Mobiles and cancer: the plot thickens
You might as well ask to buy condoms in the Vatican as ask a mobile phone
salesman for a low radiation mobile phone handset, says Geoffrey Lean.
By Geoffrey Lean
Published: 7:15PM BST 11 Sep 2009
Evidence is increasing that radiation from handsets presents a cancer hazard
If you want to know what it must have been like to be the central character in
a Bateman cartoon, stroll into a mobile phone shop and ask - as I do from
time to time - for a low-radiation handset.
"Sales executives" who can discourse for hours on WAP and GPRS, on megapixel
cameras and MP3 players, on vibration alerts and polyphonic tones are struck
speechless. They have no information, they are likely to tell you, and don't
know where to get it. And, if you are really unlucky, you will be lectured
by some pimply post-pubescent - as I once was - on how absurd you are being,
because there is no risk.
You might as well ask how you can join a foxhunt in Islington or buy condoms
in the Vatican. But in fact what you want to know should be the most
important thing about the phone you will press to your ear. Evidence is
increasing that radiation from handsets presents a cancer hazard,
particularly to children and to those who use their phones for more than a
decade.
On Monday, some of this data will be presented at a US Senate hearing. Later
this month, a long-awaited 13-nation study should be published. The official
European Environment Agency (EEA) is sounding a discreet alarm. And the
French government is so concerned that it is developing measures to ban the
devices from primary schools, stop their promotion to children under 12, and
prevent them being sold without a headset to heavily reduce radiation
exposure.
Early studies found no sign of cancer - causing blanket reassurances from
ministers and the industry. But they were largely irrelevant, because few,
if any, of the people they examined had been using the phones for as much as
a decade, and cancers normally take at least 10 years to develop.
More recent studies - especially in Sweden, where mobile phones took off early
- have included such "long-term" users. They have found, on average, that
they are about twice as likely to get malignant gliomas - an incurable brain
cancer - on the side of the head where they held the handset. As the latency
period for cancers is usually 20 to 30 years, this may indicate a much
bigger toll to come.
Worse, more Swedish research - limited, but believed to be the only work on
the effects on children and teenagers - found that people who started using
the phones before the age of 20 were five times more likely to contract the
cancers, and eight times more prone to get them on the appropriate side of
the head.
If these studies are right, we could be in a lot of trouble. There are more
than two billion mobile phones in use worldwide. In Britain - where there
are now nearly two per person - at least 90 per cent of 16-year-olds have
their own handsets, as do more than 40 per cent of primary pupils. Prof
David Carpenter, dean of the school of Public Health at the State University
of New York, predicts an "epidemic of brain cancers" among today's children
as they grow up.
Ministers, however, have done little to implement measures to reduce exposures
recommended nine years ago by an official inquiry headed by Sir William
Stewart, a former government chief scientist. Like others, they have been
waiting for the results of a massive $30 million, 13-nation study being
carried out by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
Largely financed by the industry, the study has been hotly criticised for
features that would seem to underestimate the risk, such as including few
long-term users and excluding children and young adults. Even so, some of
the research has found increased cancer, and publication of the study has
been held up for years while the scientists have argued about how it should
be interpreted. Now, after pressure from the EEA and others, a version is
finally to see the light of day.
Mobile phones have brought huge benefits, not least in improving safety by
keeping parents and children in touch and alerting emergency and security
services to accidents. It would make no sense to ban them, even if it were
possible. But radiation levels can be brought down fairly easily: they
already vary about eightfold between handsets.
Another simple measure - proposed by Stewart, and now being seriously examined
in San Francisco - would be to display the radiation level of each phone
prominently. Then people could chose whether to buy a low radiation one or
not - and I could stop making a nuisance of myself in shops.
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