Cell Phones Can Cause Brain Tumor, says WHO StudyA report by two leaders of the World Health Organization’s Interphone study, the largest research study to date on cell phone risks, was published online in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine on January 27. The authors warn that people should be careful in how they use cell phones now while additional research is carried out by WHO and others, according to Devra Davis, PhD, MPH, founder of Environmental Health Trust, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating individuals, health professionals and communities about controllable environmental health risks and policy changes needed to reduce those risks.
The study’s authors, who are not representing official WHO policy—Elisabeth Cardis, PhD of Barcelona’s Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology, and Siegal Sadetzki, MD, MPH of Tel-Aviv’s Gertner Institute for Epidemiology and Health Policy—make a number of key observations.
For example, write Cardis and Sadetzki, most research on cell phone radiation studied people who used their phones for a few hours a month for less than five years. In the WHO Interphone study, which started in 2000 and ended in 2004, the average user had about 100 hours of cell phone use in their lifetime, with between 2 and 2.5 hours per month. Those who were at the top 10 percent of cumulative call time (1,640 hours or more), if spread over 10 years, corresponded to only about 27 minutes of phone use per day, and had a 50 percent or greater risk of developing malignant brain tumors on the same side of the head where they held their phones.
The authors claim that it is not possible to evaluate the magnitude and direction of the different possible biases on the Interphone study results and to estimate the net effect of cell phones on the risk of brain tumors. In fact, they agree with others—such as the authors of the report Cell Phones and Brain Tumors: 15 Reasons for Concern, Science, Spin and the Truth Behind Interphone, issued in 2009 by the International EMF Collaborative—that the overall direction of research to date is worrisome.
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