[BITList] mobiles & cancer

[franka]

  Row over cancer risk of mobiles

  * by:Adam Cresswell
  * From:The Australian <http://www.theaustralian.com.au/>
  * December 30, 201112:00AM

*AUSTRALIAN brain surgeon Charlie Teo is one of 16 world experts who 
have accused a global newspaper of publishing "technical errors and 
misleading statements" in an article that rubbished the idea mobile 
phones cause cancer. *

In an open letter, the experts, who work in Europe, the US and Australia 
and have qualifications in fields such as cancer medicine, public 
health, statistics and electromagnetism, said the article published in 
The Economist "fails to provide critical information about this 
important public health challenge", and demanded that the journal print 
a correction.

The experts wrote that history was "replete with failures to control 
highly profitable carcinogenic substances, ranging from tobacco to 
asbestos, until proof of harm became irrefutable", and suggested on a 
conservative analysis that mobile phones and other wireless radiation 
might be seeding 250,000 avoidable brain tumours every year.

The document was released in riposte to an article published in the 
British-based Economist in September that ridiculed those who believe 
mobile phones are harming people as a "tinfoil-hat brigade" who continue 
to believe "deadly waves in the ether are frying their brains".

The Economist article implied that because radiowaves, microwaves and 
radiation from mobile phones and other devices was "non-ionising" 
radiation that lacked the energy to knock electrons out of atoms there 
was no plausible mechanism by which such radiation could trigger cancer.

The 16 co-authors replied that independent studies had shown mobile 
phone emissions could damage genetic material, increase the production 
of DNA-damaging free radicals, and affect the heart, brain, liver and 
hormone production.

In May, the World Health Organisation's International Agency for 
Research on Cancer upgraded its warning on mobile phone emissions to 
"possibly carcinogenic", which The Economist said put them in the same 
category as coffee and false teeth, but which the 16 experts say is also 
the same as for DDT, engine exhausts and fluorinated flame retardants.



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