The supposed health risk from mobile phones is the story that will never die. The latest claim, branded an “inconvenient truth” by the Observer newspaper, is that new research shows they cause cancer in rats. But like all previous incarnations of this tale, the real truth is that the evidence has been overblown and there is nothing to worry about.
Cell phones have been accused of everything from causing brain cancer to “frying” men’s testicles over the years. Phones emit radiation to communicate with mobile phone masts, and radiation has always had a bad rap, thanks to the well-known effects of X-rays and nuclear fall-out.
But phones use a form known as non-ionising radiation, meaning it doesn’t carry enough energy to tear electrons away from their atoms and turn them into ions. It’s this electron-stripping that means X-rays, for instance, can cause cancerous mutations in our DNA.
The latest work, done by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), exposed rats and mice to non-ionising radio-frequency radiation like that emitted by phones. As the NIH already reported in interim findings two years ago, some of the exposed animal groups did have a higher incidence of damage to the heart, and cancers in nerves to the heart.
But the animals were given much higher doses of radiation than people experience in real life – even those of us who are glued to our phones. They were kept in special chambers that exposed them to high levels of radiation over their whole body, for nine hours a day for the duration of their two-year lives. So the findings cannot be assumed to also apply to humans, NIH researcher John Bucher said in a statement.
No good evidence
More importantly, there has been no good evidence that cancers of these types are increasing in people. Our use of mobile phones and other wireless devices in our homes has been increasing at unprecedented rate. Cancer incidence is tracked carefully in countries such as the UK and the US – if tumours of the heart or brain were on the rise, we would know about it by now.
It’s impossible to prove a negative, of course. And with phone technology changing all the time, it’s right that we continue to study this question.
Still, the lack of an increase in cancer rates suggests that if phones have any effect on our risk of developing tumours it seems to be minuscule compared with the other everyday risks we are happy to take – and so not worth worrying about.