Biggest Study On Cellphone Health Effects Launched in Europe 109
An anonymous reader writes "The biggest study to date into the effects of cellphone usage on long-term health was launched today, aiming to track at least a quarter of a million of people in five European countries for up to 30 years. The Cohort Study on Mobile Communications (COSMOS) differs from previous attempts to examine links between mobile phone use and diseases such as cancer and neurological disorders in that it will follow users' behaviour in real time. Most other large-scale studies have centred around asking people already suffering from cancer or other diseases about their previous cellphone use. Researchers said long-term monitoring will provide more time for diseases to develop, since many cancers take 10 or 15 years for symptoms to appear."
permanent mouth movement (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder what mental and dental health effects they find now that most people's mouths never stop moving anymore.
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i'm constantly amazed by the drivel i hear from people who walk by me when they're using a cell. when cells were still car battery-sized and less common, my father used to say that people who constantly talked about inane topics had diarrhea of the mouth. it seems to me that cells have caused a pandemic of oral Giardia at this point.
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diarrhea of the mouth.
there's a word for that: logoerrea - literally translated from Greek: diarrhea of the logic (logos). the psychological disorder makes sense too http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logorrhoea [wikipedia.org]
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Foil hats (Score:2, Funny)
Foil hats on, chaps!
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These studies give me headaches.
Its making everyone older and fatter (Score:2)
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More info on study (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently the project is in the UK, Scandinavia and The Netherlands, let's see if I can participate...
No details on how the study is performed but I guess they will just try to gather data for statistical analysis. I hope they will make a difference between calling for hours daily (holding at your ear) and using mobile Internet over 3G for hours daily (on your lap / in hand)... Most studies until now just looked at the length of use and calculate the energy absorbed by the body (i.e. a sack of water), and I guess there aren't really a lot of interesting things to learn from that...
Is it ? (Score:1)
Cause or effect? (Score:5, Insightful)
So...um, if they find brain cancer in the sector of the population who can't ever seem to put their phones down, will that be diagnosed as a cause or an effect?
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So...um, if they find brain cancer in the sector of the population who can't ever seem to put their phones down, will that be diagnosed as a cause or an effect?
Whichever use better fits whatever point I am trying to make.
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This is the real problem. The believers will go right on believing no matter what the conclusion is.
Re:Cause or effect? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the real problem. The believers will go right on believing no matter what the conclusion is.
Truer words were never spoken. The results of the study can never be 'mobile phones cause cancer'. If there is any correlation it will be something like 'heavy use of a mobile phone increases your chance of brain cancer by x%' where x is likely to be quite small or we'd have noticed it by now, and certainly small enough that it won't have much meaning to anyone and they'll keep on doing the same thing as they always have.
What we know right now is that talking on the phone while driving reduces your concentration by some amount (depending on a whole load of factors including the person) and increases your chances of an accident by some amount. It doesn't seem to stop anyone from doing it though. Neither does the threat of punishment. The numbers are small enough that people can rationalise them down to zero through the various cognitive biases that inhabit the human mind. In particular "it will never happen to me".
(My bet is that phone related distractions cause more accidents and deaths than phone radiation will ever cause.)
Re:Cause or effect? (Score:4, Funny)
(My bet is that phone related distractions cause more accidents and deaths than phone radiation will ever cause.)
My bet is that there will be more deaths by phone-attracted lightning than by phone radiation.
Re:Cause or effect? (Score:4, Insightful)
If that is true heavy cellphone use could actually help reduce your chances of getting cancer
So even if cancer risks actually increase for heavy users who never drive while using them (who are probably a small minority), the results of the study might be "no increase in cancer" to average person
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If that is true heavy cellphone use could actually help reduce your chances of getting cancer ;).
Now _you_ should be a researcher! :)
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It's surprising so many people don't get it. They seem to think they'll never die. e.g. eat healthily and you'll never get cancer.
It's more about adjusting the size of the slices on the "Ways to Die" pie chart, and not dying too early...
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(My bet is that phone related distractions cause more accidents and deaths than phone radiation will ever cause.)
(Agreed, but cancer costs society quite a lot more than most forms of death)
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My largest concern is what chance my Droid sitting in my breast pocket might give me breast cancer (which men do get.) Especially whenever it's running hot, there's enough energy just in heat radiating off the thing that over the course of years I could see problems possibly arising.
