Cell phones don’t cause cancer. Looks like they never did

In 1993, a Florida man claimed on TV that talking on the cell phone had given his wife a brain tumour. Scientists looked up from their experiments and said, “whaaat!”, but the idea caught on like apple cider vinegar for an empty stomach.After all, cell phones emit radiation. Like ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’ over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or Chernobyl. And radiation causes cancer. The logic was irresistible. Some time later, someone pointed out that cell phones emit microwaves. Just like microwave ovens. No wonder, your ear feels hot after a long talk. Meanwhile, your brain is probably getting fried, they suggested.People became even more alarmed and started demanding answers. Were cell phones causing brain cancer? Deep inside, most people believed they were, but it didn’t dent sales or per-person talk time, just like global warming hasn’t dulled your appetite for an SUV and driving. But the clamour for answers became so loud that scientists and governments had to do something about it. They did some research, and the results just came out.The World Health Organisation (WHO) — which said China and its Wuhan lab had no role in Covid — has now put its stamp and seal on the safety of cell phones. You can talk all you like, safely, it says. That’s the short take. Here’s the long one.What WHO has saidOver the past 30 years, thousands of teams looked into the cell phone-cancer correlation. Most of this research was of the same standard as studies that found red wine is good for your heart, so the WHO whittled the list down to around 5,000 studies and finally picked 63 of them that had been published between 1994 and 2022.After going through all the data, it concluded that there’s no association between cell phone use and brain cancer. Also, talking on a cell phone won’t give you head or neck cancer. It won’t in one day, and it won’t over 10 or 20 years because the length of phone use does not matter. Also, how much time you spend on the phone each day makes no difference. That’s what the WHO says. medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/tL9jtuE8L8M?si=u1QX58eHEq_I4qjEA different tuneBack in 2011, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which is a part of the WHO, had classified exposure to radio waves (including the type that cell phones use) as a “possible cause” of cancer among humans. It did so because some studies at the time indicated cancer cases were rising in tandem with cell phone use.The problem with these studies was that they relied on what brain cancer patients said about their cell phone use. It turned out that they over-reported or exaggerated how much time they had spent talking on their phones. That’s why the WHO needed to look at other types of research, and took 13 years to go from “possibly yes” to “definitely no” on the question of whether cell phones cause cancer.Other agencies agreeThe US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has also said this year that “there is no consistent or credible scientific evidence of health problems caused by the exposure to radio frequency energy emitted by cell phones”.Its argument is based on America’s cancer statistics and sounds convincing. If cell phone use causes brain cancer or other types, cancer rates would have exploded over the past 20 years. But the FDA says that between 2000 and 2016, the rates of brain and other nervous system cancers actually declined.And it’s a significant drop: from 6.9 cases per 100,000 people in 2000 to 5.9 cases per 100,000 people in 2016. And these cancers have been becoming less common for almost 40 years. The FDA says, “from 1987 to 2016, the rate of such tumours has been dropping by approximately 0.2% per year”.The main point is that while the percentage of the US population using a cell phone increased from 62 to 96 between 2002 and 2019, “there is a small decrease in brain and other nervous tissue cancer rates”.Of mice and menTo make sure cell phones are safe for us, scientists turned to rats and mice. Altogether some 5,500 of these animals were put through a very punishing course of radiation from the foetal stage to death in the US and Italy.A rat lives for about two years and the 3,000 involved in the US experiments received radiation of 900 megahertz frequency over their entire bodies (not just the head-ear region) for 9 hours a day, every day.The FDA says the 9-hour dose was not delivered continuously: “The radio frequency energy was delivered in intervals of 10 minutes on and 10 minutes off for 18 hours and 20 minutes a day, every day, for two years.” Also, the level of radiation was 75 times higher than the exposure limit for humans. medium113165350At the end of the experiment in 2018, the FDA concluded that:There were no health effects on female rats or mice (both male and female) exposed to these extreme conditions.Exposed rats lived longer than the control group rats (that is, rats that were not exposed to radiation).The second point does not mean cell phone use is a substitute for exercise and a healthy diet.Hang on a momentBut when partial results from the same study were leaked in 2016, the outlook was different. Scientific American said the findings… “present some of the strongest evidence to date that such exposure is associated with the formation of rare cancers in at least two cell types in the brains and hearts of rats”.It seemed then that as the rodents were exposed to increasing intensities of radiation, “more of them developed rare forms of brain and heart cancers that could not be easily explained away”.So, which of the verdicts should we accept? The latest one, of course, because it is based on numerous studies done over three decades.Of cats and tigersThe whole controversy about cell phones started from the fact that they emit radiation. So, how is it that nuclear bombs and X-rays are harmful but cell phones are not? Let’s just say cell phone radiation is like a cat while nuclear radiation is like a tiger. But if that won’t do, here’s a longer answer. medium113165336All radiation contains energy, and radio waves are classified as ‘ionising’ or ‘non-ionising’ depending on the amount of energy they contain. For example, X-rays and gamma rays are so strong they can “shred” the molecules of your body. They can cause damage at the DNA level, increasing the risk of cancer. Hence, they are the tigers among radio waves.But microwave radiation emitted by cell phones isn’t powerful enough to cause any changes at the molecular level. At the most, it causes heating. Which is why it is benign. Like a cat.In May 2013, The New York Times published an article about scientist Eleanor R Adair who had passed away aged 86 on April 20 that year. Eleanor had done microwave experiments on monkeys and humans (starting with herself) to show the rays were harmless.She would place her subject in a chamber and expose it to strong microwave radiation for 45 minutes. “She said she never found much more than perspiration. She said the monkeys and the people mostly enjoyed the experience,” NYT wrote.Ah, that explains the heating of your ear during a long call? No, the phone gets hot because it’s using the electrical energy stored in its battery. That’s why the only place you will pop corn with a phone is YouTube videos. medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/pqIZDIxJgXw?si=KHgX1pJoyBBhqmvqStill worried? Do thisThe lesson from Eleanor’s story is not that you try to microwave yourself in winter, but only that cell phones are harmless, at least physiologically. But if you are still worried, here are a few old tips to keep yourself safe from phone radiation:Don’t hold the phone against your ear. Use the speaker, or earphones instead.Don’t keep your phone in the pockets of your trousers or shirt.Phones emit the maximum radiation when they make contact with a tower, so raise your phone to your ear after the call has connected.Phones emit more radiation while transmitting. So, move your phone away a few centimetres when you speak.Avoid making calls while in a car or a train because the phone emits more radiation while trying to constantly establish contact with new towers.Make shorter calls when the network is weak, because your phone compensates by emitting more radiation.If that’s too much to remember, don’t call, just text.Images: AI