Posted on 05/02/2011 6:05:26 AM PDT by neverdem
On Jan. 21, 1993, the television talk-show host Larry King featured an unexpected guest on his program. It was the evening after Inauguration Day in Washington, and the television audience tuned in expecting political commentary. But King turned, instead, to a young man from Florida, David Reynard, who had filed a tort claim against the cellphone manufacturer NEC and the carrier GTE Mobilnet, claiming that radiation from their phones caused or accelerated the growth of a brain tumor in his wife.
“The tumor was exactly in the pattern of the antenna,” Reynard told King. In 1989, Susan Elen Reynard, then 31, was told she had a malignant astrocytoma, a brain cancer that occurs in about 6,000 adults in America each year. To David Reynard, the shape and size of Susan’s tumor — a hazy line swerving from the left side of her midbrain to the hindbrain — uncannily resembled a malignant shadow of the phone (but tumors, like clouds, can assume the shapes of our imaginations). Suzy, as she was known, held her phone at precisely that angle against her left ear, her husband said. Reynard underwent surgery for her cancer but to little effect. She died in 1992, just short of her 34th birthday. David was convinced that high doses of radiation from the cellphone was the cause.
Reynard v. NEC — the first tort suit in the United States to claim a link between phone radiation and brain cancer — illustrated one of the most complex conceptual problems in cancer epidemiology. In principle, a risk factor and cancer can intersect in three ways. The first is arguably the simplest. When a rare form of cancer is associated with a rare exposure, the link between the risk and the cancer stands out starkly. The juxtaposition of the rare on...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Sure they do. Cellphones have been in wide circulation for at least 15 years. And every day I see people in the street just collapse from brain tumors. The government should do something.
My sister died from brain cancer and she was convinced that it was caused by her cell phone. She got the tumor on the same side of her head where she held the phone to her ear.
Probably not, but you can get "Aids-of-the-ear" from listening to too many Ass-holes.
MIke
My father died with brain cancer. These are the facts that i can report
1. We have no history of cancer in our family. Ever. Leave alone brain cancer
2. My father had a desk job with very few if any “environmental factors”
3. He was a non smoker
4. The brain cancer appeared a few years after he purchased his first brick cell phone
5. It was exactly parallel to the where the antenna used to be when he used to hold the phone
6. Repeat. EXACTLY parallel
7. He died leaving my mom a widow
I don’t think everyone who uses a cell phone will get brain cancer. However, I think if your DNA is weakened (for any reason), a cell phone will act as a trigger.
I think within the next 10 years, we will know this to be true.
I truly believe to the bottom of my heart, that is what killed my otherwise healthy dad.
May he rest in peace. I miss him very much every day.
Your mild sarcasm is spot on. Given their wide distribution and extensive use, if cell phones had caused brain cancer, the effect would have shown up in epidemiological data as an increased incidence of brain cancer. In fact, since the introduction of cell phones in the 1980’s there has been a slight decrease in the incidence of brain cancer. Case closed.
Inventions were everywhere.
One of them, X-ray, was used as attraction at fairs.
People had no qualms about putting their hands into machine to see how their hands look. Hey, it's novelty, it's breaktrough technology, it can not be wrong.
In 1903 Marie Currie got a Nobel prize for radiation research. At that time, NOTHING has been known about biological effects of the radiation. She died of aplastic anemia.
Today, nobody would touch radioactive material with bare hands, nor would stick his hand into X-ray machine just out of curiosity.
Even twenty years ago, low level radiation from CRT monitors was considered to be almost superstition. Now, it is measurable fact.
Brick mobile phones, analog cell phones, and your latest IPHONE are not the same technology, nor they have the same microwave output. The newest technology is the worst offender.
There is something else. Microwave is not coming from microwaves alone.
Average condo dweller is exposed to more than 20 wireless routers, cordless phones, microwaves, security cameras and so on, his or neighbor's.
Increasingly kids at school are exposed to microwaves as if they work on a Radar facility.
I am positive that 30 years down the road people will look at us the same way we look at the people who put their perfectly good hands into X-ray machines.
X-ray procedure is not the biggest offender. Ct scan gives greater exposure. Chest CT gives 60 times greater effective radiation dose than chest X-ray.
I’m sorry about what happened to you Dad.
We do have cancer that runs in the family and our Mom died from it when we were young kids, however; the cancer my sister died from was primary to her brain, the cancer described in the article.
As with you, I don’t think everyone who uses a cell phone will get brain cancer, but there’s some who are more susceptible.
Geez! My uncle and a number of other relatives died of brain cancer, long before cell phones. People across the world continue to die of brain cancer who have never held a cell phone. There is little more causal evidence here than if you made a case for the fact that most people who get cancer regularly drink milk.
This is as faulty as the recurring, discredited study that links aluminum (as in coffee brewers) to brain cancer. That link is now a perennial caution that is trotted out.
And I do think that you are correct in that the cell phone caused the disease.
But as DTA said, it will take decades of data and investigation before the linkage is actually proved.
If there is any good news in all of this, it's that the younger generation is using texting more and more, which is much safer.
No, but working for the NYT causes other brain problems.
As with any poison or harmful substance:
Dosage (how much)
Exposure period (how long)
Repetition (how often)
Toxicity (how lethal)
Susceptibility (based on individual)
I’m guessing that early cell phones had higher dosage and that those who developed these had higher susceptibility and/or higher exposure and repetition rates.
I'm very sorry for your loss, and for your mom.
Your comment is very thoughtful, and plausible. Most DNA mutations have no clinical consequences, and are repaired by the cellular DNA repair machinery. Some people have defects in one or more DNA repair enzymes, and are thus more susceptible to cancer. We all have mutations in our DNA occurring daily, but adding to that by exposure to extraneous factors like cell phone electromagnetic radiation could be the factor that tips the scales in certain people.
To me it makes sense on multiple levels to use bluetooth devices.
The author isn't much different from Henry Kissinger writing a guest OpEd for the NY Times. He's an oncologist at Columbia University according to the biographical information at the end of the article.
1989? Adjust for technology. Those old analog phones had an output power of over 3 watts. Modern phones are generally less than a watt.
But even then, every major study of the issue I’ve ever seen said there is no strong correlation between cell phone use and cancer, much less actual causation. Probably the main reason is that cell phones produce non-ionizing radiation, the kind that doesn’t cause cancer. It’s like a microwave (it’s in the same frequency range), it may warm things up, but it’s not going to give them cancer.
OMA... btw: That’s why we text :) l8r
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