Search results matching tag 'mobile phones'

Insider trading

jowddty — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:01:00 GMT

If you haven’t seen the 1999 movie The Insider, it offers a cautionary tale about the mobile-phone industry. It’s based on the true story of a producer (played by Al Pacino) of the American TV show 60 Minutes and a former employee of the tobacco industry (played by Russell Crowe), and their joint attempt to blow the whistle on the tobacco industry.

Although supposedly restrained by a non-disclosure agreement, Crowe reluctantly shares his inside knowledge that the corporate heads of the tobacco titans, who long knew that tobacco was highly addictive, suppressed that information for years through industry sponsored ‘studies’, which repeatedly claimed to find no such association. All of smoking’s risks were hidden behind a smokescreen of official
research. As we now know, the only studies that found passive smoking wasn’t harmful were those sponsored by the tobacco industry.

This pattern is now repeating itself in the mobile-phone industry. As WDDTY Deputy Editor Joanna Evans reveals in our cover story this month, a new review of all the independent data—yet to be published—leads one to an indisputable conclusion: mobile phones cause cancer.

The new research, along with the INTERPHONE study, a multimilliondollar, 13-country investigation into a possible cancer risk, reveals a ‘tipping point’—the amount of incremental exposure that causes mobile-phone use to become highly deadly. After 10 years’ of regular use, according to one study, your risk of brain cancer rises by an astonishing 280 per cent. However, the risk begins at surprisingly small doses. For every 100 hours of use, your risk increases by 5 per cent. And the risk isn’t limited to only mobile phones, but to any cordless phone—and what modern house is without one these days?

For years, the mobile-phone industry has bought and paid for studies that consistently show no risk, thus keeping the debate over the dangers alive. Indeed, the industry once produced a study showing that sticking a phone to your head actually protects against brain cancer. Most scandalous of all, by keeping the hazards in doubt, the industry has been allowed to market directly to children. Blackberrys and other
brands, formerly only targeted at the high-use corporate types, are now being scaled and priced down for preteens and teenagers this Christmas.

It stands to reason that children are more exposed to danger, as the protective mechanisms of the skull and neural connections are still developing. Nevertheless, we have no idea exactly how much risk our
children are facing. No study has ever bothered to investigate exactly what this sea of radiation is doing to them, nor ask what happens if a child keeps a phone constantly to hand or head. However, what is especially disturbing about the new evidence is how easily industry of any sort—whether pharmaceuticals, tobacco or mobile phones—can purchase scientific credibility.

All Western governments live comfortably off the billions of dollars and pounds paid to them by mobile-phone licensing deals, so they are the last people to look closely at whose pocketbook has funded the research. Thankfully, the French have taken the lead by banning phones in primary schools. May the rest
of the EU and the US not wait as long as they did with tobacco.

Re: glioblastoma multiforme

ampgray — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:49:18 GMT

Good luck with any potential cures.

However, if your cousin wants to avoid having the condition back again when (let's hope) he recovers I strongly suggest that they give up using a mobile phone at all - as this type of agressive tumour is linked to Mobile Phone Radiation. For a good current article go to the Daily Mail website at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1224827/As-new-evidence-links-mobile-phones-greater-risk-tumours-using-cost-child-life.html and also take a look at www.wiredchild.org as well as www.mastsanity.org .

Hope your cousin makes a full recovery.

Ade

Cigarettes and mobile phones

bshubbard — 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.

Re: Mobile phones more dangerous than smoking?

lysetskilde — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:36:14 GMT

I have made a what I call The triple Breath for Mobile Phone, and it change the mobile Phone to a healing tool.

Look here www.healingwateronline.com and if you want to try, let me know and I will give 50 Triple Breath for mobile phones away.

Their industry is cancer

bshubbard — 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.

Mobile phone health risks: 5 recent discoveries

Birdseye — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 15:54:00 GMT

This week, several bloggers have pointed out the contradiction between the recent New Scientist report on the links between mobile phone use and cancer, and the Finnish study indicating that there are no risks involved in mobile phone use. This article has the details.

Last month in WDDTY, Tony Edwards quoted five alarming recent discoveries about the effects of mobile phone use:

The incidence of malignant brain tumours was found to be 5.9 times higher risk after analogue mobile-phone use, 3.7 times higher after digital mobile use and 2.3 times higher after cordless phone use, with more than 2000 cumulative hours (Int Arch Occup Environ Health, 2006; 79: 630–9).
Albeit in rats, and so may not apply to humans, mobile telephone radiation leads to oxidative stress in cornea and lens tissues in the eye (Curr Eye Res, 2007; 32: 21–5).
Because of the shape of their heads, children receive 60 per cent more radiation from mobiles than adults do (Electromagn Biol Med, 2006; 25: 349–60).
Studies funded by the mobile-phone industry are the least likely to find any evidence of harm (Environ Health Perspect, 2007; 115: 1–4).
A Danish study found no connection between mobile phone use and brain tumours (J Natl Cancer Inst, 2006; 98: 1707–13). Critics point out that this study (a) did not control for the amount of mobile phone use, (b) mostly involved infrequent users, and (c) was funded by the cellular phone industry.

Meanwhile, one blogger has conducted his own scientific experiment to test the dangers of mobile phones. I wouldn’t exactly call it conclusive, but his post is worth a look for the pictures alone.

As always, a trawl of the WDDTY archives for articles on the health risks of mobile phones can be illuminating. Have a look here.