Crumbs
Rich T finds some tasty titbits you might have missed in the week's news
Thursday 7 December 2006, 5:58 PM
Time to settle radiation nerves?
The survey monitored a huge sample of 420,000 users of mobile phones, and the findings have been printed in depth in a key health industry journal.
The Danish work follows in the same vein as other well-respected research, including findings from the Institute of Cancer Research, which concluded with the same outcome.
Hopefully this will settle a few nerves among users of both cellular and WiFi technology.
Concerns have been rife recently, topped by calls by Ian Gibson - an MP and a cancer specialist - for an inquiry by the Department of Health into WiFi radiation, in the manner of the Stewart Report.
There will always be pessimists, but hopefully some will be more persuaded to tolerate the technology now.
PreviousComments on this post
From what I can see, the media hype over this study was outrageous. The study itself appears to be a bit of a sham, though not through any incompetence or maliciously, merely unavailability of the data.
It is worth bringing up that although they had 450,000 users in their sample, they had 750,000 users initially, of which 100,000 had to removed for duplication (fair enough), and 200,000 users had to be removed because they were corporately registered and the human user could not be tracked down. So 33% of their sample size, which the authors themselves admitted in their discussion were likely to be the most major users, were put in the "general population to compare phone users against / AKA non-users" group.
On top of that, the data they attempted to collect was based on those that had started their phone subscription between 1982 and 1995. Anyone who started their phone subscription after 1995 (which if our country is anything to go by will be the majority of phone users), and anyone who users their phone via PAYG instead of contract, will again be put into the "non-phone users" category.
Now I'm not saying they would have found an effect anyway, but having more phone users in your "non-user" category than your "phone user" category, regardless of how big your phone user category is, is just plain daft - of course you won't find anything.
Having said that, they did find a rather strangely significant protective effect for a number of cancers, which they put down to phone users not being smokers or something, but it is odd that both they and the other interphone studies seemed to veer towards the protective effect of the phone, as opposed to some studies showing very much the opposite effect
However, any conspiracies of industry bias or anything else aside, I fail to see how any merit can be drawn from the conclusions of this study one way or another, when it appears to be the unfortunate victim of gross lack of data availability.
