Consumers have been left confused by the latest study on the links between mobile phone use and brain cancer. Eifion Rees reports on the struggle to find answers
Sleek, stylish and indispensable are all words mobile phone companies would like consumers to associate with their devices. At the very bottom of the list is ‘cancer’.
But a new review of scientific evidence by a World Health Organization (WHO) body has reopened debate on the issue, just a year after another report appeared to have put it to bed.
The review, carried out by 31 international scientists from the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), led to the radiofrequency electromagnetic fields emitted by mobile phones being declared ‘possibly carcinogenic’.
The reclassification contradicts the findings of a 10-year investigation into links between mobile phones and cancer, published in 2010. The Interphone study of 13,000 people found no causal link between mobile phone use and four types of brain tumour, including glioma (although its authors conceded their findings were necessarily ‘biased’ and ‘limited’, depending as they did on participants recollections of their mobile use over time).
But nor is the new IARC report emphatic: evidence was ‘limited’ for the link with two specific brain cancers – glioma and acoustic neuroma – and ‘inadequate’ for all other cancers. The ‘possibly carcinogenic’ classification (group 2b) puts mobile phones into the same catch-all bracket as coffee, dry cleaning chemicals, chloroform and DDT.
Industry downplays
Unsurprisingly the mobile phone industry has been downplaying the IARC findings.
‘[This] does not mean cell phones cause cancer,’ said John Walls of the Wireless Association (CTIA). ‘Under IARC rules, limited evidence from statistical studies can be found even though bias and other data flaws may be the basis for the results.’
‘The IARC classification suggests that a hazard is possible but not likely,’ said Dr Jack Rowley of the mobile communication association GSMA, speaking for most of the major mobile companies. ‘This comprehensive scientific review identified some suggestive evidence in the human studies but no consistent support from animal and cell studies.’
He added that present safety standards remained valid and said the IARC report ‘should be understood as indicating the need for further research’ over a long period of time.
Sony Ericsson said the IARC had found mobiles were ‘neither a definite nor a probable cause’ of cancer, and said the results were consistent with the vast majority of research showing ‘no conclusive evidence’ of a cancer connection.
Nokia said all its products comply with international exposure guidelines and limits set by public health authorities, and pointed out that the IARC’s conclusions – that mobile phone radiation was ‘[not] definitely nor even probably carcinogenic to humans’ – were based on limited evidence.
Mobile phones pass 5 billion mark
So who can consumers trust? The importance of establishing the facts once and for all is cast into stark relief by the sheer weight of numbers involved: a study by Ericsson in July estimated that the number of mobile devices globally will top 50 billion by 2020. The 720 million mobile phone subscriptions there were in 2000 has swollen over a decade to 5 billion.
A 250,000-strong cohort study is already underway in Europe. Conducted by Imperial College London in the UK, 68,000 people have signed up since COSMOS launched last year; their mobile phone use and health will be monitored for 20-30 years, with initial results published in 2015. The research has been endorsed as a priority by global agencies including the WHO, Department of Health (DoH) and the EU’s Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks.
source: theecologist.org
Cancer Claims
