Mobile Telephones and Brain Tumors

By Robert Uhlig

Using a mobile telephone more than doubles the risk of developing brain cancer on the side of the head where the phone is held, the British Association festival of science was told September 4.

A second warning was issued when Sir William Stewart, who chaired last year's government-sponsored report into mobile phone health risks, called for the cost of handsets to be increased to restrict their use by children.

Sir William, the president of the British Association, said he would not allow his grandchildren to use a mobile phone and also castigated operators for targeting advertisements at youngsters.

The study into a link with brain tumors was carried out by Lennart Hardell, professor of oncology at Orebro University in Sweden, who compared 1,617 patients diagnosed with brain tumors between 1997 and last year with the same number of healthy people.

He found that people who used cell phones were two and a half times more likely to have a temporal brain tumor on the side of the head where they held their phone.

In the case of tumors of the auditory nerve, which connects the ear to the brain, the risk increased to more than three times for mobile phone users.

Because of the need to investigate patients who had used cell phones for 10 years or more, the research concentrated on analogue phones. But Prof Hardell said yesterday that users of digital mobiles, which emit less radiation, could face similar health risks because the phones use pulsed microwaves as opposed to the continuous signals of analogues. Read more...

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