Cell Phone Dangers are Real

NewsMax.com
Tuesday, May 1, 2001

You do risk cancer from gabbing away on your cell phone despite media reports and reassuring government statements that say there is no demonstrated danger in using the omnipresent devices.

So says Dr. George Carlo, an epidemiologist who headed a research program funded by the cellular phone industry, and co-author with journalist Martin Schram of "Cell Phones: Invisible Hazards in the Wireless Age."

Writing in USA Today, Carlo reveals that media coverage of three epidemiological studies this winter produced mainly reassuring headlines saying the studies showed no link between cell phones and cancer missed some very important points.

"If journalists had paused to consider what the new studies were really saying – and not saying – we'd have a more realistic but less reassuring picture," Carlo wrote in describing the studies, two from the U.S. and a third done in Denmark.

The studies, which were not laboratory experiments but "statistical analyses of people who used cell phones and people who had brain tumors." The analysis, he wrote, had flaws.

· The U.S. studies, which looked at the period between the early and mid-1990s, dealt with minimal cell phone use – with people who spent an average of 2.5 hours or less a month. Moreover, most owners had used cell phones for less than three years. Today, Carlo notes, millions use their cell phones for 20 hours or more a month and have been doing so for many years.

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) study in the New England Journal of Medicine responsibly noted, ''The most important limitation of our study is its limited precision for assessing the risks after a potential induction period of more than several years or among people with very high levels of daily or cumulative use.''

· The studies were small and looked at the wrong type of brain tumors. "Tumors in almost all patients were located in interior regions of the skull that couldn't be reached by cell phone radiation, which penetrates only two inches inside adult skulls," he notes, adding that there is scant comfort in proving the obvious fact that such tumors could not be caused by cell phone use.

· The NCI study of 782 brain-cancer patients published in the New England Journal of Medicine admitted that ''a much larger sample would be required'' to properly detect cell phone radiation risks. The other U.S. study, of just 469 brain cancer patients, failed to mention its own size limitation when published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

· That study also shrugged off what Carlo described as "its most chilling finding" – the doubling of cancer risk in 35 patients in a small subgroup who had neureopithelial tumors, which are near the sides of the head, close to a cell phone antenna.

Overall, the studies failed to refute the alarming findings of lab experiments that appear to link cell phones to cancer by showing that human blood cells exposed to cell phone radiation suffered genetic damage, damage cancer experts consider to be a diagnostic marker of ''high risk'' for developing tumors.

"Will people who begin using cell phones as children or teens be high risks for developing brain cancer in their 40s or 50s?" Carlo asks, saying that no studies have answered that question and it will take as long as 20 years before long-term epidemiological studies can either give us truly comforting assurance or flag real danger.

Schram and Carlo recommend that until the final results are in, cell phone users should take such simple precautions as using a headset in such a way as to keep the radiation-emitting antenna away from their heads.

People should also, Carlo warns in USA Today, "read the fine print of any new studies that come in."

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