MobileWise

The Israeli parliament is considering requiring all cell phones sold in Israel to carry a health-hazard warning label. The bill passed a preliminary reading last Wednesday and, if passed, will require phones to carry labels reading:

‘Warning – the Health Ministry cautions that heavy use and carrying the device next to the body may increase the risk of cancer, especially among children.’

All advertising targeting children would also be banned under the law.

Israeli member of parliament Dov Khenin said “The bill that passed today is a breakthrough in expanding public awareness of the possible risks in using cellular phones.”

In November 1998, UK campaigners tried to force retailers to put warning labels on mobile phones in a legal action but the evidence was not strong enough at that time:   Dr Christopher Busby, Visiting Professor in the Department of Bio-Molecular Sciences in the University of Ulster and expert witness in that case said today: “The proposed labelling of these devices by Israel’s government is a welcome development and I hope our government will follow suit.”

MobileWise is urging the UK government to adopt similar measures. Our director, Vicky Fobel said “The UK is falling behind other countries, many of which are taking steps to inform the public of the potential risks, and how they can protect themselves. Children in particular need to be informed of safety steps. The Department of Health has had a safety warning for 11 years but it is hidden away and children and families don’t know about it”

As well as the latest move in Israel, other initiatives abroad demonstrate a growing recognition of the mounting evidence:

• San Francisco’s city government recently passed regulations requiring phone retailers to give customers a leaflet containing safety advice but the phone industry has mounted a legal challenge.

• In France, mobile phones are banned from primary schools, all phones must be supplied with a headset and advertising targeted at children is banned. The government has initiated a safety information programme through its National Institute for Prevention and Health Education.

• In Canada, the country’s public health service has issued new guidelines over children’s mobile phone use which include practical advice for under-18s on how to reduce exposure to radiation

Our report, released on Wednesday, was widely covered in the UK and international media. Some of the press called children’s mobile phone health risks a ticking “time bomb”. We think this sums up the situation presented in our report rather well.

Coverage of the report meant the media aired the long overdue debate over what should be done about phone health risks. Given that we won’t know for years whether phones are safe – and, as our report shows, the evidence is stacking up against them – shouldn’t we think about what we could be doing now, before it’s too late?

On Wednesday morning we were pleased to read in the Express that the head of the Mobile Operators Association (the UK phone industry body) thinks children should be discouraged from using mobiles too much. Great news!  We hoped the phone industry was going to get out there and tell kids not to keep putting phones to their heads and we could all go home and stop campaigning.

Predictably, they backtracked a few hours later in their official response which contained the usual defensive reassurance and certainly no mention of constructive action. Not a word about publicising government recommendations advising that children should limit their calls. Nothing about alerting the public to the industry’s own small print warnings suggesting customers hold the phone away from the head.

Instead, the Mobile Operators Association dismissed our report and the World Health Organization’s official panel’s judgement on the evidence with mealy-mouthed statements about the risk not having been established. Sure, the risk hasn’t been proven, but that doesn’t mean we should all sit on our hands.

This head-in-the-sand approach is reminiscent of the tobacco companies’ stance back in the 1950’s. Just watch an episode of Mad Men and spot the parallels. The risks from tobacco weren’t proven for about 30 years after cigarettes became widespread and the failure to act quickly resulted in millions of unnecessary deaths.

If only phone companies were as modern about their approach to health as they are in developing their products. It’s supposed to be the age of corporate responsibility, after all. We hope the phone industry will hurry up and join the 21^st century, instead of acting as though they’re following a PR text book written in the 50s.

Read the report here

Read the media coverage about the report here.

Read more about the politics at www.microwavenews.com

Regular visitors to our website will know that, in the world of mobile phone research, things are not always what they seem. A new study on brain cancer risk from mobiles released today proves the point again.

Published in the British Medical Journal, the study of several hundred thousand Danes concludes that mobile phone use does not raise the risk of getting a brain tumour.

But scientists have dismissed the study as seriously flawed and offering false reassurance.

Even the study’s own research team have admitted it’s flawed. The report itself states that “a limitation of the study is potential misclassification of exposure…Subscription holders who are not using their phone will erroneously be classified as exposed and people without a subscription but still using a mobile phone will erroneously be classified as unexposed.”

