Cell Phone Use Is Of No Danger To Republicans At All

Something in my gut always told me cell phones were bad news. I didn't know what exactly, but I was the last person I knew to get one. In fact, I only got one when I became president of Reprise and the company felt they needed to be able to reach me in an emergency. I always treasured my quiet time in the car, away from insistent phones, a chance to think or listen to music intently. And once I gave in and got one... well, to this day I don't know the number or even how to work the thing beyond answering it or calling someone. No idea how to text or get a message. About a dozen people know the number. Everyone else can call me at home or e-mail me. I can't even say I knew cell phones cause brain cancer. But I suspected. So did the World Health Organization... and they made their findings public yesterday-- in a tepid, beatin' around the bush kinda way:

A scientific report released Tuesday by the World Health Organization concludes radio frequencies and electromagnetic fields - including those routinely emitted by mobile phones - are "possibly" carcinogenic to humans.  

The World Health Organization and its subsidiary investigative panel, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, or IARC, stated today what many scientific studies have been suggesting for decades: that there is a possible connection between mobile phone use and malignant brain tumors.  Dr. Jonathan Samet, who heads IARC's Working Group of 31 international scientists from 14 countries, made the announcement at the conclusion of the group's week-long meeting in Lyon, France.

Five billion people use them and health advocacy groups have been raising the alarm for many years. So why did it take so long for someone to make it even semi-official? Here's a Senate hearing from two years ago:



Russ Baker has been poking around for a long time into why the public hasn't been warned:

It’s hard to talk about the dangers of cell-phone radiation without sounding like a conspiracy theorist. This is especially true in the United States, where non-industry-funded studies are rare, where legislation protecting the wireless industry from legal challenges has long been in place, and where our lives have been so thoroughly integrated with wireless technology that to suggest it might be a problem-maybe, eventually, a very big public-health problem-is like saying our shoes might be killing us. Except our shoes don’t send microwaves directly into our brains. And cell phones do-a fact that has increasingly alarmed the rest of the world…

Though the scientific debate is heated and far from resolved, there are multiple reports, mostly out of Europe’s premier research institutions, of cell-phone and PDA use being linked to “brain aging,” brain damage, early-onset Alzheimer’s, senility, DNA damage, and even sperm die-offs (many men, after all, keep their cell phones in their pants pockets or attached at the hip). In September 2007, the European Union’s environmental watchdog, the European Environment Agency, warned that cell-phone technology “could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking, and lead in petrol.”

Perhaps most worrisome, though, are the preliminary results of the multinational Interphone study sponsored by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, in Lyon, France. (Scientists from thirteen countries took part in the study, the United States conspicuously not among them.) Interphone researchers reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell-phone use, the chance of getting a brain tumor-specifically on the side of the head where you use the phone-goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Interphone researchers in Israel have found that cell phones can cause tumors of the parotid gland (the salivary gland in the cheek), and an independent study in Sweden last year concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. Another Interphone study reported a nearly 300 percent increased risk of acoustic neuroma, a tumor of the acoustic nerve.

You may find this hard to believe-- unless you followed the tobacco industry for the 2 decades leading up to legislation regulating their carcinogenic products-- but the cell phone manufacturers are scoffing at any relationship between cancer and their products.