The National Institutes of Health's MedicinePlus website carried a Reuters article last week stating that Most tumors not within cell phone radiation range. The article refers to a study Location of Gliomas in Relation to Mobile Telephone Use: A Case-Case and Case-Specular Analysis by Dr. Suvi Larjavaara from the University of Tampere in Finland in the American Journal of Epidemiology, which said that, "These results do not suggest that gliomas in mobile phone users are preferentially located in the parts of the brain with the highest radio-frequency fields from mobile phones." The study included 888 gliomas (brain tumors) from 7 European countries (2000-2004) with tumor midpoints defined on a 3-dimensional grid based on radiologic images.
In the article on the NIH web site, Dr. Larjavaara cautioned that the results of the Finnish study are not conclusive since only 5 percent of the people included in the study had been using mobile phones for at least 10 years and cancer can take years to develop. She also acknowledged the finding contradict the World Health Organization's latest announcement putting cell phone use in the same cancer risk category as coffee and chloroform.
Doug Lung is one of America's foremost authorities on broadcast RF technology. He has been with NBC since 1985 and is currently vice president of broadcast technology for NBC/Telemundo stations.
