Mobile phones do not carry cancer risk

A recent study indicates that mobile phones do not increase the risk of developing brain tumour. After a four-year survey, scientists from the Institute of Cancer Research in London found no raised risk of glioma associated with regular mobile phone use and no association with time since first use, lifetime years of use, cumulative hours of use, or number of calls. The results were consistent with the findings of most studies done in the United States and Europe. During the past two decades, the use of mobile phones has risen rapidly worldwide but there has been no hard evidence to substantiate fears that the technology causes health problems ranging from headaches to brain tumours. More than 4,000 new cases of brain tumors in Britain and about 20,000 in the United States are diagnosed each year. Last year, Swedish scientists had stated that mobile phones could pose a higher health risk to people living in rural areas because they emit more intense signals in the countryside. But the researchers did not find any increased health threats for rural dwellers. Earlier mobile phones used analog signals, which emitted higher power signals than the later digital models. If there were health dangers from mobiles phones, they would be more likely to result from the earlier models but the scientists found no evidence of it. They questioned 966 people with glioma brain tumors and 1,716 healthy volunteers about how long they had used mobile phones, the make and model, how many calls they made and how long the calls lasted. Scientists from the Universities of Leeds, Manchester and Nottingham said that among cancer sufferers, the tumors were likely to be reported on the side of the head used with a mobile phone. But it could be due to over-reporting of patients. People have a tendency to remember and/or embellish or falsely remember those things that they think might be relevant. There is a lack of convincing and consistent evidence of any effect of exposure to radiofrequency fields on the risk of cancer.