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Cell Phone Use Study Sees Increased Cancer Risk
Dotnaught writes "Frequent cell phone users face a 50% greater risk of developing tumors in the salivary glands than those who don't use cell phones, according to a recently published study. The study, led by Tel Aviv University epidemiologist Dr. Siegal Sadetzki, appeared last December in the American Journal of Epidemiology 'Sadetzki's findings are sure to add to confusion surrounding the already contentious debate about the health effects of cell phone radiation. Many other studies in recent years have found no increased risk of cancer due to mobile phone use, but a few have stopped short of ruling the possibility out and a few have said increased risk of cancer is small but real.'. Even with the increased risk, however, you're still about three times more likely to die in a car crash in a given year."
Good, their constant chattering gets on my nerves!
I will have a sig when the market demands it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
One sees these duelling studies, some for, some against cellular phone usage,
and one can't help but recall the Steven Wright joke about getting a humidifier
and a de-humidifier for Christmas. So he put them in one room and let them
fight it out.
Maybe there could be some kind of academic cage match between the two camps,
wherein they have to explain their research publicly, and get to critique the
methodology of the opposing camp.
The match ends when intellectual honesty compels one camp to admit that their
work is an absolut waste of human time, at which point enter John Cleese to issue
a Wensleydale.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Maybe its because they are talking all the time, drying out their mount and their salivary glands are stress to compensate.
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
Bluetooth handsets ftw?
I love my cell phone, but every time it powers on I has the startup phrase: "Cancer Machine ON".
So what? Chocolate makes you fat, Tobacco gives you cancer, Death and Taxes are inevitable. Until humans live forever and are tax-exempt, at least they DO have a choice on the others.
Cell phones cause cancer?
Sounds like another one of those liberal lies... Like global warming.
So what if my cell phone melted to my neck goiter while I was using it outdoors in the middle of January? It's totally coincidental.
It doesn't matter whether the results of this study are valid or not. I can't stop using my mobile phone, as I work for a web startup I need to be constantly available if there is a site problem and having my mobile close by, always (even in my bed), is something that is 100% essential.
In addition, I would basically be saying goodbye to my social life (what little I have of one after work) if I stopped using a mobile phone.
Therefore, I hope this study is wrong. If it isn't I hope that mobile manufacturers can somehow make next gen phones slightly safer, if possible.
It's quite simple actually. Most of the positive studies are either funded by wireless companies or are watered down for fear of litigation.
"Three times more likely to die in a car crash"? That's not reassuring. Given how many people die in crashes each year, that would make cell-phone-induced tongue cancer one of the more significant causes of death.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
I'm skeptical about these statistics: 500 tumour patients and 1300 control subjects can't really support a probability of 0.003% and 0.0045% for each outcome, can they? I reckon that these numbers are less likely than the false-positive error for their data set.
Particularly if you are talking on your cell phone at the time.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I'm three times more likely to die in a car accident than of cell phone radiation? Good gracious, I'm never driving again!
It seems to me that both findings of the study (more tumors and even more tumors in people in rural areas) could be due to simply talking a lot. More talking means more salivation to keep the mouth from drying out, and it is possible that heavy use of the salivary glands could lead to cancer. In rural areas, one would expect the effect to be magnified because people there are more isolated, and so even less likely to talk a lot except when using a cell phone. It's possible that the study accounted for differences in time spent talking, but neither article makes that clear.
Based on that data, a 50% increase would raise one's theoretical high-end risk of developing a tumor in the head from 0.003% per year to 0.0045% per year.
This translates into an effectively zero risk. The risk is so low that an individual couldn't really justify spending any time or money trying to lower it further.
We've got to learn that even though our advancing technology allows us to measure smaller and smaller risk, that doesn't mean that "something has to be done!" for every risk we can measure.
From the article:
Does this simply mean we should use handsfree headsets or hold the phone away from our heads?