Dr Denis Henshaw, Emeritus Professor of Human Radiation Effects at the University of Bristol, calls its findings “worthless”. He says that “this seriously flawed study misleads the public and decision makers about the safety of mobile phone use.”

Epidemiologist Dr Devra Davis of the Environmental Health Trust in the US says the ‘new’ study is only an extension of one already published by the Danish team two years ago. Not only was it widely criticised at the time, but it was rejected by the World Health Organization as unreliable when they did a review of studies in May. The WHO panel decided almost unanimously to classify mobile radiation as ‘possibly carcinogenic’.

The study purported to analyse long term use of mobiles when in fact the minimum period of use was only one year. It also excluded business users from the users group, who were by far the heaviest users in the early days of mobile use and also excluded those who started their phone subscription after 1995, plausibly a very significant proportion. This created a potentially huge distortion in the results by inflating the apparent risk of non-users and reducing that of users.

Studies that don’t find a link generally get lots of media attention and we imagine this one will too, despite its own research team acknowledging it’s flawed.

You can read more details about the study on the Powerwatch site.

As evidence mounts about the health risks of mobile phone radiation, some administrations are taking action. San Francisco’s government is obliging phone retailers to display posters and give customers safety leaflets telling them how to limit their radiation exposure.  In its leaflet, the five-point checklist for reducing personal exposure starts with an injunction to limit children’s use.

As well as the practical advice, the leaflet being given to all mobile phone customers also tells people about the World Health Organization’s classification of mobile phone radiation as a ‘possible carcinogen’. They recognise that  the word ‘possible’ isn’t a reason to delay action:The French government is also taking action. Its National Institute for Prevention and Health Education has launched a campaign to alert the public to mobile risks.

So why isn’t the British government getting this information into the public domain? It has had an unpublicised leaflet recommending children limit their use of mobiles hidden in an obscure part of their website for the best part of a decade. If the risks are as substantial as many studies suggest, the Government’s failure to inform the public is leaving a health time bomb to tick.

We’ve been talking to the Department of Health about publicising its warning. We’ll keep you posted.

Kevin O’Neil, consultant neurosurgeon at Charing Cross Hospital and trustee of MobileWise, has called on the medical profession to support safety measures for children. In a letter to the British Medical Journal (BMJ) he stresses the particular vulnerability of young people and the need to protect them, to help prevent a future increase in brain tumours.

Kevin O’Neill’s alert to fellow medics comes amid growing concern that children need to protect themselves from these emerging risks, as he explains in this short film:

For more information on the implications of phone use for children, see How Safe and Did You Know?.

It’s easy for young people to cut the risks:

The World Health Organization (WHO) has classed mobile phone radiation as a “possible human carcinogen”.  It has just issued its full report in The Lancet Oncology Journal outlining the evidence for an association between mobile phone use and certain brain cancers. It states that the evidence for the link  is not conclusive but is possible. So what should we make of that?  

To paraphrase the conclusion of the WHO report: when people use phones over a long-ish period – if their estimates of their use can be trusted – they seem to get more brain tumours, especially on the side they usually hold their phone.

But we don’t know for sure whether one causes the other. There could be a confounding factor: maybe people who use phones a lot also lead unhealthier lives . More fast food? Less sleep? More X-rays?  Who knows?

So is this an “everything gives you cancer” moment, as some have suggested?  Is this a trifling risk, maybe like the coffee that appears in same  World Health Organization category listing“possible” carcinogens ? Or is it a major one like tobacco and asbestos?  

The body of evidence showing risk from mobile phone radiation has been growing rapidly. From a smattering of studies in the early Noughties showing up some disquieting results, recently we have seen study after study find a link between phone use and cancer (though interestingly that isn’t always what the press has reported).  Almost every one of the many studies published that has looked at people who have used a phone for at least 10 years has found an increase in brain tumours.

People  who liken phone health risks to those of drinking coffee (a parallel brought to journalists’ attention by the phone industry’s representative body,  the CTIA, immediately after the WHO ruling) ignore the fact that many of the other toxins in the WHO’s Class 2B have all been around for a very long time, such as  coffee, gasoline and bitumen. So we can get a handle on how serious a risk we are dealing with there.

