WHO Cell Phone Report Skips Science, Raises Hysteria

Yesterday's press release by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (part of the World Health Organization) is once again fanning the flames of an issue that had been fading away: do cell phones cause brain tumors?

Unfortunately, once you read beyond the headlines -- such as today's Seattle Times' above-the-fold headline proclaiming "Panel dials up danger of cellphone radiation" -- there is really nothing new that we didn't know already.

This is unfortunate because this type of hysteria will only cause people to shy away from a transformative technology that isn't proved to be unsafe. But that doesn't stop some from making policy based on false assumptions. In the instance of cell phones, there may be some economic and productivity harms created, and these should be recognized (more on that in a minute) but this type of thinking -- policy making without scientific evidence -- has shown up in other areas creating more damage.

Just today WPC published "The Emergence of the Digital Precautionary Principle," a report that outlines various moves among federal, state and local officials to enact, consciously or not, a precautionary principle for the digital industry. As has been shown in environmental policy, the precautionary principle may sound good ("better safe than sorry") but leads to a host of unintended consequences and may lead to actual economic or social harm.

I am reminded of the polio scare (admittedly far before my birth) mid-last century where ice cream was thought to be a major cause behind the crippling disease. In 1949, Dr. Benjamin Sandler published a book called "Diets Prevent Polio" where he speculated that ice cream and soda caused polio. This was of course not the case, as polio is an infectious viral disease. But ice cream and soda distributors, sellers and manufacturers took a massive economic hit in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a result of fuzzy science. The same could be said will happen to the cell phone providers and manufacturers today.

On a more serious note, the case of pediatric vaccines as a chief cause of autism tore through the ranks of anxious parents for two decades until the science quieted the quacks once and for all. In this case, however, real damage was done as thousands upon thousands of parents skipped administering vaccinations to their children. Data is still emerging from the result of these skipped vaccinations but this CNN article points to a sharp increase in measles among British children as an unintended consequence of vaccination fear. In this instance, it is reasonable to assume actual lives were lost because of faulty, or fraudulent, science.

Back to the IARC report. In the footnotes of the summary we see that evidence linking cell phones and two type of cancer, glioma and acoustic neuroma, is very "limited," meaning that "chance, bias or confounding could not be ruled out with reasonable confidence." And that there is "inadequate" evidence to suggest any other type of cancer link.

Cell phones first came on the U.S. stage in the early 1980s and took off in the mid 1990s. Today, there are over 300 million cell phones in use in the U.S. and a quarter of households in this country do not even have a landline anymore. They rely solely on their wireless device for telephony.

So, have we seen an uptick in cancer rates in this nation in the last 30 years? That's the wrong question. The correct question is "do we understand what causes cancer?" An instinctive reply would probably be "yes!" but do we know that nonionizing radiation emitted by cell phones, microwaves and light bulbs contain carcinogens? We do not. Do we know that ionizing radiation, the kind found in X-rays, cause cancer with enough exposure? We do. 

The fact is that brain cancer is extremely rare: about 7 cases per 100,000 are diagnosed in the U.S. every year. And from 1990 to 2002 the age-adjusted incidence rate for overall brain cancer remained relatively flat. This is while cell phone usage grew from 4 million to 135 million (as I said, its over 300 million today). In other words, we have had a tremendous opportunity to monitor what no scientific organization could afford -- a case/control group of massive proportions.

But not only are brain cancer rates flat, life expectancy is up, drastically. According to the Center for Disease Control, life expectancy in 1980 was 73.7 years. It's now almost 78 years. The life expectancy in 1900? A mere 49 years.

There are real carcinogens in our environment, both natural and artificial, and we should be focused on limiting peoples' exposure to those whenever possible. And it certainly is not a waste of resources to test wireless devices for their radiating characteristics. But until science has proven that there is demonstrable harm to users from prolonged usage of such devices, throwing out "maybe" and "possibly" serves no public good.

In fact, the most dangerous characteristic of a wireless phone is its mobility -- we can use it while moving. This causes more damage and loss of life because people are texting/talking while driving, while walking, while crossing train tracks, while driving trains, while flying planes, etc. Unfortunately, wireless devices do introduce risk into our society but not because they emit cancerous radiation.