| Your Cell Phone Won’t Kill You (Directly Anyway) |
| Monday, 28 February 2011 21:46 | |
 Everywhere, February 2011 — While it’s hard to believe, Cell phones have only been in widespread use for a couple of decades, which is far too short a time for anyone to determine conclusively whether or not using them could cause cancer. Research to date appears to indicate that we have little if anything to worry about.
According to the federally funded National Cancer Institute, the low-frequency electromagnetic radiation that cell phones give off when we hold them next to our heads is “non-ionizing,” meaning it cannot cause significant human tissue heating or body temperature increases that could lead to direct damage to cellular DNA. By contrast, regular X-rays consist of high-frequency ionizing electromagnetic radiation and can lead to the kind of cellular damage that can result in cancer. Nonetheless, some cell phone users and researchers still worry about our cell phone usage, given how much we now use them and how little we know about their potential long-term effects. The reason this keeps coming up is that some initial studies in Europe, where cell phone usage caught on a decade before the U.S., showed links between some forms of tumors and heavy cell phone usage. As a result, researchers teamed up to do a more definitive study, called the “Interphone” study, in 13 countries between 2000 and 2004. The results, published in May 2010 in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Epidemiology, indicated no increased risk of developing two of the most common types of brain tumors, glioma and meningioma, from typical everyday cell phone usage. Researchers looking to get past the relatively short timing window and the recall bias issues of the Interphone study launched one of a longer term, given the moniker COSMOS (for Cohort Study on Mobile Communications), in Europe. Some 250,000 cell phone users between the ages of 18 and 69 and located in Britain, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark would participate by allowing researchers to track their cell phone usage and health over three decades. According to an April 22, 2010 article in Reuters, over the next 30 years the study will factor in the use of hands-free devices and how people carry their phones and will also be on the lookout for links to neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In the meantime, if you’re not sure, there are precautions you can take to minimize any risk, real or imagined. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) suggests using your cell for only short conversations, or when a conventional or landline isn’t available. Another step would be to use a hands-free device, which puts more distance between you and any invisible and potentially harmful rays that might exist. SOURCE: National Cancer Institute, COSMOS study, FCC.
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