According to a new study on Saturday, in spite of a latest change to categorize mobile phones as possibly carcinogenic, the scientific proofs increasingly points away from a link between their use and brain tumors. A key analysis of earlier published research by a committee of experts from Britain, the United States and Sweden resulted there was no solid proof of any cancer linkage.
It also revealed a lack of established biological mechanisms by which radio signals from mobile phones might activate tumors.
"Though there remains some ambiguity, the trend in the building up evidence is increasingly against the theory that mobile phone use can cause brain cancer in adults," the experts wrote in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
The recent paper comes just two months after the World Health Organization's (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) determined cellphone use should be categorized as "likely carcinogenic to humans."
Anthony Swerdlow of Britain's Institute of Cancer Research, who head the new analysis, told Reuters the two situations were not unavoidably conflicting, since the IARC required putting mobile phones into a pre-defined risk category.
"We are endeavoring to say in plain English what we consider the relationship is. They (IARC) were attempting to categorize the risk according to a pre-set classification system," Swerdlow said.
Other things considered by the IARC to be may be carcinogenic include items as vary as lead, pickled vegetables and coffee.
Mobile phone use has increased massively since the early 1980s, with nearly 5 billion handsets in use today, and debate about their closed association to the main types of brain tumor, glioma and meningioma, has never been far away.
The detailed study to date, published last year, observed at almost 13,000 mobile phone users over 10 years.
Swerdlow and fellows reviewed its conclusions in detail but resulted it gave no obvious answer and had numerous methodological problems, since it was based on interviews and inquired subjects to recall phone use going back many years.
Considerably, other studies from many countries have shown no sign of enhance in brain tumors up to 20 years after the introduction of mobile phones and 10 years after their use became extensive, they added.
Proving an absence of linkage is forever far harder in science than finding one, and Swerdlow said it should become much clearer over the next few years whether or not there was any credible link.
"This is in fact a serious issue to research," said David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public accepting of Risk at the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the study.
"But even given the restraints of the evidence, this report is obvious that any risk shows to be so small that it is very hard to notice-- even in the masses of people now using mobile phones."
Swerdlow is chairman of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection's Standing Committee on Epidemiology. The commission is the international body, familiar by the WHO, that builds strategies for exposure limits for non-ionizing radiation.
Since mobile phones have become such an important part of routine life -- utilized by several for web surfing as well as chatting -- industry experts say a health risk is unlikely to stop people using them.
No comments:
Post a Comment