Cell Phone Radiation 'Possibly Carcinogenic,' Experts Say

A group of experts from the World Health Organization has classified the radiation emitted from cell phones as a possible cancer-causing agent, concluding that cell phones could be associated with an increased risk for glioma, a type of brain tumor.

The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) convened a group of 31 scientists from 14 countries to look at the health risks associated with radiofrequency electromagnetic fields. They spent a week in Lyon, France, reviewing hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific studies on the issue.

"The evidence, while still accumulating, is strong enough to support a conclusion and the 2B classification," Dr. Jonathan Samet, a University of Southern California scientist who chaired the working group, said in a statement.

The IARC classifies carcinogenic agents according to different degrees, from "carcinogenic to humans" to "probably not carcinogenic." Group 2B -- the group that will now include radiofrequency electromagnetic fields -- is defined as "possibly carcinogenic to humans." It also contains lead, DDT, engine exhaust, and chloroform, among other substances.

Dr. Samet explained that the classification means that there could be some risk -- a risk that warrants continued study. The IARC group did not quantify the radiation risk of cell phone use, but did consider a study that showed the highest risk of brain tumors among the heaviest users.

"Given the potential consequences for public health on this classification and fidings, it is important that additional research be conducted into the long-term, heavy use of mobile phones," IARC Director Christopher Wild said.

Until then, measures should be taken to reduce exposure, including use of hands-free devices or texting, Wild added. Many cell phone manufacturers put out safety manuals that encourage users to keep the devices several millimeters from their body.

We went to the street to gauge people's reactions to the new findings. Here's what they had to say:

Comments

[Eileenalana]

01:03 AM on 06/08/2011

Back in the early 1990s, I worked at a MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) facility with very experienced co-workers (Interventional Radiology Techs, RNs and Radiologists), who literally curtailed their use of cell phones based on the type and specific LOCATION of the tumors they were beginning to see on Brain MRI imaging. Apparently, it was thought to be very rare for this type of tumor to show up above the EAR or even in and around the male beltline (where Men often attached their cell phones). At that time, I recall reading everything I could possibly find on the subject and absolutley NO research had been conducted in the US. Most likely because the Communications Industry was pretty much headquartered here in the US and any form of brain tumor research associated with cell phone use would prohibilt profits.

Of interest, at that time, there was one (1) research study performed and financed by a small country in Europe that was used in a highly publicized US lawsuit case brought forth by a physician to support his claim that his brain tumor (cancer) was caused by his consistent cell phone use. Unfortunately, the physician eventually lost his legal battle and, soon thereafter, his own life. Sadly, and NOT surprisingly, the physician’s legal opposition included testimony from the Entire US Communications Industry. Strangely enough, sometime AFTER the lawsuit, the Communications Industry began changing the locaition of the cell phone antenna which was eventually placed further away from the brain.

Eileen, RN

[jackhole]

11:11 PM on 06/05/2011

test

[palindrom]

09:56 PM on 06/02/2011

I don't like cell phones much, and I think they can be dangerous because of the way they put their users on autopilot, but there are good reasons to think that they don't cause cancer. An excellent take on this by a cancer scientist is here:

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/06/the_bride_of_the_son_of_the_revenge_of_c.php

[darkmark]

11:32 AM on 06/02/2011

for years there were articles in magazines like JARMA about second had smoke being a possible cause of cancer. always stating that the evidence was not in. what they were really saying was they didn't want to take on the cigarette companies in the lawsuits a statement like "there is no doubt that second hand cigarette smoke causes cancer." lawsuits and politics kept that information from coming out for decades. not just government politics but corporate and university politics. corporations because they don't attack their friends. universities because they don't attack their alumni or their donators. simple isn't it money, it clouds the truth.

[cable1977]

04:35 PM on 06/02/2011

Nice conspiracy theory, but one really cannot extrapolate from the case of second hand smoke to cellphones. One huge difference is that cigarette smoke itself is acknowledged to be a significant carcinogen whereas radiation emitted by a cellphone is not known to be a carcinogen such as cigarette smoke.