Of course, no more than any other electronic device, but until now I haven't been in the habit of keeping them within millimeters of my skin all day.
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Actually, I think the information available about the dangers of phone usage while driving *does* stop some people from doing it. It would be nice if more people heeded the warnings. The results of this study may not convince as many people as some would hope, but if it convinces some people (it is or isn't safe) then it has value.
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Presumably either "cell-phone usage causes cancer" or "the two are commonly caused by a third factor", unless you can think of a plausible mechanism by which having cancer would retroactively cause cell-phone usage.
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Cell phone use in public == Neurological disorder (Score:2)
I commute by train to work, and must listen, involuntarily, to the conversations that cell phone addicts have, and who seem to think that what they have to say is important and should be shared with the rest of the world.
I don't know if there is a causal relationship between the use of cell phones in public and their owners' behavior . . . I think maybe that some of them have had shit for brains since birth.
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I don't know if there is a causal relationship between the use of cell phones in public and their owners' behavior . . .
There is. In the reverse order: behavior ==> use of fucking cell phones in public. And "shit for brains" ==> behavior, too.
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Problem:
I commute by train to work, and must listen, involuntarily, to the conversations that cell phone addicts have, and who seem to think that what they have to say is important and should be shared with the rest of the world.
Solution: Don't commute by train.
General solution: Reduce interaction with strangers if you dislike such interaction.
Rule: Reduce disliked situations.
Law: Be happy.
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I appreciate your effort in sharing the joy, but can I just get you to quickly suck my dick while you're at it?
thanks. :)
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Yeah, cause I'll be way happier getting hit by one of these same morons making calls while they're driving?
Well, quite some times, replacing train commute for car gets you in humongous jams so they won't hit you very fast.
It's a win/win/bore you out of your skull until you'd rather repeatedly stab your brain with a pencil, situation.
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This is why I prefer my subway commute to any of my driving commutes; spending a half hour driving is a half hour wasted, but I can read on the subway. I liked my walking commute best of all, but I can't always live within two miles of work. I don't have a problem with cell phones (Note to NYC: Never let anyone wire your subways for cell phones), only morons who need to play their music so loud that even using headphones, it is clearly audible to people at the other end of the car.
Of course, in both cases t
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I noticed the very same thing on ham radio operators using VHF handy-talkies. Claims that RF is dangerous to brain cells shouldn't be underestimated...
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Perhaps they're the normal ones and you're the odd one? Who's to say? Buy some good earphones or earplugs and the problem will go away.
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Humans instinctively talk louder when they can't see their conversational partner.
Yeah right (Score:1)
Control group? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but where are they going to find a control group of people who don't use a cellphone?
</kidding>
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I manage the same thing with a cellphone and no friends.
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And I'm another. While they're useful, I rather like that if someone wants to get hold of me they have to make an effort. Having a cellphone makes people assume that I'm available to talk to or text all the time, and if I don't answer or, worse yet, turn it off? It's inconceivable to them!
Seriously, I have been told by people I know that if I only had a cellphone, they'd be sending me text messages all the time. Apparently that's supposed to be an encouragement to get one...
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That is the only reason I don't have a cell phone. If I end up giving out my number to friends/family, it is assumed that my phone will be on and with me at all times. At least with my land line, it is assumed that if I don't pick up, I was away from the phone.
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Exactly. If you were to measure, say, a son's height vs his father's height, you won't have a control group of people with no fathers.
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There are more than a few Amish that use cell phones.
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Exactly what I was thinking. Especially as there are no Amish or so in Europe.
Likely there will be no "control" as such and also no placebo group (after all proper medical research is done double blind with the real thing and placebo controls - however a placebo mobile phone just doesn't work), but there will be people that use their mobiles less than an hour a month, and others that don't put them down other than to change batteries. You can easily look at the difference between those two groups and still
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Using pre-1980 numbers for control won't work. Many forms of cancer have been increasing in prevalence over the years. The exact causes aren't known, but it's likely from a combination of reasons. Environmental contamination is one possibility; e.g. BPA and other hormone mimicking chemicals may affect the rates, as could other dietary changes like the increasing prevalence of salt, transfats and HFCS. Some or all of those may be harmless as far as cancer goes, but if any of them do matter, your control is w
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That said, for a smaller scale study, it might be possible to pay individuals to use or not use a cell phone;
We are not seeing anything like a brain cancer epidemic - and the research has to be done over a period of decades indeed. Paying people to not use mobile phones for decades won't work - and the numbers will be too small to be usable. I don't think we can detect any effect without looking at thousands of people over long periods of time; and even then it may be hard to detect any effects, if they exist.
