enough to justify anything.