In fact, the risk increase of getting lung cancer for smokers vs. non-smokers is approximately 10-15 fold (1000-1500%). By contrast, at worst (and based on very poorly derived usage information), the estimated risk for the highest users of cellphones is an ~40% increase. Therefore, it is, at least, significantly biologically plausible and even likely to expect that second hand smoke could cause cancer, whereas the biological plausibility for cellphone radiation to cause cancer is far less concrete. There is also a significant amount of data that fails to find any correlation between cellphone use and brain cancer of any kind.

[darkmark]

05:53 PM on 06/02/2011

and 20 years ago the statements on second hand smoke were "possibly, maybe, needs more studying." i wrote a paper on it for an english class but being me i wrote absolutely, no doubt considering all the studies made on second hand smoke's proven track record for causing cancer. i've already stated why it was absolutely at the time, politics and fear made it maybe, more studying needs to be made. my last job was in networking, routers and switches. wireless was just getting strong when i left and questions were made about its possible health problems due to high frequency transmission. but wireless emissions were and i believe still very low compared to cell phones and cell phones are held directly against a persons head. there have been other studies in other countries that go so far as to declare cell phones a serious threat to health. of course europe and sweden comes to mind.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091111121251.htm
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jul2002/cell-j11.shtml

[Edan Aharony]

09:34 PM on 06/01/2011

Leave it to the cell phone lobbyists to come up with a research in a few months that says Cell phone radiation is actually helpful for our brains and that in a research conducted on 2 year olds for a couple of months they found that the researched group was able to compute vectors. Edan Aharony

[emily tripp]

05:02 AM on 06/02/2011

Funny stuff. :)

[Soc Law]

05:04 PM on 06/01/2011

All of the studies about cell phone use increasingly seem to be linking radiation from cell phone to brain tumors. Cellphone use has increased worldwide and will continue as cellphones become more a part of mainstream life, with more services, apps, etc. Having even a small amount of microwave radiation close to your brain, I think, requires more study and research to determine the possible effect of brain tumors from cellphone radiation.
Get more information here: http://www.cellphoneradiationbraintumors.com/

[elizabeth lerer]

04:07 PM on 06/01/2011

The scariest thing about cell phones is the damage it causes to wallets.
They may not be an effective birth control device, but a cell phone can come in handy in the back of a police car.
Teach your kids how to text while handcuffed.

[Dr Debrup Chatterjee]

04:02 PM on 06/01/2011

This is a known issue and is nothing to worry about .. the research is still not conclusive - ... http://bit.ly/iN9g0u

[InspiredByTruth]

11:52 PM on 06/01/2011

Actually it is something very real to worry about. When you exclude the studies funded by the mobile wireless industry the conclusions trend decisively on cellphones posing a credible carcinogenic risk.
snip
Lai’s frustration with the increasing body of contradictory research led him to do an analysis in 2006 of the available studies on cell phone radiation between 1990 and 2006, and where their funding came from. What he found was that 50 percent of the 326 studies showed a biological effect from radio-frequency radiation and 50 percent did not. But when he filtered the studies into two stacks—those funded by the wireless industry and those funded independently—Lai discovered industry-funded studies were 30 percent likely to find an effect, as opposed to 70 percent of the independent studies.
http://www.seattlemag.com/article/nerd-report/nerd-report

[Dr Debrup Chatterjee]

02:20 AM on 06/02/2011

http://bit.ly/iN9g0u --ts is why we must not fear much .but take little intelligent steps as cell is very essential for all of us .

[NotEve]

01:45 PM on 06/01/2011

The primary cause of harm from cell phones are accidents caused by distracted talkers.

Its much more important to understand what this classification is NOT saying:

Its not saying that cell phones cause cancer, its not saying that cell phones might cause cancer - what it IS saying is that they cannot rule out that cell phones cause cancer.

Accompanying cell phones on this same list are pickles, coffee, and being a carpenter - and its a very long list.

The primary type of cancer they're talking about is a brain cancer called a glioma. If you're worried about cell phones then you should consider how ubiquitous cell phone use is worldwide and that incidence rates of glioma have basically remained steady.

Furthermore, there's no real hypothesis on what the mechanism could be. The "radiation" emitted by cell phones are radio waves and do not have sufficient energy to break bonds in a DNA molecules or proteins.