I happen to hold mine in front and use the loudspeaker but that's purely because I'm deaf in one ear and don't like not being able to hear anything else that's going on.
A thistle is a fat salad for an ass's mouth...
The more contentions something is, meaning there's no real clear evidence one way or the other, then the more it's much ado about nothing. You are free to use a cell all you want - there's no conclusive hard evidence it causes cancer. You are free to believe it will melt your brain if used for more than 5 minutes and rigorously avoid it. You can take one side or another in the argument and waste a lot of time and energy promoting an arbitrary view. Or you can just ignore the whole tempest-in-a-teapot and get on with more important things in life.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Everyone knows that it is the bloated sense of self-importance that these cell phone yammerers suffer that causes cancer.
Post a Slashdot story when one of these studies is actually reproduced.
Otherwise you might as well cut and paste the same "yes they cause cancer/no they don't" stories on an alternating basis every six months.
is this TERRORIST.
You're not three times more likely to be killed in a car crash if using a cell phone makes you four times more likely to be in that car crash in the first place. Any probability wiz care to run with this?
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
These people just talk too damn much. Was a time when people enjoyed silent activities like reading - now they're constantly needing to communicate.
Grrr.
Get off my lawn.
And shut up.
For example, if you've got a laptop sitting in your lap you're pretty much exposing yourself to relatively high levels of microwave radiation in the 2.4GHz band. Even cordless phones now are up there.
We're all going to die because of wireless freedom.
Right?
Claiming cell phones have zero impact on cancer rates is illogical. It must raise the risk. By how much is the real question.
Their is a ton of money in the cell industry, kinda like cigarettes. Just like cigarettes, it will probably take us another 30 or 40 years to prove it when 500,000 deaths a years are attributed to cell phone use.
History is so fuckin cyclical sometimes...
From You've Got A Lot To See, performed by Brian Griffin:
Our flashy cell phones make people mumble,
"Gee whiz- look how important he is, his life must rule!"
You'll get a tumor, but on your surgery day
The doc will see it and say, "Wow, you must really be cool!"
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Who needs salivary glands when we have beer?
** scratches head **
Without those glands a lot more beer will need to flow. What's bad about that?
How to Download YouTube Videos
1 (obvious) Talk on the cell phone less frequently.
2 (best) Place your cell phone on your belt, and use a headset. Remember, the energy waves' strength falls off rapidly with distance; having the cell phone even a short distance away from your head reduces exposure significantly.
- Demosthenes
cynicsreport.com
I don't have access to the main journal article, so it's possible the answer is in there, but there are potentially a lot of variables in 'cell phone' use. The article kind of hints at that in the following:
I would be curious if anyone has done a larger break-down of the 'risk' seen in this study, to find out if users were using older analogue phones, or newer digital, spread-spectrum phones (which, I believe, typically run at much lower power levels). What frequencies do the phones run at? (It might be, I dunno, that different mobile phone networks around the world use different frequencies, and there might be a correlation to specific frequencies used and an increase in cancer). I would also be curious to see if anyone is able to repeat this finding in other populations outside of Israel? Maybe the increased risk is really something in the air or water? Hard to say sometimes. . .
Honestly though, if it were me, and I were living in Israel, I think there are risks I'd be more worried about than my cell phone. . . like Hezbollah missiles, Palestinian suicide bombers, another war erupting with the neighboring countries, etc. . .
I got a new cellphone last year, its a nextel motorola i836 and was slimmer then my previous model (i760? big blue one), so i usually carried in in my right front pant pocket. I did this daily (well M-F) all day long, and often in the evenings. About 4 weeks ago, my right thigh directly under where I kept my phone, started getting nerve twitches, and it felt like the phone was ringing (on vibrate), about 10-15 x daily. Most of the time, Id pull it out and there was no call. I moved it back to my belt, on the clip, about a week ago, and within a few days the strange nerve twitchings went away.
I do notice the phone has a lot of leaky radiation, when i set on my desk, my desk landline starts cacklin, often right before I receive a call, or tm.
