The Latency Problem

A close call: Why the jury is still out on mobile phones - The Independent

Scientists at the Children with Cancer conference in London this week will advocate that governments adopt the ‘precautionary principle’ – advising phone users to take simple steps to protect themselves and their children from potential, not proven, long term health risks of electromagnetic fields - especially head cancers.

They will call for urgent research into new Office of National Statistics figures that suggest a 50 per cent increase in frontal and temporal lobe tumours – the areas of the brain most susceptible to the electromagnetic radiation emitted by mobile phones – between 1999 and 2009.

Dr Annie Sasco from the Epidemiology for Cancer Prevention unit at Bordeaux Segalen University is at the conference discussing the 1 to 2 per cent annual increase in childhood brain cancers.

“It’s not age, it’s too fast to be genetic, and it isn’t all down to lifestyle, so what in the environment can it be? We now live in an electro-smog and people are exposed to wireless devices that we have shown in the lab to have a biological impact. It makes sense that kids are more sensitive – they have smaller heads and thinner skulls, so EMFs get into deeper, more important structures.

“It is totally unethical that experimental studies are not being done very fast, in big numbers, by independently funded scientists. The industry is just doing their job, I am more preoccupied with the so called independent scientists and institutions saying there is no problem.”

According to Joel Moskowitz, director of the Center for Family and Community Health at the University of California, Berkley, “This is the largest technological experiment in the history of our species and we’re trying to bury our head in sand about the potential risks to cells, organs, reproduction, the immune system, behaviour, risks we still know next to nothing about.