A couple of weeks ago the World Health Organisation “announced that radio-frequency electromagnetic fields generated by mobiles are ‘possibly carcinogenic to humans’”, prompting a fair bit of this kind of thing:
Kent Brockman: “So, professor: would you say it’s time for everyone to panic?”
Professor: “Yes I would, Kent.”
Fortunately for those of us who hate being without our phones and also hate getting incurable brain tumours that bring on a horrible premature death, the phone/cancer thing doesn’t really seem to be true:
”In May 2010, following a landmark, decade-long study undertaken by teams in 13 countries, the IARC reported that no adverse health effects could be associated with the use of mobile phones. Indeed, the group went so far as to highlight the biggest risk to mobile-phone users as being, not brain cancer, but road-traffic injuries caused by talking while driving. As for the heating effects of radio waves, the increase in temperature of the skin caused by holding a mobile phone close to the ear was found to be an order of magnitude less than that caused by being exposed to direct sunlight.
The Group 2B classification the IARC has now adopted for mobile phones refers to “possible”, not “probable” (Group 2A) nor “proven” (Group 1), carcinogens—and ranks the mobile phone’s health risk alongside the chance of getting cancer from coffee, petrol fumes and surgical implants such as stents and false teeth. In other words, pretty small and, even if such effects were ever detected, nothing to get hysterical about.”
And another one for good measure:
A number of points can help put the perplexing anxiety about the potentially dire consequences of using a cellphone in perspective. First, brain tumors are extremely rare, and their incidence has changed little in most advanced industrial countries over the past two decades. In Scandinavia, which has excellent registration of all cancer cases and where cellphone use was widespread early on, there is no evidence of an increase in different types of brain tumor.
Second, cellphone technology makes use of radio frequency energy, which is millions of times less powerful than ionizing radiation, such as X-rays and gamma rays that can damage DNA and other molecules in a cell and potentially initiate cancer. There is no known mechanism whereby radio frequency energy can induce or promote cancer.
Now that that’s settled, can we all please move on and find some other perfectly safe thing to panic about?
oindge
