“Thousands of people are to be studied over the course of 20 or 30 years to see if the long-term use of mobile phones increases the risk of developing brain tumours and other medical disorders, as part of the largest ever study into the subject.
At least 250,000 mobile phone users will be monitored as part of the multi-million-pound Cohort Study on Mobile Communications (Cosmos), which aims to settle the debate over whether there are any serious health risks from using the devices once and for all.
Previous research has relied on studying people who have already developed illnesses, which has led to suggestions that they suffered from an inherent “recall” bias, such as people having more vivid memories of holding their mobile phones to the side of their head which developed a brain tumour. Cosmos will pick up diseases and symptoms as they arise and changes in people’s health will be compared with their usage of mobile phones, taking into account both the number and duration of calls and the positioning of handsets.
Volunteers taking part in the study will be aged 18 to 69 and recruited through co-operating network operators. Between 90,000 and 100,000 people are expected to participate in the UK, with others joining from Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark. The total cost of the study for the first five years is estimated at £5-7 million. The UK arm alone will cost £3.1m, jointly funded by the Government and industry.”
Read more at The Independent (thanks, Soulmate02)
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Guinea pigs, the lot of us! Wonder how much 02 and Vodaphone are stuffing in the contingency fund already for when the lawsuit shit hits the fan in a decade’s time?
Interesting! Too bad that, as with all these studies, it’ll take years before we get any results.
It is probably not the mobile phones that causes tumors .. the other way of communicating … levels of stress .. those are more like the factors that might trigger a weakness in their body/brain.
TV was causing cancer and blindness too .. What about cars?? Radio’s? Internet? Any other tool/equipment/machine?
Please name something that does not have the potence to cause cancer nowadays. They always forget to mention the other side .. (in fact, they hardly ever proof a damn thing, it’s just one side of the story scientists show to the world (otherwise there would not be much left to say probably).
Life .. having a body .. if you have that you are running a risk for sure to develop cancer or another disease.
Shit happens. I could link cancer and such up to anything as well.
what’s the level of radiation coming from these devices? radiation is well known to cause cancer. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls
roz: Mobile phones do not emit nuclear radiation. They do emit some microwave radiation, but since nobody is walking around with burns (which you’d expect from dangerous levels of microwave radiation) or suffering from dizzyness and disorientation after using a phone (which afaik is what lower levels of microwave radiation do), I’d say those levels are far from dangerous.
And even if they WERE dangerous, frankly I’d expect less brain tumours and more facial skin tumours in mobile phone users. There’s a skull between phone and brain, while the skin is openly exposed. Why would any radiation ‘decide’ to leave the skin and bone in peace, but cause disease in the brain?
Whilst I think this is probably just another scare story, I wouldn’t advise shoving the end of your mobile phone right in to your ear (like the woman in the photo’s doing.) That’s got to be bad for you.
Berber you do make a valid point, but greed drives most people. So when people start to see billions of pounds potentially available, because they can sue someone, all kinds of crap appear.
From buying hot coffee and burning yourself because it didn’t have hot coffee written on it, (no brainer) but to even prove that 0.1% of mobile phones could cause cancer or tumours means lots of money for some people.
Also the fact that modern phones are more efficient now compared to the walk about bricks 20 years ago, would also be a good study.
But in my eyes, the end of the day, someone wants to prove something so they can start to get rich.
If you don’t like mobiles, use a land line or carrier pigeon. Oh I have to stop writing now, maybe my computer monitor is radiating my brain as well.
true, berber anna…but even microwave EFTs are measurable, if controversial. the truth is, we just dont know that much about what radiation does. anything which takes 20 years to produce an effect is very difficult to study.
there’s unquestionably damage caused by radiation therapy, which is administered by doctors as a healing modality! and some of the damage is indeed more to the internal organs, such as the brain, than the bone.
A coment about all the stuff that cause cancer. Cancer is sort of inevitable. If there isn’t anything else that will cause death, cancer eventually will. This will happen even if the cancer is not caused by a cancerogen or not. This is actually one of the issues needed to be resolved if we are going to be able to extensively extend the life span of human beings.
A hypothesis is that we get cancer several times during our lives, but that our immune system react in an early stage and elliminate it before it gets serious. Eventually we can not avoid it getting serious. The runaway cells will come more often and our immune system follows the path the rest of the body and gets weakend. Given enough time cancer cells will be all over the place in us.
We can not avoid cancerogens. We are bathing in radiation comming from our own sun mostly. We have developed an amount of resistence to this during evolution. Cancerogens should be defined as causing cancer and to determine this in such a study the group exposed to the subject of the study should be proven to have more cancer than the control group. People that have used a cellular phone and also get a brain tumuor isn’t evidence in its own. People get cancer even if they haven’t used any such phone.
Seeing as almost everyone already has one this is bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted.
What will they do if it’s found the phones do cause cancer ?
Get rid of them ?
I received a letter by the Imperial College, London – inviting me to participate in the study of mobile phone use and it’s effects on health. Not sure if I should?
roz: Again, radiation therapy uses nuclear radiation (ionizing radiation), usually X-rays. This is quite different from the radiation used by phones (low frequency microwaves, which are non-ionizing). Comparing the two is like saying there must be grave dangers in the use of vitamin C, as it is an acid and so is battery acid. They just aren’t the same thing. Ionizing radiation causes cancer because it damages DNA by ionizing its atoms. Microwave radiation, being non-ionizing, can’t do that. It’s dangerous in high intensity or at close proximity because it messes with the electrical signals in the nervous system (in low doses) or because it basically boils the water in your body (in high doses, which cause grave injury — that’s why radio transitters and phone towers are fenced off so well)