This Week Cell Phones Don't Cause Brain Cancer
The ICNIRP (International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection) Standing Committee on Epidemiology recently analyzed published research related to cell phones and brain cancer. This review concludes that evidence from a growing number of studies does not support the theory that cell phones raise the risk of brain cancer.
It's interesting to note that early on D. Savitz, a member of the ICNIRP Standing Committee on Epidemiology, was in the EMF causes childhood leukemia camp. In 1993 with the accumulation of additional data Savitz was able to concluded that “the evidence falls short of demonstrating a causal association between electric and magnetic fields and cancer.”
In 2004 the same members of the ICNIRP Standing Committee on Epidemiology published a detailed review of epidemiological studies of health effects from exposure to radio waves. The reviewers concluded that "results of these studies to date give no consistent or convincing evidence of a causal relation between RF exposure and any adverse health effect."
In 2009 the ICNIRP Standing Committee on Epidemiology published an update of their 2004 review. They noted that the number of papers on this topic had grown since 2004, but concluded that the available data does not suggest a causal association between mobile phone use and fast growing tumours in the brain such as malignant glioma. The similar absence of an association for slow growing tumours such as meningioma and acoustic neuroma is far less conclusive because the period of observation is simply too short.
With ICNIRP’s caveat “the possibility of a small or a longer term effect cannot be ruled out", I’m sure this isn't the end of the story. We’ll keep you posted.
