Posted on 01/27/2006 1:56:35 PM PST by Stoat
Jan 26, 2006
by Michael Fumento ( bio | archive )
Thirteen years ago, writing in Investor's Business Daily, I was the first reporter in the country to present evidence that cell phones have no link to brain cancer in direct contrast to numerous television and radio shows, and hundreds of related articles in the U.S. and worldwide. Now the largest study ever on the issue has been released and it finds . . . cell phones have no link to brain cancer. Was my work of 13 years ago that of a genius or a soothsayer? If I could tell the future, Id be playing the horses instead of writing this. And call me a genius if you wish, but a better explanation would be that other reporters were too lazy or too excited over a hot story to put their brains in gear before booting up their computers. In any case, the Cell Phone Saga provides a terrific example of the incredible poverty of health and science reporting in the country, then as well as now. It started when Larry King invited Larry Reynard onto his show who claimed that since his wife developed a fatal brain tumor three months after she began using a cell phone, the cancer must have resulted from phone emissions. By no great coincidence he had just filed suit against the phone maker and the service provider. (He lost.) Yes, it really was that insipid. And it set off a panic. I had to point out, believe it or not, that people were getting brain tumors before cell phones were ever invented. I further noted that the American Cancer Society said about 17,500 brain cancers are diagnosed each year, of which about two thirds are fatal, and already at that time about 4% of the population was using the type of cell phone that was held to the head. That meant simple chance dictated 180 cell phone users would die of brain tumors, leaving 179 unaccounted for. Further, I noted brain tumors don't appear in three months. In fact, the latency period (also called the time from insult to diagnosis) for brain tumors in adults appears to be 10 to 20 years. That would leave Mrs. Reynards tumor about nine years and nine months short. Yet no other reporter bothered to look for these numbers, either because they didn't have the ability or they didn't have the integrity to dig up the evidence they knew would kill their own stories. In the ensuing years, the cell phone scare continued to be driven by lawsuits, by companies selling shields to protect phone users, and by alarmists who have warned of the dangers of any type of manmade emissions since microwave ovens were introduced. The cell phone industry expended massive funds on grants to independent researchers grants to look for connections to ill health. Overwhelmingly they have found no correlation with cancer, although the phones do increase the risk of automobile accidents and often enough seem to turn users into obnoxious cretins. One such funding effort led to a scandal in which it became accepted that industry cooked the books, when in fact a self-serving alarmist had done so. Dr. George Carlo, then an epidemiologist working at the George Washington University School of Medicine, administered a $28 million research project funded from 1993 to 2001, via a blind trust established by the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA). As the project wound down, Carlo pre-empted a study that later appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. He claimed it showed a tripling of the risk of a brain cancer called neurocytoma among cell-phone users. Yet the study had no such conclusion. Regardless of how frequently the phones were used per month or how many years that the phones were used, there wasn't any relationship with the developments of brain cancer, its chief author told PBS. Carlo insisted he had no reason to fudge anything, since he wouldnt be re-upping for the project. He didnt mention his forthcoming book, Cell Phones: Invisible Hazards in the Wireless Age. Sigh. And thats the sordid cell phone story. Its time for it to end. After all, theres so much more scary pseudoscience in need of media attention. Michael Fumento is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., the author of BioEvolution. Copyright © 2006 Townhall.com |
Doggone it! I was hoping all those jerks I see on the road every day yapping on cell phones while they drive were doomed!
"They" are still claiming cell phone start fires, despite what Mythbusters proved.
My only complain about this article is that the words "insipid" and "Larry King" are not in the same sentence.
Smarter! :-)
The rather credible-sounding reports that I've heard have not been that cell phones "start fires" per se, but that when people try to save money by buying cheap, off-brand replacement batteries for their phones that these batteries have, on occasion, actually exploded. There were numerous reports of this happening and documentations of the sometimes serious injuries that have resulted.
None have been reported, to my knowledge, in cases of people using high-quality batteries.
You wouldn't happen to have a link to the article you refer to, by any chance?
Nope, Mythbusters is a cable show.
Well, one COULD say that they are doomed to a fiery death in an auto accident of their own making, as well as being doomed to endless derision, insults and honking from the other drivers in their vicinity who are actually interested in traffic safety and getting to their destination in a timely manner.
Add that number to those who obviously haven't even bothered reading the article or the linked documents before spouting off with a post ("because they CAN, and it's so terribly important to get that post done FAST, after all") and you'll have an overflowing bushel basketful in very short order :-)
Yup. But you're not putting it next to your head pretty much all the time.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.