Good Reason

It's okay to be wrong. It's not okay to stay wrong.

Mobile phones and cancer

A study shows that mobile phone towers do not cause cancer. Good to know.

British scientists who conducted the largest study yet into cell phone masts and childhood cancers say that living close to a mast does not increase the risk of a pregnant woman’s baby developing cancer.

In a study looking at almost 7,000 children and patterns of early childhood cancers across Britain, the researchers found that those who developed cancer before the age of five were no more likely to have been born close to a mast than their peers.

And in this article, Bernard Leikind explains why mobile phones themselves cannot cause cancer.

One watt (the amount of energy emitted from mobile phones) is much smaller than many other natural energy flows that no one suspects might cause cancer. In my Skeptic paper, I show that the average energy production in my body as I go about my life is about 100 Watts. I also show that while I jog on my local gym’s treadmill for half an hour, I produce 1100 or 1200 Watts. This energy, produced in my leg muscles, travels throughout my body including my brain, and I sweat a lot. My body’s temperature does not change much. No one believes that my frequent treadmill sessions cause cancer. If the cell phone’s less than 1 Watt causes cancers, then why doesn’t my exercise session’s more than 1000 Watts cause cancer?

Perhaps if people hear this enough times, they will start to believe it. We live in hope.

2 Comments

  1. Phew! another one of my worries that I can reasonably let go of. Maybe I should just stop worrying in general!

  2. Without RTFA (no subscription), the watt argument sounds pretty bogus. Watts are units of power (not even energy which is the dosage measure you'd expect to be proportional to cancer risk). The quote sounds like "I drink 1 litre of water when I exercise! That's much more than the 200mL claimed to be the LD50 of cyanide!". As water is to cyanide, so is heat to ionizing radiation.

    I'm not saying the phones cause cancer, just that the argument (as you quoted) is poor. Perhaps Leikind's full Skeptic article treats the physics better…

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