Medical tech has advanced a lot indeed over the last decades, that for sure. So detection rates changed.
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Using pre-1980 numbers for control won't work. Many forms of cancer have been increasing in prevalence over the years.
Advances in treatment can explain a lot of that. Prevalence is simply the number of people with the disease, so if people are living with it longer (i.e. not cured or killed) then the prevalence will increase despite the incidence staying the same.
The presence of so many confounding factors makes it nigh unto impossible to attribute any effect to cell phones without a real study.
IMHO, this is why such a study is meaningless (albeit I'm sure the reasons for conducting it are political). A person who doesn't use a cell phone is probably less sociable, which is known to have health effects (lowered risk of catching stuff, but overall negat
Wow, already? (Score:1, Funny)
What's next? A 45 year study into the health effects of forks?
Who's John Galt?
30 years... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Results (Score:1)
If the results turn out that there is a correlation, people will definitely stop using cell phones, And all wireless networks will be shut down.And people will move to caves because their neighbors are still using wireless. And then the cave peoples will rise and kill the few remaining idiots that continue to use these Dangerous Waves Which The Eye Cant See. And finally all will be well, because the air is clean from annnnnny kind of waves and everyone lives (statistically) 0.001 seconds longer! (not accoun
Re:Results (Score:4, Funny)
And the cave people will be called Morlocks and the wave-people will be called Eloi...
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Herbert George is that you?
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nope, doesn't ring a bell.
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H.G. rings no bells. That is a deep subject.
new category of story (Score:5, Insightful)
+1, we're going to keep studying this until it agrees with our preconceived ideas.
So you consider the matter already settled? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't have any opinion on the relationship between cell phone use and health. None. However, the more information the better, particularly in a field as fuzzy and complicated as health. Given how new cell phones are, I would be very much surprised if there was already enough research to consider the matter settled.
Surely, if there is a correlation between cell phone use and this or that health problem, the effect is rather small. Otherwise, as others have noted, we would have already noticed the effect wi
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I'd turn the question around: at what point would YOU consider it settled?
I agree with you - I don't really have any preconceptions about it, and I'm certainly not an electroneurologist or whomever would be an expert in this field. I use cell phones all the time, and am frankly glad that such an issue is at least part of the design consideration.
But as far as I can tell, every study I've seen has shown no issue. Since pretty much every study's objectivity today appears to be in doubt (somehow, somewhere,
Non-Ionizing radiation (Score:4, Interesting)
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Careful about assuming you know the mechanism.
Actually, it's best to be careful assuming that know anything at all....
There are plenty of stories in medicine where we 'knew' something could or couldn't happen based on current theory, past observations or just because. Then the concept is carefully studied and whaddayaknow, we didn't know what we thought we knew. I personally rather doubt that cell phone use increased
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People can go on about 'heating effects' which is a common response I see to the non-ionizing radiation bit, but if that were the case, prolonged exposure to heat packs should also cause cancer. Luckily the body is quite good at dissipating heat.
Difference is, heat packs apply heat from outside the body, and we've evolved to dissipate that kind of heating, as you've said. Heating by radiation can cause localized heating inside the brain, which is quite different, and we don't have the same mechanisms for dissipating that type of heat. We've never evolved such mechanisms as we've never needed them before. Pretty much all chemical reaction rates are temperature dependent, and small changes in temperature can also affect the relative rates of diffe
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There could be a sufficiently large molecular resonance for some important organic molecule, either DNA itself or maybe a protein or enzyme which will interact with the DNA. An example of this is lactose which has a resonance at 530GHz, well known to terahertz researchers. Complicated organic molecules which have very complex shapes, bonds, and mass distributions have multiple frequencies at which they resonate, with varying Q factors, which is very hard to derive. Proteins and DNA in particular I think
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Still a bad study (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, although it's better than studies that try to quantify exposure by asking people to self-estimate their cell phone use (these studies are completely lacking in value, unfortunately), it's still a bad study protocol.