 But when it comes to mobiles, the science is in its infancy. The longest period of use that’s been studied is 10 years. Yet brain tumours take around 20 years to develop, so the full effects would not yet be showing up in the research and we may only be seeing the tip of the iceberg.

This is critical. Ninety per cent of over 11’s  in the UK now have their own mobile phone and research shows children are muchmore vulnerable to the  radiation emitted by mobiles:  theyabsorb up to 60% more radiation because of their smaller heads and thinner sculls. By the time they are in their  thirties they will have used mobiles for as long as it takes a tumour to develop.

A  new review of studies concluding that there has been no ‘material increase’ in brain tumours in the past 10-15 years hascreated headlines . But we wouldn’t expect to see an increase yet given the latency lag. And in this review, unlike the World Health Organization one, key studies demonstrating statistically significant increases in certain brain tumours  were ignored.

Contradictory reports leave us all feeling disoriented. They alsopander  to our hope that mobile phone danger isn’t yet another problem to worry about. This does a disservice to the children growing up ill-informed and exposed to a potentially serious – and easily avoidable – risk.

In  1929 Fritz Lickint published the first paper linking tobacco to lung cancer. The evidence was the first warning bell following a mass explosion in smoking during and after the First World War.  But it wasn’t until the 1960s that governments started getting serious about discouraging smoking. The early signs were ignored, while the tobacco industry milked the scientific and regulatory uncertainties for all they were worth.

The explosion in mobile phone use means that we are in uncharted territories again. The science just doesn’t tell us enough about the profile of this risk. So we need to think intelligently about how we deal with it . The MobileWise Safe Mobile Code is one way – better safe than sorry.

The UK government recognised the unquantified risk for young people when it issued a recommendation in 2000 that under-16s limit their phone use.  But it  hasn’t publicised this warning to anyone who might have conveyed it to children – like their parents or teachers. The latest version of the Department of Health leaflet containing the warning  is not even being printed.

When we look back, will we be proud if we dismiss  the compelling (if not conclusive) evidence that mobile phones might be giving us brain tumours? Might we wish we’d taken the label ‘possible’ more seriously and not responded with that lazy cliche´ “everything gives you cancer”?

Dr. Devra Davis is a renowned epidemiologist and writer. In this video she explains the issues, and why she supports MobileWise as a scientific adviser.

You can download the Safe Mobile Code here.

The decision of the WHO to classify mobile phones as a possible carcinogen has led to a frenzy of coverage, on air and in print.

Most of the media reports have aimed to play down the risks. Yet the very evidence that the WHO drew on to classify wireless radiation as a class 2 carcinogen was impressive and extensive. They reviewed hundreds of studies, including some as yet unpublished: it was a consummately scientific assessment.

So why the apparent eagerness to play down that evidence and the new WHO decision?

Journalists’ working lives depend on wireless devices, be they mobiles, laptops or iPads. They don’t want to believe that what have become essential tools of their trade are dangerous. Neither do their readers, especially those with children.

But after last week’s widely-reported Council of Europe declaration that young people are at high risk of radiation damage from wireless equipment, any parent – writer or reader, teacher or doctor – should be concerned.

Why the widespread denial then?

Because people feel themselves caught in an all-or-nothing dilemma: deny the evidence and live with the unfolding health risks; accept it and you’ll have to bin your mobile. Significantly, that would mean parents denying their kids one of their most treasured toys, with all the conflict that supposes.

But it’s not that black-and-white.

Children – and their parents – can reduce these emerging health risks greatly by using their phones more intelligently: it’s as simple as that.

No one keeps children indoors because the roads are dangerous: we simply increase their awareness of the dangers and teach them how to cross roads safely. Child mortality – proportionate to the number of cars on the roads – has decreased as a result.

That kind of pragmatic ‘Green Cross Code’ approach is even more important with mobile use.

The dangers of crossing the road carelessly are not cumulative; the health risks resulting from excessive mobile use are. And for our children, those risks will accumulate over an entire lifetime.

So what is the answer? It can be encapsulated in just five simple, practical rules that any child can understand, the Safe Mobile Code: