Posted on 02/17/2008 6:55:51 PM PST by blam
Heavy mobile phone use a cancer risk
By Lucy Cockcroft
Last Updated: 1:09am GMT 18/02/2008
People who use a mobile phone for hours a day are 50 per cent more likely to develop mouth cancer than those who do not talk on them at all, new research has shown.
The study also suggests that mobile users who live in rural areas may be at an increased risk of cancer because handsets need to emit more radiation to locate fewer antennas.
Studies in recent years have found no link between cancer and mobile phone use
Research author Dr. Siegal Sadetzki, a cancer specialist at Tel Aviv University, investigated the cases of nearly 500 people diagnosed with benign and malignant tumours of the salivary gland.
The study is regarded as significant as it was conducted on the Israeli population who were among the first to widely adopt mobile phone technology and are among its heaviest users.
Dr Sadetzki said: "Unlike people in other countries, Israelis were quick to adopt cell phone technology and have continued to be exceptionally heavy users.
"Therefore, the amount of exposure to radio frequency radiation found in this study has been higher than in previous cell phone studies. This unique population has given us an indication that cell phone use is associated with cancer."
In the study, the 500 patients were asked to detail their mobile phone use patterns in terms of how frequently they used one, and the average length of calls. Later they were compared to a sample of around 1,300 healthy subjects.
She found that those who had used the mobile phones against the side of their heads for many hours a day were 50 per cent more likely to develop a tumour of the paratoid gland compared to infrequent users.
The parotid gland is the largest human salivary gland and is located near the jaw and ear, where mobile phones are typically held.
In the study, published by the American Journal of Epidemiology, Dr Sadetzki speculated that the greatest effects will be found in heavy users and children over a period of time.
She also highlighted rural users as being slightly more at risk than those in cities, because there are fewer masts and the phones have to emit more radiation to ensure a clear connection.
However, many other studies in recent years have found no increased risk of cancer due to mobile phone use.
In September 2007 the U.K. Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research Programme found that "mobile phones have not been found to be associated with any biological or adverse health effects," although it noted that "the situation for longer term exposure is less clear."
Professor Lawrie Challis, Chairman of MTHR, said: "The results are so far re-assuring but there is still a need for more research, especially to check that no effects emerge from longer-term phone use from adults and from use by children."
Dr Sadetzki says the risks have been hard to prove, but believes this is mainly due to the long latency period involved in cancer development.
She says that anecdotal evidence has been substantial and the consistency of her study results support an association between mobile phone use and these tumours.
The report also outlines that the risks of mobile use can be diminished by using the speaker, hands free devices and limiting the number of calls made and hours spent on the phone.
Dr Sadetzki said: "While I think this technology is here to stay I believe precautions should be taken in order to diminish the exposure and lower the risk for health hazards. Some technology that we use today carries a risk. The question is not if we use it, but how we use it."
This REALLY should not be a surprise. Placing a radio transmitter next to your brain is likely to have an impact.
The only reason we have not seen this the more obviously is that cell phones have been rapidly decreasing in power as PCS and other technologies brought the transmitters phyically closer, lessening the need for output power in the phone itself. Also, frequencies have been going up dramatically from 800mhz into the gigahertz range. This, I’m sure has thrown off the stats on disease.
And Global Warming only increases one’s risk in getting cell phone cancer.
I think people who drive and yack on their cell phones for hours each day should be examined for colorectal cancer.
Use a hands free earplug.
swallowing saliva causes stomach cancer...but only when swallowed in small amounts over a long period of time <*/S off>
....another study in which the conclusion will be quietly retracted upon peer review......just like all the rest of them.
swallowing saliva causes stomach cancer...but only when swallowed in small amounts over a long period of time <*/S off>
********************
An tis is wah ah bread thru mah mouf, to are it drah. ;o)
Dare I hope...
When in doubt, the inverse square law is your friend.
Deny, deny, deny!
