Cigarettes and mobile phones

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:51:00 GMT

Those of you old enough to witness the descent of the cigarette, from essential accessory for the sophisticate to Evil Incarnate, within two generations may be getting a sense of deja vu right now.

This time round it's the turn of the mobile, or cell, phone, which, over the past 15 years, has become the essential accessory for everyone who needs to tell everyone else everything you are doing at every moment.

Research has been quietly telling us that long-term mobile phone use can result in brain tumours, but these studies have usually been dismissed as the ravings of mavericks and madmen.

Despite this, UK government health officials have been warning us that children in particular may be especially vulnerable to radiation from the phones. Last week, Canada's health guardians voiced similar concerns, and this week the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute has warned faculty and staff to cut down on cell phone usage.

Others, including those in the pay of the mobile phone industry, continue to ridicule these concerns, but the doom-sayers are making a reasonable point. They are effectively saying: we don't yet know the long-term effects of persistent mobile phone usage, so it's better to be safe than sorry.

Cut to 40 years ago, and you can see a similar pattern over cigarette smoking. The manufacturers were even claiming that cigarettes were healthy, something that the mobile phone operators aren't saying, at least. The tobacco industry produced their own studies to 'prove' cigarettes weren't a health concern, something the mobile phone industry has also done.

It'll be interesting to see, if in 40 years' time, mobile phones are also banned from every public place, and each phone comes with a health warning.

Their industry is cancer

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 23 May 2008 12:05:00 GMT

How much do industry groups and their hired ‘experts’ hide from us the carcinogenic effects of their products and services?

We know the way the tobacco industry twisted and turned for years before finally having to admit that cigarettes cause cancer. But there are plenty of other industries, too, that seem to be playing fast and loose with the truth – even though it means that many thousands of us die every year from a cancer caused by our environment or from industrial or electro-pollution.

We know this because Dr Devra Davis, formerly with the US National Institute of Health, has finally blown the whistle on industries that deliberately mislead, confuse or blatantly lie to us about cancer. She wanted to tell all back in 1990 but her bosses warned her off, citing the example of Willhelm Hueper, who was forced out of the National Cancer Institute in the 1940s when he spoke out about the environmental causes of cancer.

As she says of her years at the NIH: “I watched the maturing of the science of doubt promotion – the concerted and well-funded effort to identify, magnify, and exaggerate doubts about what we could say that we know as a way of delaying actions to change the way the world operates.”

Their tactics are well known. They employ ‘experts’ whose task it is to stop genuine research and debate, and she mentions Sir Richard Doll as one example. Doll had concluded in the 1960s that medical x-rays were harmless, and yet they were stopped for pre-natal evaluation only 20 years later. He also supported the pro-fluoridation movement, and he confirmed the view that there was no link to cancer. However, he had miscalculated, and there was a correlation.

Similarly, poorly conducted trials are often touted as ‘proof’ that a service or product is safe. Just such a tactic was carried out on behalf of the mobile phone industry, which surveyed the cancer risk on 421,000 cell-phone users. The survey concluded there was no risk of brain tumour, and it made newspaper headlines around the world. But the study was a short-term review – often, brain tumours do not appear for at least 10 years – it also featured infrequent as well as frequent users, thus muddying the results, and it didn’t include any business people at all, probably the most intensive users.

It all leaves a nasty taste. While it’s every industry’s right to make a profit, should it be done when it risks the health of the general population? And, when they know the truth, isn’t it their obligation to share it with us all? Or is this yet another example of profits before people.

Source: The Secret History of the War on Cancer (Basic Books, New York, 2007. ISBN 978 0 465 015665) by Devra Davis.

Adverse Reactions : mobile phones

Cigarettes and mobile phones

Their industry is cancer