‘More Dangerous Than Smoking’
May 16th, 2008 at 9:43 pm by Susie
Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded. He says people should avoid using them wherever possible and that governments and the mobile phone industry must take “immediate steps” to reduce exposure to their radiation.
It draws on growing evidence – exclusively reported in the IoS in October – that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. Cancers take at least a decade to develop, invalidating official safety assurances based on earlier studies which included few, if any, people who had used the phones for that long.
[...] Earlier this year, the French government warned against the use of mobile phones, especially by children. Germany also advises its people to minimize handset use, and the European Environment Agency has called for exposures to be reduced.
Professor Khurana – a top neurosurgeon who has received 14 awards over the past 16 years, has published more than three dozen scientific papers – reviewed more than 100 studies on the effects of mobile phones. He has put the results on a brain surgery website, and a paper based on the research is currently being peer-reviewed for publication in a scientific journal.
Noting that malignant brain tumours represent “a life-ending diagnosis”, he adds: “We are currently experiencing a reactively unchecked and dangerous situation.” He fears that “unless the industry and governments take immediate and decisive steps”, the incidence of malignant brain tumours and associated death rate will be observed to rise globally within a decade from now, by which time it may be far too late to intervene medically.
Does this include my cordless phone at home? It doesn’t pick up from or transmit to such great distances. And I hardly use it anyway.
You might want to hunt up the good Dr’s site and look carefully at his citations, both for and against a link. What I noticed was that he is much more accepting of anything that supports his hypothesis and critical to the point of abandoning standard criteria when dealing with evidence contrary to his view.
For example,he is dismissive of the standard, normally applied, of statistical significance when a researcher found no statistically significant linkage between phone usage and tumors. On the other hand, a peripheral finding that would normally only be reason for further study is highlighted. He cites the maximum allowable energy input but does not list the actual energy being experienced. Further, total energy in Watts/kg would seem a measure better suited to whole body radiation exposure than to measuring the degree of ionization and/or DNA damage.
The site also uses bold face for emphasis and includes parenthetical comments, usually negative, about contrary findings. Without actually looking at the research, you don’t know if the issue was addressed and why or why not in the study. Although there are a large number of citations, most are from what could be considered second tier journals. In other words, there are plenty of citations from” Bioenergetics” but few from Nature, Science, JAMA, Lancet, etc. All in all, it reads much more like a political blog than anything else.
It might prove informative for you to actually look at the works cited. If your background is not in physics/biology etc, it may be heavy sledding. Not to say the research is wrong, but I am ever mindful of Linus Pauling. brilliant - his work on the chemical bond earned him a Nobel Prize but he was way off on his work in biological molecules, Vitamin C and the common cold in particular.