So don't freak out just yet. Let them do the research. When its time to freak out you can guarantee the media won't let you down.

[emily tripp]

07:45 AM on 06/02/2011

While I agree with the gist of what you're saying, I do take issue with your contention that this article is "not saying that cell phones MIGHT cause cancer." I believe that not only is that exactly what the article is saying, but this is in fact the main point of the article: that there is merely possibilty, and nothing more.

That is actually what annoys me about this article: this sense that they (the media? the WHO?) (no, not the band) are arousing a concern about something which, by and large, they cannot substantiate. Every article covering IARC's recent pronouncement - including this one, one by Reuters, another by MSNBC, by CNN,... - is full of "possible" and "may" and "could be" and "some" risk, and, finally, "we need to do more research."

They might as well be saying, "Be worried....but not really."

[emily tripp]

07:46 AM on 06/02/2011

My favorite part of this article is the quote, "The IARC group...did consider a study that showed the highest risk of brain tumors among the heaviest users." What this article fails to mention, however, is what I gleaned from an MSNBC article: that this particular study is clouded in controversy due to the fact that it began with people who already had cancer and asked them to recall how much they used their cell phones MORE THAN a DECADE AGO. !!! Can you remember "how much" you used your cell phone 10 years ago? Or anything, for that matter: watched tv, rode your bike, had cereal for breakfast? That would be like studying a group of people with high cholesterol by asking them how many eggs they ate 10 years ago.

And yet apparently this is the study on which some advocacy groups are basing their concerns, because it showed a "hint" of a "possible" connection between "very" heavy cell phone use and glioma - which is itself a rare form of tumor at that (according to MSNBC). In essence, the radiation "might" be the cause of something that actually hardly ever happens.

Much ado about nothing, I say... at least for the time being....

[cable1977]

10:01 AM on 06/02/2011

The problem with what you decide in known as recall bias. It is an especially confounding factor in studies like this. If you have a brain tumor and someone comes to you and says we are doing a study to determine if cell phones caused your brain tumor and then ask how much a person used a phone, you have now biased that person to think that their cell phone may have caused their cancer. That is going to strongly bias the results of any answer that you would get about phone usage potentially making them likely to overestimate their actual usage.

A better study would be actually using phone records to determine usage rather than recall.

[SaddleBum]

01:32 PM on 06/01/2011

you hold something pressed against your ear that is powerful enough to emit a signal 10 miles away to a cell tower.

nahh, that couldn't be dangerous.

lol

[kitsmom1990]

01:04 PM on 06/01/2011

Speaking as someone who has spent her entire professional life as a science researcher, these kinds of "studies" and "reports" make me absolutely crazy. They are badly reported on in the media and most people do not have enough of an understanding of how to read and interpret scientific data to know when a study is worth paying attention to. It is the job of a science reporter to bridge the gap between the scientific community and the general public and the media does a terrible job. Not every research finding is news worthy. Not every study can be validated. Not every study that shows a correlation between variable and outcome is meaningful. Correlation is not causality! What ends up happening is that when someone really does make a breakthrough in research, that breakthrough is muted or even completely lost among all the noise that gets reported. Science reporters need to do their jobs a whole lot better.

[black2deep]

01:24 AM on 06/05/2011

What is your field of study? Obviously, it is not radio emissions. I have spent most of my adult life dealing with radio and radio frequencies and I can tell you that holding a cell phone next to your brains is not a good idea. Prolong exposure to high frequency radio waves even at a very low wattage will cause damage. So if your really are a scientist as you claim then you need to hit the books a bit before speak.

[kitsmom1990]

08:24 AM on 06/05/2011

My field of research is breast and colo-rectal cancer. The world wide incidence of the kind of brain cancer discussed in these studies is exceedingly low and has in fact dropped over the decade. On the other hand, cell phone use has increased world wide exponentially. I'm not buying that there is such a strong correlation between radio wave contact and brain cancer that its worth scaring the daylights out of people over. You are of course entitled to your opinion based on your professional expertise. I have no problem with that at all. I just disagree. Have you ever met 2 Oncologists that shared exact views on how a particular pt. acquired their particular form of cancer? I haven't. Thats why the area has been under study for decades and we still have no significant break through. We'll just keep plugging along in our respective fields and hope one of us makes that break through. Lets hope the public can believe it when it happens.

