#950: Mobile phone use ‘raises children’s risk of brain cancer fivefold’
From Eileen O’Connor:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/mobile-phone-use-raises-childrens-
risk-of-brain-cancer-fivefold-937005.html
Independent on Sunday
Alarming new research from Sweden on the effects of radiation raises fears
that today’s youngsters face an epidemic of the disease in later life
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
Sunday, 21 September 2008
The Swedish research was reported this month at the first international
conference on mobile phones and health
Children and teenagers are five times more likely to get brain cancer if
they use mobile phones, startling new research indicates.
The study, experts say, raises fears that today’s young people may suffer an
“epidemic” of the disease in later life. At least nine out of 10 British
16-year-olds have their own handset, as do more than 40 per cent of primary
schoolchildren.
Yet investigating dangers to the young has been omitted from a massive £3.1m
British investigation of the risks of cancer from using mobile phones,
launched this year, even though the official Mobile Telecommunications and
Health Research (MTHR) Programme which is conducting it admits that the
issue is of the “highest priority”.
Despite recommendations of an official report that the use of mobiles by
children should be “minimised”, the Government has done almost nothing to
discourage it.
Last week the European Parliament voted by 522 to 16 to urge ministers
across Europe to bring in stricter limits for exposure to radiation from
mobile and cordless phones, Wi-fi and other devices, partly because children
are especially vulnerable to them. They are more at risk because their
brains and nervous systems are still developing and because since their
heads are smaller and their skulls are thinner the radiation penetrates
deeper into their brains.
The Swedish research was reported this month at the first international
conference on mobile phones and health.
It sprung from a further analysis of data from one of the biggest studies
carried out into the risk that the radiation causes cancer, headed by
Professor Lennart Hardell of the University Hospital in Orebro, Sweden.
Professor Hardell told the conference held at the Royal Society by the
Radiation Research Trust that “people who started mobile phone use before
the age of 20″ had more than five-fold increase in glioma”, a cancer of the
glial cells that support the central nervous system. The extra risk to young
people of contracting the disease from using the cordless phone found in
many homes was almost as great, at more than four times higher.
Those who started using mobiles young, he added, were also five times more
likely to get acoustic neuromas, benign but often disabling tumours of the
auditory nerve, which usually cause deafness.
By contrast, people who were in their twenties before using handsets were
only 50 per cent more likely to contract gliomas and just twice as likely to
get acoustic neuromas.
Professor Hardell told the IoS: “This is a warning sign. It is very
worrying. We should be taking precautions.” He believes that children under
12 should not use mobiles except in emergencies and that teenagers should
use hands-free devices or headsets and concentrate on texting. At 20 the
danger diminishes because then the brain is fully developed. Indeed, he
admits, the hazard to children and teenagers may be greater even than his
results suggest, because the results of his study do not show the effects of
their using the phones for many years. Most cancers take decades to develop,
longer than mobile phones have been on the market.
The research has shown that adults who have used the handsets for more than
10 years are much more likely to get gliomas and acoustic neuromas, but he
said that there was not enough data to show how such relatively long-term
use would increase the risk for those who had started young.
He wants more research to be done, but the risks to children will not be
studied in the MTHR study, which will follow 90,000 people in Britain.
Professor David Coggon, the chairman of the programmes management committee,
said they had not been included because other research was being done on
young people by a study at Sweden’s Kariolinska Institute.
He said: “It looks frightening to see a five-fold increase in cancer among
people who started use in childhood,” but he said he “would be extremely
surprised” if the risk was shown to be so high once all the evidence was in.
But David Carpenter, dean of the School of Public Health at the State
University of NewYork who also attended the conference said: “Children
are spending significant time on mobile phones. We may be facing a public
health crisis in an epidemic of brain cancers as a result of mobile phone
use.”
In 2000 and 2005, two official inquiries under Sir William Stewart, a former
government chief scientist, recommended the use of mobile phones by children
should be “discouraged” and “minimised”.
But almost nothing has been done, and their use by the young has more than
doubled since the turn of the millennium.