#include bier;
Cell phones do not produce ionizing radiation, nor do they contain any matter that does.
Therefore, the sun is approximately infinitely more likely to cause cancer than a cell phone.
Non-ionizing radiation (which is all that cell phones produce) has little to no impact on the human body. See for example, light bulbs, radios, radio stations, TV stations, microwaves, ovens, the earth's magnetic field, refrigerator magnets, CB radios, MRI machines, CAT scanners, PET scanners, CD players, MP3 players, computers, monitors, TVs, cell phones, watches, motors.
The worst a cell phone can do to your body via radiation, is make you a few nano-joules more energetic. Unless of course you installed a nuclear power source in your phone for some reason. Your freaking smoke detectors are more likely to cause cancer than your cell phone.
Question everything
"...Even with the increased risk, however, you're still about three times more likely to die in a car crash in a given year."
Look at the odds of being killed by a terrorist...Yet how much are we spending, how many rights are being trampled, and what other things are being ignored to address that 'serious concern'.
I just had a tumor removed from that region and I spend a ton of time on cell phone meetings.
So... maybe nothing but.... kinda a big... "huh".
Driving are reducing the time available for the cancer to metastasize before a fatal car crash - skewing the results.
0x7279727972797279
Admittedly, I'm only on my phone for a few minutes a day, and am not too concerned. But air-tube headsets have been promoted for years as a safer alternative.
IANA engineer, but the principle of having sound travel through an air tube instead of wires (thus keeping the electronics further away from your head) seems like there's little down side (other than clarity - which I can't speak to because I haven't used one.)
You stereotypers are all the same...
Nevermind that according to the googles, it has an occurance rate of .9 in 100,000. That means that about 2000 people a year get it in the entire US population, roughly. The mortality rate is an even smaller piece of that pie.
Please help metamoderate.
Put the phone down and drive, please.
This is just stupid. First, I'm extremely skeptical of the statistical significance of the study. A probability increase on the order of one or two per 100,000, based on a sample size of around a thousand? That translates to just a few people in the sample, which gives a very high statistical uncertainty (roughly sqrt(N) for a Poisson distribution). You see this in the 95% confidence level intervals quoted in the abstract, which are 1.1 to 2.2.
The other missing piece, which studies like this seem to consistently underestimate, is the systematic uncertainty. This comes from a couple factors, for example, the use of marker variables for the amount of exposure. But more importantly, there's a tendency -- for lack of a better expression -- to keep looking until you find something. To oversimplify, if you look at 20 possible results (e.g. brain cancer, parotid gland tumors, lymphoma, etc.), and find a correlation that is 95% likely to be real and not a statistical fluctuation, you publish and the world (and slashdot) takes notice. After all, it's 95% likely (from a statistical point of view) to be real. But you've looked at 20 different things! 95% equals 1 in 20, so it should not be surprising that you find something that is 95% likely to be something other than a statistical fluctuation. Statistical fluctuations on the order of 5% (or 3%, or 0.1%) really do happen, and if you look hard enough, you're guaranteed to find them.
We saw the same thing with power lines and cancer. Huge amounts of money were spent doing epidemiological studies, which all concluded that we see emerging evidence of some ill effects and that (surprise!) more studies are needed. In fact, there was nothing there -- they were all the type of statistical fluctuations described above.
In both cases (power lines and cell phones), the radiation is non-ionizing, and so it can't break DNA strands or directly cause any chemical changes. This makes it a priori unlikely that there's any link. It's still possible, of course, but to paraphrase Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. To me, this study hardly qualifies.
At the bottom of the
I read a similar study if not the same one. If I recall, one of the main reasons for the increased distraction is there is a need to always fill all silences in phone conversations handsfree or not. Think about it, how often is there a large pause in a phone conversation? Never basically. Normal conversation with a present person is less taxing on us socially, and thus less distracting.
I suppose that more lives are saved by cell phones then are killed by salavatory gland cancer.