Before I get fired up about the increased risk, what is the usual incidence of mouth cancer by age group?
If the actual rate (among non-tobacco users) is tiny, even tripling it will be triple-tiny.
Or buy the most light-weight model you can find.
“Heavy mobile phone use a cancer risk
Dare I hope...”
Why?
I remember when color TV caused cancer.
RADAR RANGES caused cancer.
You get the drift ...
In which case you transfer the problem from your mouth/ear area to wherever you place the phone while talking.
Breast pocket of your shirt? (Heart)
Pants pocket? (Genitals)
I place the phone on a desk, table, or the car seat next to me, unless I'm walking, in which case it's in the outermost pocket of whatever clothing I'm wearing.
I personally don't know if there's a correlation, and I rather doubt it, but like jwalsh07 said:
When in doubt, the inverse square law is your friend.
What does the weight of the phone have to do with it?
Or did you mean "lowest powered model", which introduces other problems like it doesn't work well?
I think you’re more likely to kill yourself or others by talking on a cell phone while driving.
Mine is not very heavy so I guess I am OK.
Amen Brother!
LLS
Usually if I have a cell phone conversation that lasts more than a minute, I switch the cell phone over to speaker phone mode.
“I place the phone on a desk, table, or the car seat next to me, unless I’m walking, in which case it’s in the outermost pocket of whatever clothing I’m wearing.”
I duct-tape it to a broomstick and put it on speakerphone mode and hold it as far in front of me as possible.
bttt
In which case you transfer the problem from your mouth/ear area to wherever you place the phone while talking.
This common sense. Go into a basement and talk on you’re cell. Pretend it’s not entering you’re brain after penetrating all of that.
That's probably over-doing it. ;-)
1/(R^2) makes any distance more than a couple of inches unnecessary. You could use a 12-inch ruler, and that would be easier to carry around than the broomstick. /s
BTW, for short calls, or if I don't have my hands-free earpiece with me, I hold the phone against my head like a normal person. I just don't do that for longer calls (more than a few minutes). I don't know if it'll make any difference to cancer (I'm 56), but I do know that my lousy hearing makes it harder to listen to the phone speaker, compared to the earpiece.
Well, I was thinking of another area of the body, not an area of an inanimate object like a car. But yeah...
Has there been an increase in mouth cancers since cell phones became available?
Several years ago my one of my managers (who was in his early 40’s) contracted brain cancer right in the area where the cell phone would be on his head when he was on it (it was the 900 mhz type) and they had those phones glued to their heads essentially.
He survived the brain surgery and chemo, but when they go into a man like that, he will lose a measure of him coming out.
He was an ass to me, but I sorrow for him and his family, although I suspect the company has taken care of them as they should.
btt
Dare I hope...”
Why?
Because the way some people allow themselves to become slaves to the devices and endanger others in traffic I for one wouldn't miss them if they were distracted by a *real* event rather than the "where you at" or "I'm on my way to soccer practice" events that are soooo important now.
A day where my cell phone doesn’t ring is another day it doesn’t get flushed down the toilet.
Honestly, I *despise* telephones. We don’t have a landline in our new house — one of the best decisions we ever made (and appreciate during election cycles) — and just use cell phones. That said, I resent the *#(&$# thing. It’s convenient and I carry it for safety reasons. For the life of me, I don’t understand how a tech lover like myself loathes a little thing like a cell phone so much.
Geek going into MRI tunnel. "Can you hear me now?"
If your genetics is too weak to survive technology, then you are inferior, and the gene pool is better off without you.
Ping
So the moral of this story must be you shouldn’t go to your dentist and get x-rays (which are many more times powerful) than a cell phone. Of how about using your 5.8 gigahertz cordless phone at home? Again, many more times the dosage than a cell phone. Why single out cell phones? Get rid of TV’s, car radios, MRI’s, catscans, etc. You name it. Oh, and don’t get a sun tan with all that radiant energy being absorbed in your body. And if you get rid of electro-magnetic energy altogether then there will be no magnetism and you can float out into outer space (which is where this study on cell phones belongs).
