Swedish Study Finds Cell Phone Cancer Risk 282
dtjohnson writes "A new Swedish
study has
found that heavy users of cell phones had a 240 percent increase in
brain tumors on the side of their head that the phone was used
on. The study defined 'heavy' use as more than 2,000 total hours,
or approximately one hour of use per workday for 10 years. An
earlier British
study was previously discussed
here that didn't find an increased risk, although that study
covered fewer subjects and only followed one type of brain tumor for a
shorter period of time. Or course, the biggest epidemiological
study of all is the one we are all participating in whenever we use our
cell phone. The results from that study won't be available for a
while."
link to the actual study (PDF) (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.arbetslivsinstitutet.se/pdf/060331Mild
Sarcasm makes a poor argument, try reason and fact (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, I'm a physicists and I resemble your comment.
You could do better. You might have something if you point to the known link between cancer and chronic irritation and then prove cellphones irritate nerve tissue. There should also be a rise in auditory canal and skin cancer of the ear at that rate, not to mention head and neck cancers. Hell, you might even score some points if you cited the 85 heavy cell phone users of 905 brain case numbers and told us, which the article fails to explain, how that's 240% higher than the general population. But some other smart ass would tell you you could prove anything with such tiny numbers. Both of you might ignore everyone's advice and take a smoke break.
What would you like to know about ionizing radiation [wikipedia.org] or radio biology [wikipedia.org]? The general principals are not difficult, but as you noted are not related to microwaves. Everyone wants you to know the causes of cancer [nih.gov] but here's the short and sweet:
except for the increase in cancers caused by smoking, and a remarkable decrease in stomach cancer, the incidence of the most common cancers for individuals of a given age has not changed very much during the course of the twentieth century figure [nih.gov]
Cell phone, schmell phone. It might be true, but I'm not going to give up my cell phone.
If people quit smoking other relations would be easier to spot, so cut it out already! You are killing me.
Tagging comments (Score:2, Informative)
While off-topic from the article perspective, I think this comment has some merit given that at the time of this comment, the tags for this article include 'gay', 'straight', 'bi'.
I suspect the 'straight' is to offset the 'gay' tag which appeared on all April 1 articles, and overflowed into April 2 articles. The system, I don't believe, knows that 'straight' is opposite of 'gay'. It does however know that '!gay' is opposite of 'gay', and will (likely) drop the tag that people vote against. Please use the '!word' tag to negate a word.
Just an FYI.
(don't mod me off-topic please. =] )
Re:Assumptions (Score:5, Informative)
The penetration depth of EM waves is roughly of the size of wavelength. Hence, the infrared radiation from a fire doesn't even penetrate the human skin (the heat will eventually transmit deeper via molecular vibrations but that is a slower mechanicsm and we have evolved a biological warning system via pain sensation), while the RF radiation from the cell phones (or similarly the microwave ovens), which is several orders of magnitudes longer, penetrates and is absorbed by entire brain. Since the presence of RF emitter near brain is a very recent occurence on evolutionary time scales, we don't have a built in biological warning for the damage it does. The whole generation of current teenagers will be going senile in their thirties.
Re:Assumptions (Score:3, Informative)