Since your about three times more likely to die in a car crash in a given year, while talking on your cell while driving. This will reduce the time any cancer can start and develop when your dead. Being dead will also reduce cell phone use.
Everyone gets those "Phantom Vibrations", but try again - they're just muscle memory. [citation: http://jscms.jrn.columbia.edu/cns/2005-05-03/orso-phantomvibes ]
The interference with speakers is caused by...wait for it... radio waves.
Those things that are engulfing all of us, all the time, in varying intensities. Naturally produced or not.
Just because you do not understand the world around you, doesn't mean you must be fearful of it.
I'm not interested in "does this double the risk."
I am interested in how it affects my overall health risk and life expectancy.
If using a cell phone an hour a day decreases my expected lifespan by 1 day and increases my expected lifetime medical bills by $1000, big deal.
If it decreases my expected lifespan by 5 years and increases my expected lifetime medical bills by $500,000 then that's a big deal.
If it decreases my expected lifespan by 25 years and increases my expected lifetime medical bills by $5,000,000 then that's a very big deal.
Let's compare some risks:
Cell phone use: very little risk.
Smoking a pack a day for 20 years: high risk, probably several years chopped off of your life
Being a "flying ace" in the German Air Force in WWI: Very high risk, reducing your life expectancy from decades to months.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Maybe it's not the radiation from the cell phone, but maybe the fact that they talk more causes their mouth to dry out and the salivary glands to work too hard.
So why one would think it's the phone but not the incessant yapping that's contributing to the cancer?
It doesn't really matter if a cellphone is giving off radiation anyway, simply because it's such a low dose. In perspective we are constantly bombarded with radiation from the numerous radio towers in every city. Where I live there are 30+ stations each pumping out a signal at untold amounts of power 24/7. Then there is this little thing called the SUN! This thing has been blasting us with every type of radiation we can think of. Sitting in front of your computer is far more hazardous to your health than talking on your cell phone. Then again I'm using a some logic and common sense which doesn't seem to apply to scientific studies anymore.
"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.... WELCOME TO THE MAIN EVENT!
In this corner, with combined revenue of over 220 billion.....CELL PHONE MANUFACTURERS! In the other corner, already salivating like half-starved rabid dogs, PERSONAL INJURY LAWYERS!
"LETS GET READY TO RRRUUUMMMBLLLE!
(CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!)
(sounds of lawyers shuffling papers and shouting as lawyers demand settlements)
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
The researchers are fishing. They investigate if there is an increased risk based on different parameters. All these investigation are done with a confidence level of 95%, ie. one out of twenty results may show an increased risk without there being one, just because of statistical fluctuations. As they are investigating about 140 different parameters, there is an expectation of finding 7 "false" instances of increased risk. They found 6...
(And no, medical doctors, even researchers, are not very good at statistical theory. Quite the opposite. The same goes for the reviewers of certain journals.)
So I guess this will kill Motorola's plans to come out with their line of gamma ray cellphones.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Comparing the probability to car accidents does not really give you a feeling of what it means. It may be better to say something like "N people would need to completely stop using cellular phones to prevent a single death".
Anyone has an idea what N might be?
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I don't want to bash AT&T Cingular, but if you get an incoming call and your phone is next to a normal speaker that is off, the speaker will make sounds because of the power of the signal. My Verizon phone doesn't make the speaker make noises, so I think it has less energy. More energy is essentially more chances for cancer. The studies of people living under power lines draws that conclusion.
God spoke to me.
There is even further silliness that goes on. It could be that people who have cell phones are more likely to drink coffee with saccharine which causes an elevated risk of cancer (I am not saying that is true). What they see is a correlation. It is an interesting correlation, but I would suggest taking it with a grain of salt. There are all sorts of correlations you can find that mask the true underlying cause. I mean hell, for a simple non-PC correlation that will make people's head spin, correlate skin color in the US with education, crime, and income. If you buy that correlation you will end up believing that some how melanin (skin pigment) vastly elevates your chances of becoming a low paid, poorly education, criminal. Correlations just show that two trend move together, not that the trends have anything to do with each other. So, being black might mean that you have an elevated likelihood of being impoverished or sent to jail, but it certainly isn't that pigment causing those things. It is far more likely the fact that you are more likely to have been born in a shitty neighborhood where people get poor wages, poor education, and there is an elevated level of crime.
