World Health Organization Links Cell Phones, Cancer Risk

[devotedsniper]

Didn't they say this about mobile phones years ago? like 5-10 years ago?

Yes... And the antennas were stronger and BIGGER back then.

Also did you know that everyone who ever tea has died and will died. Do you see the connection between tea and the definite mortal rate now? Do you regret drinking tea and will you think twice of drinking tea now?

Also on the headlines, I have a rock on my desk that keeps lions away, of course there aren't any lions in Finland and that is all thanks to this rock. Would you like to buy this rock so you can be safe of tigers also?

On topic...
I know this dude, who been sitting front of phone antennas as a job for bast something 15 years, developing and testing them, guess what hes cancer free. Tho he is balding slowly, being 50 and all, you think Telephone antennas and balding at older age might be connected?

And they are going to start selling those golden "rad shields" again... Oh the mid and end 90's how useless were you...

Also, I am not physics student but, radio-waves aren't ionizing radiation. ? Specially the short wavelengths?

Why ain't the scourging trough the foods and chemicals anymore? Aren't they enough of a scare anymore?

As far as i'm concerned it's been blown out of porpotion as usual with the news, if it were so bad mobiles phones wouldn't be in use anymore, and if i remember correctly i read somewhere that all objects give off radiation (especially electronic ones), it's just that it's not enough to do harm.

 

[Bruden]

As soon as it said "cooks your brain" I knew it was based on bullshit studies. There has never been any proven instance of a cellphone causing a temperature increase in your brain. It has however been hoisted as proof by people who don't know what they are talking about.

here's a much better sourced version

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/05/who-declares-cellphones-possibly-carcinogenic.ars

And it's not a "coalition of 31 scientists" it was a meeting attended by 31 scientists. And they didn't agree that cellphone use was hazardous, just that it fell into the classification of "possibly carcinogenic" which means there's limited evidence if any. This was not a study, there was no research done, no findings obtained, it was a group of people that came together and agreed that they should probably look into the issue.

 

[McMullen]

...strange. I was sure this research had already been reported several years back, hyped in the media, caused mild hysteria in those most prone to it, and was then quietly but soundly discredited until people eventually stopped talking about it if they wanted to be taken seriously.

In explanation of the findings, Dr. Keith Black, chairman of neurology at Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, likened the radiation given off by a cellular phone to a small microwave. "What microwave radiation does in most simplistic terms is similar to what happens to food in microwaves, essentially cooking the brain," he said.

As a communicator of science to the public, this guy is horrible at his job, if not an outright fraud. If he was using an analogy to simplify things for the public, it's a bad and misleading one. Horrible, horrible job. If microwaves do cause cancer - and there's no conclusive evidence that they do - they do not do it through cooking tissue. If your phone were cooking anything, you would expect excruciating pain in the hand holding the phone, accompanied by burns. Since about the only heat you feel from your cell phone is the waste heat from battery usage, we can rule that out.

As for the scare factor from radiation, microwaves have less energy per photon than infra-red and visible light, which in turn have less than ultraviolet, which is the lowest-energy ionizing radiation there is. It is ionizing radiation that causes cancer by shredding your DNA enough to corrupt the file called YourGenes.dna. Since microwaves are a few orders of magnitude less powerful than the weakest ionizing radiation, that's not the problem either.

 

[HellenicWarrior]

I swear, if i end up sterile or with thigh cancer i'm going to beat the shit out of the first phone executive I find.

 

[Aeshi]

Everything gives you Cancer these days.

 

[CrazyCapnMorgan]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there mention of something like this a year or two ago about how some organization sent a memo to its members to suggest the reduction of the use of cell phones because of the risk that it posed for cancer?

It's times like these I curse my long term memory.