The use of mobile phones is increasing among children and adolescents. Experts warn of the dangers, since children are more vulnerable to radiation.
In a recent study, an international research team concluded that mobile-phone use among children does not increase the risk of developing brain tumors.
Parents who might be breathing a sigh of relief at this should think twice. According to one Swedish expert, we cannot trust these results, and she is not the only one saying so.
According to professor Maria Feychting, Institute of Environmental Medicine at Karolinska Institute (KI), who led the Swedish part of the Cefalo study, the results show no increased risk of developing a brain tumor among young cell phone users.
The basis for this study is standardized interviews with 352 children and adolescents between the ages of 7 and 19 in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland who have developed brain tumors between 2004 and 2008.
Participants were asked about their mobile-phone habits. The responses were then compared with the cell-phone habits of 646 healthy control individuals of the same age. The results from the study were published in Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Results showed that children who had their own cell-phone subscriptions for more than 2.8 years were more than twice as likely to develop brain tumors.
Journalist and author Mona Nilsson has followed cell-phone risk studies for many years, and she does not find the results of the Cefalo study reassuring.
On the contrary, the results are very worrying. The study shows the opposite, that mobile-phone use increases the risk of brain tumors, even at relatively low use by today’s standards.
Nilsson believes that the scientists dismiss their own findings in the study and that these are the same scientists who tried to smooth over the increased brain-tumor risk in the international WHO study a year ago.
The scientists dismiss their own results on the basis that the Swedish statistics on brain tumors overall do not show an increasing trend. That’s like saying that smoking is not dangerous for youths based on the fact that lung-cancer statistics did not go up during the period when it became common for young people to smoke.
All cancer experts know that it takes several years for cancer to develop and show up in statistics.
This way of presenting the results is a gross betrayal of children and parents. Unfortunately, it reflects the enormous financial interests associated with research on mobile-phone health hazards.
The Cefalo study has also been called into question by professors Devra Davis and Ronald Herberman. Davis is a cancer specialist and has written several books on cancer. In 2010, she wrote the book “Disconnect” about the health hazards associated with mobile-phone use.