The same holds for cell phones. People with cell phones might be more likely to get cancer then those without, but it might be that people with cell phones are more likely to perform some behavior that is more likely to give them cancer. You can try and control for these factors, but well, you can only control for the factors that you know exist. If the common link between cell phones and cancer is that cell phone users are more likely to buy sushi, and sushi gives you cancer, the available data won't tell you.
I am not saying that cell phones certainly don't give you elevated chances of cancer, I am just saying that you shouldn't assume that they do because someone found a correlation. If you let your life be ruled by correlations you will quickly go made and likely be no better off for it.
Someone pass me the Copenhagen tin....so I can get cancer on the other side of my head and balance it all out.
Seriously. We should stop doing cell phone use studies if they increase the risk of cancer.
Trial Lawyers are just salivating; waiting for the one report that claims the link between the non-ionizing (i.e. it can't cause cancer) radiation from cell phones and cancer is conclusive.
Studies can generate statistics to say whatever they want. The fact remains that radiation from cell phones does not have enough energy to mess up your DNA, no matter how much the Trial Lawyers wish it did.
The problem with statistical studies is that they study statistics, not facts. Statistical studies can conveniently ignore variables that detract from the findings the researchers wish to support. For example, in the study where they try to link salivary gland cancer with cell phones, did they look at other variables that could cause it? Probably not. Did they look at ALL of the possible causes? Definitely not.
Cell phones don't cause cellular damage, and that is all there is to it. The frequency is not high enough. The E-field strength is not high enough. I would be willing to bet that there is a stronger correlation between the parotid tumors and chemicals leeching out of the plastics and rubber in the cell phone through the skin on that side of the face. I doubt they considered that, either.
I'm skeptical about these statistics: 500 tumour patients and 1300 control subjects can't really support a probability of 0.003% and 0.0045% for each outcome, can they?
...if you're willing to accept any degree of confidence.
That's the beauty of statistics. These numbers can support any outcome you want...
They could poll one million people. They still can't guarantee talking on a cell phone will be 10X MORE DEADLY (yes backwards) than car crashes. However, the probability of it being worse is very very very very very small with such a large dataset.
Yes but to be fair there is a difference between a 2.45Ghz microwave oven amplitude at 500W (if we use the classical wave point of view) and a small wifi transmitter around the same frequency at only 2W. Not as much energy is being transmitted from the cell phone so the term "microwave" can be misleading to someone automatically associating it with an oven and the inherent dangers.
Question: How far and how long would stand from an operating microwave oven (facing you with its door open) so that your gonads don't get damaged? Would you feel safe for 1 second exposure at 10 feet?
I agree, the power levels in Wifi are very small. But for some, this will go hours/day for decades... Anyway, the heat and pressure from the laptop are probably worse than the Wifi...
Everybody tries to focus on the electromagnetic radiation that the cell phones emit, but unless they warm the temperature of tissues more than the natural variation in body temperature would, or there is some microstructure in the cell that is particularly sensitive to cm radiation (again, something objectively measurable), then there is no mechanism. What is more likely is that there is some chemical that the cell phones slowly release which causes the effect if there's any effect at all. I mean, there have to be plenty of candidate carcinogens that are used only at "safe" levels in there - dioxins in the plastics, lead in the solder (until recently), maybe even the lithium from the batteries.
And no, the "move the phone to the belt" method wouldn't tell you much of anything about the difference between the two models because concentration of a diffusing chemical also drops rapidly with distance.
I keep mine in my pocket and use a blue tooth... aw shit...
