If you pay attention to health news, it seems like every day, something new is blamed for causing cancer. And how fitting that on the 30th anniversary of the first handheld cell phone, cell phones are now being put in the spotlight again as having the potential to cause cancer. Well, even the author of this news story seems to indicate that this claim cannot be taken seriously.
Cell phones have been blamed for a host of things in the past causing brain cancer , disturbing sleep, lowering a man s sperm count, causing a drop in honeybee populations and a host of other things. Well, what it comes down to is that none of these connections have been scientifically supported. No controlled studies have been done, and therefore, cell phones cannot definitively be labeled as harmful. Even the measurement of radioation emitted from the cell phone and absorbed by a human body the SAR is worthless when it comes to consumer safety, according to the Federal Communications Commission. The agency says that these numbers do not accurately measure radiation absorbed by the body under typical usage conditions.
And neither the National Cancer Institute nor the Mayo Clinic has acknowledged any relationship between cell phones and cancer.
The author of this piece, technology writer and historian Stewart Wolpin, believes that down the road, cell phones will be deemed as cancerous as cigarettes, but based on our past behavior toward things we want that we know are harmful to us, even if the cellphone/cancer conditional turned into a definite we'd fatalistically shrug our shoulders and take the next call.
ACSH s Dr. Ruth Kava begs to differ. Literally hundreds of studies have confirmed that the link between cigarette smoking and cancer is real; smokers may have a 20-fold greater risk of lung cancer than non-smokers. But in the 30 years since cell phones were introduced there have been no replicated studies demonstrating a link with cancer none.