[kimballh53]

12:20 PM on 06/01/2011

Another false alarm on a slow news week. Research data released prematurely and that sends people into a flurry of anxiety and panic unnecessarily. Next week it will be contradicted and dropped.

[Daria Boissonnas]

12:19 PM on 06/01/2011

Now tell us what the cell phone antennas on our water towers are doing to our water by microwaving it 24/7...

[NotEve]

01:31 PM on 06/01/2011

Sterilizing it.

[black2deep]

01:26 AM on 06/05/2011

Wrong kind of radation. Think in terms of a microwave oven. Instead of cooking a chicken from the inside out, in this case you are cooking your brains from the inside out.

[Daria Boissonnas]

05:11 PM on 06/05/2011

?? Not sure what I missed. Cell phone towers emit in microwaves, roughly 2 - 11 GHz, and more typically on the lower end of that range right around microwave oven frequencies. Here in the midwest, cell phone antennas are all over every water tower you see.

From wikipedia: "A microwave oven passes (non-ionizing) microwave radiation (at a frequency near 2.45 GHz) through food, causing dielectric heating by absorption of energy in the water, fats, and sugar contained in the food."

Water is the most polar of molecules and most reactive to microwaves' electromagnetic jostling, so the antennae on the water towers are gently microwaving our water, agitating those molecules constantly. Something similar is happening at the device itself, too, microwaving your brain on the inside, as you said.

Some people say microwaves are not dangerous because they aren't ionizing -- they don't knock electrons around and make unhappy nasty molecules. But it jiggles them electromagnetically, constantly. Not sure I want my brain jiggled. And we are about three-quarters water, hmm.

[cdub1991]

11:57 AM on 06/01/2011

A word of clarification. In the regulatory world, "possible" doesn't mean it MIGHT cause cancer. It means, "we can't say for certain that it DOESN'T, so we will err on the side of keeping the question open." That's a much weaker statement than some seem to think. That's also why there are so many odd items in that category. It will stay in that class until there is enough information that most well-informed, reasonable experts in the field can make a judgement one way or the other.

[InspiredByTruth]

11:56 PM on 06/01/2011

That is because this review included MOBILE WIRELESS industry funded studies, which (shock) tend to say their is no link. A scientist once paid by the mobile wireless industry to do these exact cancer-cellphone link studies found this:
snip
Lai’s frustratio­n with the increasing body of contradict­ory research led him to do an analysis in 2006 of the available studies on cell phone radiation between 1990 and 2006, and where their funding came from. What he found was that 50 percent of the 326 studies showed a biological effect from radio-freq­uency radiation and 50 percent did not. But when he filtered the studies into two stacks—tho­se funded by the wireless industry and those funded independen­tly—Lai discovered industry-f­unded studies were 30 percent likely to find an effect, as opposed to 70 percent of the independen­t studies.
http://www­.seattlema­g.com/arti­cle/nerd-r­eport/nerd­-report

[Tiggerchick]

11:49 AM on 06/01/2011

My new dieting trick (somewhat cruel, but effective) when I go to a restaurant, cafeteria, etc. is to sit for ten minutes and watch what other people are eating (and the size of these people) before I order. The average American's diet is dismal. Even for those who eat healthier, are they aware of the levels of sodium, etc. in canned vegetables, bread products, anything frozen - it's off the charts. If you actually eat five servings of fruits and veggies, but they're not organic, you may be consuming up to 53 different types of pesticides (poison) in one day. We drink soda which is poison. I think I'll tackle my household diet to keep my children from ingesting toxic chemicals on a daily basis first before I worry about this - not that my children have cell phones that they're allowed to use other than calling a friend for 5 minutes on a weekend - when they go to school the phones stay here - the only reason they have them is because it's cheaper than a land line.

[Ricky Varn]

01:05 PM on 06/01/2011

wow dood... :) i guess my hip will have cancer, cause thats where my phone is lol.