Mobile Phone Usage Deemed Safe?

You may have heard recently in the news that there is no link between brain tumours & mobile phone usage. The largest study to date determined mobile phones posed no link to cancer, yet the results do not establish the devices are 'safe'.

According to a Danish study published in the British Medical Journal that monitored more than 350,000 mobile phone users in Denmark over a period of 18 years, there is no link between the devices and increased risks of tumors of the central nervous system.

However, organizations like MobileWise, who sustain that cell phones pose cancer and genetic health damage, criticised the study as "seriously flawed" and said it offered "false reassurance."

"The report itself states that a limitation of the study is potential misclassification of exposure…Subscription holders who are not using their phone will erroneously be classified as exposed and people without a subscription but still using a mobile phone will erroneously be classified as unexposed,” the group said.

So effectively the research group was primarily bill payers, with pre-pay users not even considered. I know people who are on bill pay, but may only use their phone a couple of times a month (my mother for example). I am also aware that many of my pre-pay friends use thier phone far more than I do (I am also on bill-pay). Many of the network providers offer free call time on pre-pay bundles, such as free O2 to O2 calls if you top up by at least 20euro a month.

So imagine someone who is based in Dublin but is in a relationship with someone in Galway, they are both O2 customers, so as long as they top up by 20euro a month they can talk away for as long as they want and for as often as they want. From what I understand they would not be considered as 'exposed' in the massive research undertaken.

Epidemiologist Dr Devra Davis of the Environmental Health Trust in the US says the ‘new’ study is only an extension of one already published by the Danish team two years ago. Not only was it widely criticised at the time, but it was rejected by the World Health Organization as unreliable when they did a review of studies in May, she added.

The WHO panel voted almost unanimously to classify mobile radiation as “possibly carcinogenic.”