Death by Mobile Phone

Many of you will be reading this with a mobile phone held to your ear; if you are under 30, it will probably be permanently glued there. Personally, I only use them when I have to, turning the damn thing off outside of office hours. And I’m increasingly happy about my apathy towards chatting and texting endlessly about, well, nothing in particular.

The reason for this is that (and even the ‘corporate’ media have found this impossible to ignore), the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an arm of the World Health Organization (WHO), has declared after a review of the research that mobile phones are very possibly cancer-causing agents. The expert panel ruled that there was evidence that mobile phone use was linked to two types of tumours—brain tumours (gliomas) and acoustic neuromas.

Some scientists say the IARC classification is still not strong enough, and that mobile phone radiation should have been classified as a ‘Probable Human Carcinogen’ based on the existing science, but apparently there were not enough studies to classify it more soundly at the present time.

Okay, you’ve no doubt heard rumours about this before and chose to ignore it. But the science is getting stronger and more convincing. And with the amount of time young people (and nowadays not so young people) spend with a mobile phone pressed to their ears, it’s now almost certainly another time bomb the NHS has to worry about.

Professor Dariusz Leszczynski, of the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority in Finland, explains “… for the first time a very prominent evaluation report states it so openly and clearly: RF-EMF is possibly carcinogenic to humans. One has to remember that IARC monographs are considered as ‘gold standard’ in evaluation of carcinogenicity of physical and chemical agents. If IARC says it so clearly then there must be sufficient scientific reason for it, or IARC would not put its reputation behind such claim.”

So there youare: time to cut down on mobile use. All right, you’ll feel far less important on the train, but you’ll cut your chances dramatically of dying a horrible death; it seems a fair compromise to me.

ROD MILLINGTON

chief editor