Live longer with cellphones?

In 1993 a man whose wife died of a brain tumour filed a suit in the United States against cellphone manufacturers. The man’s wife used a cellphone for hours at a time, which in this era of mindless assumption of cause and effect led the man to conclude that the phone caused the tumour. Phone company stocks plunged. Regulators said they would consider issuing warnings to buyers. The case was later thrown out, but it generated a newspaper and television sensation.

Who could have imagined cellphone cancer scares would keep coming, year after year, one junk science yarn after another.

The latest headline-grabber came from the U.S. National Toxicology Program. In a “draft” report, the NTP said it found evidence of cancer in rats subjected to full-body bombardment with cellphone radiation for their entire lives.

The bombardment began in the womb of mother rats and continued for two years after birth. As the NTP put it, the rats from the womb onward were radiated 18 hours a day “using a continuous cycle of 10 minutes on (exposed) and 10 minutes off (not exposed) for a total daily exposure time of approximately 9 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

The result: The NTP found a slight increase in tumours for male rats, but “no biologically significant effects” were observed in female rats. More interesting, radiated rats lived longer than rats in a control group. Does cellphone radiation prolong life?

One reviewer of the NTP study, Michael Lauer at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, said he was unable to accept the author’s conclusions. “I suspect that this experiment is substantially under powered.”

Instead of bombarding rats with cell radiation, there’s also actual human experience. A new study in the June issue of the journal Cancer Epidemiology asked the question: “Has the incidence of brain cancer risen in Australia since the introduction of mobile phones 29 years ago?” Answer: No.