Cell phones and cancer

The anatomy ofa needless health scare

The latest study supposedly linking cellphone radiation to cancer was meant to serve the public good. But its effect on the public has been bad. The $25 million governmentfunded experiment produced confusion and scary headlines, but little in the way of useful information — beyond perhaps an indication of where the science publicity machine is broken.

This wasn’t necessarily a case of bad science. The researchers, from the National Toxicology Program, subjected one group of rats to high doses of radiation of a frequency similar to that emitted by cell phones. Following accepted protocol, they compared the radiation-exposed rats to a control group. The pathologists looking for cancer didn’t know which animals came from which group.

But last month, the scientists released partial, unpublished results in a rush, suggesting some public health urgency. They claimed to have identified a link between the radiation and a type of brain cancer called a glioma as well as a nonmalignant growth called a schwannoma. Adding fuel to their health scare, they offered up sound bites such as “breakthrough” and “game changer.”

Only after the first round of scary headlines did critics get a chance to explain why the result was statistically weak, riddled with unanswered questions and somewhat implausible.

It’s not clear why scientists are carrying out these studies in the first place. There’s no compelling theoretical or empirical reason to suspect that cell-phone use has anything to do with cancer. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, said investigations of possible links are done because people are interested in the question. That interest, he said goes back to 1990, when Republican political strategist Lee Atwater was diagnosed with a deadly brain tumor at the age of 39. He was dead the next year.

At the time, Brawley said, some people noted that Atwater had been an early adopter of cell phones, though the reality is that brain cancer occasionally strikes all kinds of people with no apparent risk factors. Adding to the shock over Atwater’s fate was confusion about the term radiation, which scientists use to describe everything from radio waves to what comes out of a light bulb to the deadly emanations from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. X-rays and gamma rays do cause cancer by damaging DNA, and ultraviolet light can damage DNA in skin, but lowerenergy radiation such as microwaves and radio waves would have to cause cancer some other way.

Brawley said dozens of studies have been done to test the safety of cell phones. The bulk of evidence to date suggests they are safe to use except for their