[Hidden-tech] Cell Phones and EMF Risks Study

[Gavin Andresen]

Oh boy, my Skeptical Alarm is going off big-time with this one.

Reasons to be skeptical of this:

1. It's a "meta-analysis."  They didn't actually do any research themselves,
but pulled together data from 11 other studies ("Garbage in, garbage out"
applies doubly to meta-analysis statistics).  And many of the underlying
studies looked at small numbers of people (because brain tumors not caused
by some other type of cancer are pretty rare).

2. There might be confounding factors-- something ELSE about heavy
cell-phone users other than cell-phones that make them susceptible to
"acoustic neuromas and gliomas"  -- that the researchers didn't control
for.    Maybe they drink more coffee than  less-heavy cell phone users, or
are under more stress or...

3. The study says that the risk is 20-30% greater, but greater than what?
How big or small is the risk to begin with?
According to  http://neurosurgery.mgh.harvard.edu/abta/primer.htm#Section3,
you've got about an 8 in 100,000 risk of getting a brain tumor this year.
20-30% greater risk would bump that up to a 10 in 100,000 risk.

4. The two types of tumors they found were:
  acoustic neuromas.  According to
http://www.med.umn.edu/otol/library/aneuroma/origin.htm, "*An acoustic
neuroma (sometimes also termed a neurinoma or vestibular schwannoma) is a
benign or non-cancerous growth"*
  ... and gliomas, of which there are several varieties and are the nasty
type of brain cancer you've really gotta worry about (although brain tumors
near your ears aren't NEARLY as bad as brain tumors deep in your head).  So
the "two types of cancer" is very misleading.

-- 
--
Gavin Andresen
http://gavinthink.blogspot.com/
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