"Does Cell Phone Radiation Cause Cancer?"
When it comes to the potential human health effects
of cell phone use, sure if you text excessively you might end up
with a crick in your neck, or even a broken neck
for you or someone you hit if you do it while driving.
On the other hand, think of the countless lives
that have been saved on the road because people are now able
to so quickly phone in emergencies.
But what about cancer?
Since the turn of the century, there've been studies
suggesting up to a doubling of brain tumor risk with long-term
cell phone use on the side of your head where you use it to talk.
That's important since the radiation only really penetrates
a few inches into your head.
Looking from the back of someone's head or from the top,
you can see why you might develop cancer
on the one side of the head over the other.
Since it's such a local effect, you can see why there
are recommendations for, like,
using the speaker function or using a hand-free headset,
which can reduce brain exposure by a factor of 100 or more,
and this includes Bluetooth headsets.
This may be particularly important in children who have thinner skulls.
Yeah, but cell phone radiation isn't like nuclear radiation;
it doesn't damage DNA directly,
like gamma rays from an atomic bomb or something.
Ah, but it does appear to be able to damage DNA indirectly
by generating free radicals.
Out of a 100 studies that looked at that, 93 confirmed
these oxidative effects of the kind of low-intensity
radiofrequency radiation that comes out of cell phones.
OK, but does that oxidative stress translate out into DNA damage?
Most studies found it did, finding signs of genotoxicity,
damage to our genes, our DNA, or chromosomes.
Yeah, but a lot of those studies were in a Petri dish or lab animals.
I'm less interested in whether Mickey or Minnie's at risk.
What about brain tumors in people?
Yes, some population studies found increased cancer risk,
other studies did not.
Hmm, I wonder if the source of funding of those studies
had anything to do with it?
Some of the studies were funded by cell phone companies.
Researchers suspected that studies would be less likely
to show an effect if they were funded
by the telecommunications industry, which has the obvious
vested interest in portraying the use of cell phones as safe.
So they ran the numbers- and surprise, surprise-
found that the studies funded exclusively by the industry
were indeed substantially less likely to report significant effects.
Most of the independently funded studies showed an effect.
Most of the industry- funded studies did not;
in fact, had about 10 times fewer odds
of finding an adverse effect from cell phone use.
That's even worse than the drug industry!
Studies sponsored by Big Pharma about their own products
only had about 4 times the odds of favoring the drug
compared to independent researcher, though
Big Tobacco still reigns supreme when it comes to Big Bias.
Why do research articles on the health effects
of second hand smoke reach different conclusions?
Well, turns out studies funded by the tobacco industry
had a whopping 88 times the odds of concluding it was not harmful;
so, 10 or so times for telecom puts it more towards
the drug industry end of the bias spectrum.
There's conflicts of interest on both sides of the debate though,
if not financial, then at least intellectual,
where it's human nature to be biased towards evidence
that supports your personal position.
And so you'll see flimsy science like this,
published where there appears to be a "disturbingly" straight line
between the states with the most brain tumors
and the states with the most cell phone subscriptions.
But come on, one could think of lots of reasons
why states like New York and Texas might have
more brain tumors and cells phones than the Dakotas
that have nothing to do with cell phone radiation.
Sometimes, you might even see outright fraud,
with allegations that academic researchers that authored
two of those genotoxicity papers-and this very review-
were involved in scientific misconduct, which they deny,
pointing out that their lead accuser turned out to be a lawyer
working for the telecom industry, and on and on.
Whenever there's a trillion- dollar industry involved,
whether it's the food industry or the tobacco industry,
the drug industry or the telecom industry, there's so much money
involved that the science can get manipulated.
Take the nuclear energy industry.
Decades of high-level, institutional cover ups
as to the health consequences of Chernobyl, for example,
with the official estimates of resulting health problems
a hundred or even a thousand times lower
than estimates from independent researchers.
Was it just 4,000 who would eventually die from it,
or nearly a million people?
It depends on who you ask,
and who happens to be funding whoever you're asking.
That's why when it comes to cancer, all eyes turn to the IARC,
the official World Health Organization body
that independently and objectively tries to determine
what is and is not carcinogenic.
We'll find out what they concluded about cell phones, next.