Here we go again.“Confused about mobile phones and base stations risks to your health?” I wrote in July 2000, in my Sunday Times column “Sacrificial lambs to Midas”. Well, uncertainty still reigns on the subject. Over a decade later we are still getting experts telling us of “possible risks” to our and our children’s health.
My column in 2000 had followed the news that Dr George Carlo head of the Washington-based Wireless Technology Research (WTR) had publicised his concerns on health risks posed by mobile phones. He had upset the goldmine trail by throwing caution to the wind and admitting that even the experts are confused.
This was the same year that the Stewart Report was released. After a call for clarification by Professor Liam Donaldson, then the UK’s Chief Medical Officer (he retired last year), the independent expert group on mobile phones chaired by Sir William Stewart had advised that “individuals might choose to use phones for as short as time as possible, use phones with low specific energy absorption rate (SAR), use hands free kits and other devices provided they have been proved to reduce SAR.”
Professor Donaldson had also asked the group to be clearer about what age children should be discouraged from using mobile phones for other than essential calls? “Children under 16 years of age should be discouraged from using mobile phones.
“They are likely to be more vulnerable to any unrecognised health risks than adults...the developing nervous system is likely to be more vulnerable to potentially hazardous agents because of their thinner skulls and higher tissue conductivity children may absorb more energy than adults if there are detrimental health risks caused by mobile phone signals,” said the expert group.
The report had concluded that it was “not possible at present to say that exposure to RF radiation, even at levels below national guidelines, is totally without potential adverse health effects and the gaps in knowledge are sufficient to justify a precautionary approach.”
But that advice had not been given much weight by either the mobile phone industry or governments. The mobile phone industry continued to grow and grow and antennas were mushrooming.
Then in March 2008, we got another warning call. A study, by award-winning cancer expert Dr Vini Khurana, warned that using handsets for 10 years or more could double the risk of brain cancer. Khurana warned of a huge rise in tumours and called on industry to take immediate steps to reduce radiation.
The Mobile Operators Association dismissed brain expert Khurana's study as "a selective discussion of scientific literature by one individual". It then said it believed his study "reaches opposite conclusions to the WHO and more than 30 other independent expert scientific reviews".
Yet, in that year 80% of (WHO acknowledged) studies on people living in the vicinity of mobile phone base-stations, showed a significantly increased risk of neurological diseases, impaired well being and cancer.
I happen to live very close to a huge mast and have been increasingly suffering from vertigo, so I am just wondering whether the masts close to my bedroom are the cause.
Research in Austria showed that: People living near mobile phone masts reported more symptoms of fatigue, irritability, headaches, nausea, loss of memory, visual disorder, dizziness and cardiovascular problems the higher their level of microwave exposure.
In Egypt: Residents living beneath and opposite a long-established mobile phone mast in Egypt
reported significantly higher occurrences of headaches, memory changes, dizziness, tremors, depressive symptoms and sleep disturbance than a control group.
In Israel: A four-fold increase in the incidence of cancer among residents living within a 300m radius
of a mobile phone mast for between three and seven years was detected.
In Germany: A three-fold increase in the incidence of malignant tumours was found after five years exposure in people living within 400m radius of a mobile phone mast.
In France: 530 people living near mobile phone masts reported more symptoms of headache, sleep disturbance, discomfort, irritability, depression, memory loss and concentration problems the closer they lived to the mast.
Then why had WHO claimed that there was “no evidence” of health impact from mobile phone base-stations?
Earlier that year, the French government warned against the use of mobile phones, especially by children. Germany also advised its people to minimise handset use, and the European Environment Agency had called for exposures to be reduced.
Dr Khurana had repeated the warning that people should avoid using mobile phones whenever possible.
"We are currently experiencing a reactively unchecked and dangerous situation... "There is a significant and increasing body of evidence for a link between mobile phone usage and certain brain tumours".
He believed this will be "definitively proven" in the next decade and said 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.
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, said the top neurosurgeon who had received 14 awards for his work by that time.
Yet, did anyone listen? Even the users and parents still did not seem to take the warnings seriously. Of course the industry’s counter advertising, proclaiming safety, together with some doctors who backed the industry’s claim worked.
Now, in 2011, the alarm bells are off again. But guess what? The experts are still not giving out clear messages and are still only managing to confuse us. I read last week that the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) told a press conference, "After reviewing all the evidence available, the IARC working group classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans.”
“Possibly carcinogenic”? After all these years of research the experts still have not come to a conclusive assessment. "We reached this conclusion based on a review of human evidence showing increased risk of glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer, in association with wireless phone use," said panel chairman Jonathan Samet, MD, chair of preventive medicine at the USC Keck School of Medicine.
Although “human evidence showing increased risk of glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer”, the IARC didn't make recommendations to consumers, but Kurt Straif, MD, PhD, MPH, head of the IARC Monographs Program said that there are precautions people can take.
"Some of the highest exposures come from using mobile phones for voice calls. If you text, or use hands-free devices, you lower exposure by at least [10-fold]," Straif said at the news conference. "So this is left to consumers to consider whether this level of evidence is enough for them to take such precautions." Apparently, just like the smoking warnings, some people just don’t seem to care.
This ‘advice’ was echoed by Otis W. Brawley, MD, chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, who noting in a press release that the IARC was a highly credible group, said “People who are worried can reduce their risk. On the other hand, if someone is of the opinion that the absence of strong scientific evidence on the harms of cell phone use is reassuring, they may take different actions, and it would be hard to criticise that."
What are these people playing at? The question is should we be worried or not? When is it likely that “strong scientific evidence” will surface? And as my title in 2000 suggested it was, and is, the risk to children that should concern us most.
And how can there still be an “absence of strong scientific evidence”? In the late 1990s, the IARC developed a multinational case-control study, INTERPHONE, to address strong public concerns about cell phone safety.
The goal of the study was to investigate whether the radiofrequency radiation emitted by cell phones is carcinogenic. Thirteen countries participated in the project (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the UK).
The study ran from 2000 to 2006, cost 30 million U.S. dollars (Economist 2008) and involved 14,078 study participants. among them 2,765 glioma, 2,425 meningioma, 1,121 acoustic neurinoma, 109 malignant parotid gland tumour cases and 7,658 controls.
And they still can’t make their minds up? At the end of last month the World Health Organisation decided that “Cell phone use may cause cancer”. So what’s new? It now “groups cell phones in the same hazard category as chloroform, lead, and engine exhaust.”
“May cause cancer”, why all this hedging? “There is not enough long-term data to link cancer and cell phone use directly, reported a group of 31 scientists from 14 countries. But there is enough information to issue an alert.
But we have been getting “alerts” since 2000. However, it now seems that some action is going to be taken. The Council of Europe is calling for a ban
on the use of mobile phones and Wi-Fi technology in all schools in its 47 member states.
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