If this were true people with pacemakers should have insanely high cancer rates as they have a radiation source right next to their heart and lungs. Also all the wires in our homes and cars give off detecable amounts of radiation so this too should cause cancer.
Means little in a study like this.
Put another way, if .5 percent of the control population would come down with the condition it would only require one more patient in the study group for the risk to be "50% greater".
Not really.. You've conflated a lot of different things here that are not equivalent.
First, ionizing radiation (such as from radioactive isotopic material) is completely different from electromagnetic radiation (such as from wires or antennas). So your reference to "radiation" in pacemakers, which I presume refers to the early models which had isotopic power supplies, doesn't say anything relevant about cell phones, whose antenna put out electromagnetic waves. But modern pacemakers use batteries, not radioactive material, so that's irrelevant completely.
Second, the amount of electromagnetic energy radiated by the wiring in house wiring or cars, that gets to your body, is miniscule compared to that radiated by a cell phone, because the cell phone is held next to your head. So unless you spent hours every day with your head pressed tightly against the circuit-breaker box in your house, or up on a power pole hugging the power lines, there's no comparison.
Third, the frequency of the electromagnetic energy is important because different frequencies have different effects on living tissue. So the 60Hz AC power in your house, and the DC and impulse energy in your car, are completely different from the GHz-range frequencies of cell phones (like literally a billion times -- 8 or 9 orders of magnitude).
Finally, I said earlier I don't know, and frankly doubt, that cell phones used in normal amounts cause cancer. Used abnormally (like non-stop all day long) the effects might be noticeable, as in this study. But I don't think it's something most of us have to worry much about. I take reasonable precautions for the same reason I wear a seatbelt in a car -- although probably nothing will go wrong, the effect if something does go wrong could be pretty awful, so it's worth a small amount of care.
THANKS MUCH.
However, folks will not likely change.
Too many are into doing WHATEVER THE BLAZES they want to do at the moment and hang the consequences tomorrow.
Probably most will die from war, disease or famine before the cancers hit anyway. But were our life to go on as it has for so many decades . . . the numbers of current youth who’d end up with brain tumors is . . . incredibly awesomely horrid. Some kids younger than 10 or 12 have the things glued to their ears hours a day.
However, I see the scoffers have weighed in rapidly.
Wow, definitely investing in the tin-foil futures today.
IMHO, Correlation does not imply causation.
Thanks, blam. I appreciate your thoughtfulness on this issue.
Folks ought to be aware—particularly musicians, pastors, conference presenters . . .
the cordless mikes put out a lot of RF from the belt unit all the way up to the mike—typically zapping the spine and kidneys etc with destructive RF concentrations. I don’t have a link to a study but one was mentioned on C2C. A number of rock musicians have had to take to wearing sheilded undergarments on stage.
Especially those paid for by the phone companies . . .
oh, yeah, which has been most of them.
BTW, exalted expert . . . a question . . .
the—what are they called—blue tooth or some such cordless ear pieces . . . what’s the relative hazard from them compared to the phone itself at the ear?
“Especially those paid for by the phone companies . . .
oh, yeah, which has been most of them.”
You think phone companies pay for studies that try to link cellphone use to cancer?
All the phone companies say is that they meet gov’t standards for RF exposure. What else can they say?
Oh, and in a fliptop phone, is the antenna in the flip top or the bottom half?
Thx in adv.
And, there are some convincing claims I’ve read along the way [no, no current links off the top of my head and I’m not interested in Dogpiling.com for it]
. . .
which indicate that keeping house wiring, clock radios, night lights 3’ or more from one’s pillow at night is wise.
So, are you a typical naysaying
TYPE II ERROR addict?
Impressive.
Of course correlation does not equal causation.
Neither does it DISPROVE causation.
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