Friday, March 31, 2006

New Cellphone Study - Don't Believe the Hype

I've posted here before about the cellphone-causes-brain-tumors studies. It seems the Swedes have a new study that establishes a link between the two.

Who to believe? As I've posted before, my brother-in-law is one of the world's leading researchers on radiation and cancer. I asked him what he thought of this Swedish study. Here's his reply:

"This group from Sweden is the only group in the world that finds associations between mobile phones and brain cancer. This is just another in a string of methodologically poor studies. A few years ago, the Swedish govt asked me to review the literature and we severely criticized this paticular group for conducting biased and misleading studies: http://www.ssi.se/ssi_rapporter/pdf/ssi_rapp_2002_16.pdf

The main problem is how they obtain information on mobile phone use ...they ask leading questions to persons with brain tumors and are less interested in obtaining accurate responses from the controls without brain cancer. This can be seen in their studies where the risk from "cordless phones" is often as high or higher than the risk from mobile phones.

The RF energy levels are 100 times lower!

Studies by solid Swedish investigators do not find these associations.

Some of the investigators of this article have been involved in litigation in the US ... guess which side."


I'll take that opinion over one from Reuters any day.