While many websites and self-appointed experts claim that mobile phone use can cause brain cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, no scientific study has looked at long-term health effects of mobile phone use, and no study has proven the claimed health hazards.
Scientists in London have begun an official study to determine the effects of long-term mobile phone usage on the human brain. The study, which will begin in Britain, Denmark and Sweden with 200,000 participants, will eventually expand to include other European countries.
The British arm of the study, expected to cost 3.1 million pounds, is being funded jointly by the British government and the British mobile phone industry. The leaders of the study in Britain are a team from Imperial College, London, under the auspices of the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research (MTHR) Programme.
The British scientists will study 90,000 mobile phone users over ten years and track their health. Because cancers can take ten years or longer to develop, it is unclear whether mobile phones cause cancer, because mobile phone use has expanded so quickly and is a relatively new phenomenon.
This will be the first study to follow participants long enough to determine whether, as many people hypothesize, mobile phone users are twice as likely to get brain cancer on the side of the head where they hold the handset.
Mike Bell, chairman of the Radiation Research Trust (RRT), called the new study’s launch a “breakthrough,” that had come about parly because of the way the IoS had put the issue into “the public domain.”
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colleen 09.03.08 at 6:21 pm
Hi thanks for dropping by. Those pictures are really scary! Do cell phones give off radiation all the time or just when you are talking on them. Because if the former, I might also come down with left hip cancer.
Henry 09.03.08 at 7:20 pm
Hi Colleen, Unfortunately phones are constantly giving out radiation whenever they are switched on. Even when the phone is not being used for calling, it is still transmitting airwaves and providing network coverage.
I certainly hope you do not get cancer. If it does happen to you, I suspect that you will not be alone…