Absolutely. But then again, this is only a study regarding tumors of the salivary glands. What this and other studies DO show is that it is factually incorrect to say there can be NO effect. Often the Slashdot crowd brings up comments like, "There's no ionizing radiation!" or "impossible!", when a steady stream of studies of various forms keep showing effects. Taken in isolation, each study shows a small effect which appears to not be sufficient to do drastic things like attempting to remove all the cell phones from the world.
What they DO show, is that there ARE biological implications and impacts of cell phones and other wireless devices, and that these are occurring through non-ionizing mechanisms which are not fully understood. The solution is therefore not to make radical changes to cell phones yet, but instead, to study this much more intently. The correct approach is also to stuff a cork in the blind skepticism about the impossibility of these effects. It is more scientific to attempt to understand than to attempt to ignore. When we pursue this matter fully, we will know quite a bit more about the effects of these wavelength ranges on biological tissue and organisms than we currently do, and this is definitely worth doing with an open mind. It could lead to novel therapies, and it could lead to insights about which wavelength and protocol choices are safest. Even with JUST consideration of salivary glands, (0.0045-0.003%) * 6 billion would be 90,000 lives. If you could save a mere 90,000 lives a year by a patch which changes a protocol, or a simple infrastructure change to another wavelength, then you'd be a fool not to do it.
Sun burns and skin cancer aren't a result of the ionizing radiation properties of UV. In fact UV isn't energetic enough to be called ionizing radiation in tissue, it merely drives energetic photochemical reactions. The damage mechanisms are very different than that from ionizing radiation such as x-rays, gammas, and high energy particles. So while x-rays can give you a skin burn you're never going to see an x-ray tan. Melanin production, tanning, is triggered by the photochemical reactions that UV photons power, not ionization events.
Correlation does not prove causation. And with such small deviations, it's hard to believe that any results are outside the margin of error of the experiment.
You know... I know just enough to know that I don't know much.
I wrote a letter to Santa Claus when I was 12. I did so JUST IN CASE. Hedging my bets so to speak.
I feel the same way about Cellphones, Radiation, and Cancer. Who the heck really knows anything definitively yet.
So I don't use my cellphone next to my face at all. I usually keep it 3 feet away from on my desk in a charger and use a small bluetooth headset to make and receive calls. When I am done with the bluetooth, I usually take it off and put it down on my desk, or stick it in my shirt. Then at least it is not near by brain. My mother had emergency brain surgery to remove a tumor the size of baseball. Some seriously scary shit. I would much rather have some skin cancer than that shit all day long. She ended up making a *miraculous* recovery though. The doctors told me that she might not be the same person and would have to go through a year or two of physical rehabilitation. She proved them all wrong. She was discharged 72 HOURS after surgery and I swear that unless you knew it happened, you could not tell anything a week later. If only we could all be that lucky, since she was the exception, not the rule.
In the end, we can only mitigate our risks with rational educated guesses when confronted with something as nebulous as cellphone radiation. That's it.
"Far more non-ionizing radiation reaches the surface of the earth than ionizing radiation."
So how much of that non-ionizing radiation reaches your salivary glands?
Given the fact that there is no established mechanism whereby nonionizing radiation can damage DNA, not to mention the potential for bias (differential recall bias--people with tumors who are seeking a cause may be more motivated to remember cell phone use than healthy people--is mentioned but dismissed by the authors) as well as the problem of multiple comparisions, I'd have to see a p value considerably lower than 0.03 to take this seriously.
"than those who don't use cell phones" . . . And how many Americans really never use cell phones? I see folks who can't afford an automobile or other things in life who have a cell phone. It is more important than cable in many cases. As to "I happen to hold mine in front and use the loudspeaker but that's purely because I'm deaf in one ear and don't like not being able to hear anything else that's going on." I am sure everyone around you loves it when you get a phone call. :) Do I see a Jitterbug in your future? (sorry, couldn't resist).
:)
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