Mobile phone users warned of brain cancer risk
Dr Ronald Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, said his warning to thousands of members of staff was based on early, unpublished data, about the possible risk of brain cancer.
Children should only use mobiles in emergencies and adults should try to keep the phone away from their head, he said in an internal memo.
“We shouldn’t wait for a definitive study to come out, but err on the side of being safe rather than sorry later,” he said.
“I am convinced that there are sufficient data to warrant issuing an advisory to share some precautionary advice on cell phone use.”
He added that there was a “growing body of literature” which linked long-term mobile phone use with adverse health effects, including cancer.
But no major academic study has found evidence that exposure to mobile phone signals affects brain function and the US Food and Drug Administration has said, if there is a risk, it is probably very small.
Last September, British experts found mobile phones do not cause health problems if used for up to 10 years but a long-term cancer risk could not be ruled out.
Researchers with the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research programme found a “very slight hint” of increased incidences of brain tumours among longer-term users.
That data was “at the borderline of statistical significance” but needed to be investigated further, they said.
The impact of mobile phone use on children was also unknown and must be investigated further, the scientists said.
A six-year research programme found no links between mobile phone use and brain cancer nor evidence of brain function being affected by mobile phone signals.
But cancer symptoms are rarely detectable until at least a decade after a cancer-producing event so it is too early to “say for certain” whether long-term mobile phone use could be dangerous, according to the MTHR report.
The issue that concerns some scientists is electromagnetic radiation, especially its possible effects on children.
A 2008 University of Utah analysis looked at nine studies — including some Herberman cites — with thousands of brain tumour patients and concludes “we found no overall increased risk of brain tumours among cellular phone users. The potential elevated risk of brain tumours after long-term cellular phone use awaits confirmation by future studies.”
Studies last year in France and Norway concluded the same thing.
The largest published study, which appeared in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in 2006, tracked 420,000 Danish mobile phone users, including thousands that had used the phones for more than 10 years. It found no increased risk of cancer among those using mobile phones.
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