Cancer

Readers may have seen The Times on 20th January 2007, under the heading of ‘Could these be the cigarettes of the 21st century?’ It’s a thought we have used ourselves in icon previously. BBC Breakfast news also picked up on it. While several studies in the past 12 months have seemed to provide an all clear for mobile phones when used in the short to medium term, there is no such evidence for their ‘safety’ with longer-term usage. And this has the man who heads the UK Government’s mobile safety research worried. In the article, Professor Lawrie Challis is clear, ‘You can look at almost any cancer where you know what caused it and you find absolutely nothing for ten years’.

At the moment there is a massive new Interphone Study taking place across Europe with many countries participating. Challis already alludes to ‘hints’ of concerns. And well he might.

A couple of the participating countries have even broken ranks on their findings and started to publish. In the recent issue of the International Journal of Cancer, epidemiologists from 5 European countries are reporting that there is a 40 per cent increase in gliomas amongst those people who have used a mobile for over ten years! 521 cases of glioma have been followed.

The Swedish team has found in their part of the Interphone study that there is a doubling of acoustic neuroma, and this is in line with their previous findings in 2000. Anssi Anvinen, the Professor in charge of the Finnish study is also finding much the same.

The Background

I must own up, right up front. I helped launch Mercury 1-2-1 mobile phones in the UK. I was chairman of the advertising and direct marketing agencies, and I sat on the company’s launch business committee.

We asked then, back in the early nineties, about the lawsuits filed in the USA over mobile phones and brain tumours to receive a curt, ‘‘Don’t ask’’ reply.

Also, my daughter died of a brain tumour in 2004, aged 26. It could well have been a complete coincidence that she seemed to live on her mobile phone. Certainly when I asked her surgeon what he thought might have caused her brain tumour, the first words he uttered were, ‘‘Well a lot of people think they are caused by mobile phones – but that’s a load of rubbish’’. He rather spoilt this emphatic answer when about five minutes later he said, ‘And anyway, when you get a tumour from a mobile phone it tends to be over one ear - Catherine’s tumour is not – it is in the left frontal lobe’.

I think I need to start off by saying a little about brain tumours: There are tumours, and there are tumours. Some people have benign brain tumours, like acoustic neuromas. These are not cancers, although they are indicative that extra-ordinary growth is taking place. Other people do have cancers, from grade 1 to 4. For example grade 3 astrocytomas, or highly aggressive grade 4 gliomas; like the one that took Catherine’s life.

In icon we have previously reported on a number of research studies, for example three by Hardell and one by Mild in Sweden comparing over a thousand people and looking at cordless, analogue and digital phones. In 2005 one of their studies concluded that using a digital mobile phone for over one hour a day increased the risks of a brain tumour by about 30 per cent. As Roger Coghill puts it so wonderfully, “Anyone who uses a mobile phone for more than 20 minutes, needs their head examined!”