I can’t find any other mention to the claim in this article on andPop (I know…it sounds fishy), but if there’s any truth to the story it’s got me thinking extra about my cell phone usage, especially since I’m in a rural area. I’ve always been apprehensive about cell phone usage and very conscientious about the SAR ratings of phones that I use, so the possibility of this news being accurate doesn’t do much in the way of calming my suspicions…
Here’s a much better article from the Cancer.org web site that goes into greater detail about the link, if any, between cell phones, their use, and cancer. The article was last revised on 12/16/2004, and references many studies and articles on the topic from the last 10 years.
May 19th, 2005 at 1:09 pm
The original article was linked to from Fark.com, which usually has legitimate news but also some satire. Since the content didn’t strike me as all that funny, I was wondering about the legitimacy of the report. Honestly, though, I think I was too concerned with my own fears about cell phone use that I didn’t even see that it was a Swedish study.
I also didn’t bother to read the comments from the Fark link (I originally saw the story on Fark’s RSS feed). Double oops!
It is nice to have an expert comment on a post, though.
May 19th, 2005 at 9:52 am
Please, move away from the fishy news websites. Ok this is my area of expertise. It was an epidemiological study done in Sweden, so you have generalizeability issues there. I.e., Can you apply their situation to the U.S.? Furthermore, their study had lower statistical power than it could have had. Their conclusion even notes, “…the results in this study must be interpreted with caution due to low numbers in some of the calculations.” Basically this study must be replicated (preferably in the U.S.) before its results can be valued.
If you want to read the abstract to the journal article, go to: oem.bmjjournals.com.
Now if you’ll excuse me, my cell phone’s ringing…