Study on Cell Phone Link to Cancer questionable
If there’s one routine implement that’s omnipresent, from American cities to remote villages of the developing world, it’s the mobile handset.
Can they also be deadly?
The exasperatingly unsettled dispute erupted again this week with the release of a $24 million U.N. study straddling a decade and covering 13 nations that suggests recurrent cell phone use may boost the chances of developing rare but deadly form of brain cancer.
Troublingly, since glioma has a budding latency period of a quarter century — longer than cell phones have been in pervasive use — even the study’s authors say there is no way yet to tell how big the risk is, if there is one.
Specialists were nearly common in saying the results of the study are inconclusive. But the fact that it turned up even some proof of a cancer risk may have profound corollaries for a appliance that people have become habituated to seeing as extensions of themselves.
From farmers in Africa who rely on cell phones to check crop reports to dodge fund traders compulsively checking Blackberries at trendy restaurants to suburban American kids spending hours calling their friends — people around the world have come to rely on mobile phones as never before.