The kind of people who take steps to reduce their microwave radiation exposure from cell phones are, unfortunately, very likely to be the same kinds of people who take steps to reduce their exposure to other possible risks, some of which actually do cause cancer. Not all of these confounding factors can be adjusted out.
Keep in mind the placebo study which showed that not only does the use of a placebo benefit health, but the people who take the placebo regularly and according to instructions benefit more than people who take the placebo less meticulously.
How about PREVENTING diseases? (Score:2)
Saw an article about some recent work with animal models that suggests cellphone usage MIGHT cause a significant (40%ish?) REDUCTION in probability of developing clinical alzheimers.
I wonder if, should that turn out to be true, this study would pick it up?
study (Score:1)
Re:What, now? (Score:5, Informative)
And as for why this study has taken so long to do - you don't launch a study costing many millions of pounds and spanning decades as a first step in research (particularly in a field with relatively sketchy underlying hypotheses). You start with smaller, retrospective, studies which allow for large effects to be readily detected, at a fraction of the cost. The problem with mobile phones is that there is no evidence for the type of large-scale, acute effect which can be readily quantified by such small projects, so a larger project (like this one) is required to look for smaller-scale effects (which may still be significant on the level of the population).
And the problem with a big project is actually managing to get enough stats for sufficient predictive power - in the early days of mobile phone usage there simply weren't enough people regularly using mobile phones to make meaningful predictions about the effects on the level of a population. Indeed, it notes that even five years ago a study of this kind had to be halted because of a lack of participation.
Berating scientists for wanting to perform good-quality studies is not very productive. The demand for scientists to produce dramatic information very quickly tends to lead to lead to misleading results being presented, and statements of that kind (see: foods which cure/cause cancer every other week) is one of the reasons many people are losing faith in science.
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I use my cell phone for about 2 hours a month. My wife uses her cell phone for about that much a day.
I'm pretty sure they can find enough people with different usage levels such that unless there's a very low threshold for risk increase and there's no increase in risk with more use they'll be able to see an affect (if there is one at all).
Wow! (Score:2, Insightful)
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It's comments like this on a site supposedly frequented by those most educated in science and engineering that make me believe that a good portion of these frequenters are doomed to ... give the rest of us a bad name.
Yes, great, you may have a point there (I think you overestimate the ability of most people to have a broad knowledge of various subjects --- the post might have been made by a genius computer games programmer who has zero knowledge outside his narrow field of expertise, for example), but reall
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The real reason the inverse square law, whereby power falls by a factor of four when the distance is doubled.
You fail it too.
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> You fail it too.
Ah, so when you don't talk on your cellular telephone, you always keep it further from your body than it is when you are using it for talking? I didn't assume that, since, in my experience, most people keep their phone close to their body all the time they have it with them (and actually, some people keep their phone further from their body when they use it to talk, via many modern phones having speakerphone capability built-in, for exactly the reason you have raised).
Oh, you were only
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Yes, considering power outputs the short period of time I carry it when it is on doesn't really add to the total. Most of the time it is switched off, I turn it on a take it with me when I really need to, which isn't that often since I'm a nerd who doesn't leave the computer room let alone the house very often...
The linksys access point in that computer room bathes me with far more radiation than my cell phone, I promise.
Re:What, now? (Score:4, Insightful)
.. many people are losing faith in science.
IMHO Faith and Science are exact opposites.
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.. many people are losing faith in science.
IMHO Faith and Science are exact opposites.
Come on. It's an expression. I think you knew that. It's perfectly clear what the GPP meant [reference.com].
1. confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another's ability.
There is faith in science (just very little) (Score:4, Insightful)
IMHO Faith and Science are exact opposites.
There's a scientific meta-claim that submitting theories to trial by experiment (and discarding the theories which disagree with the world) is likely to produce good theories about how the world works.
How would you verify this? Experimentally? Why would you believe that experimenting is a good way to learn the truth?
Yes, in the end I'm asking "you believe that what you see (perceive) is a reasonably accurate reflecting of what the world really is like; why?" But my answer is still the same: there is an element of faith in science.
That said, I want that kept small, carefully watched and well understood.
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IMHO Faith and Science are exact opposites.
Personally, I disagree. I find that Science (as it has been put) does require faith, but its dogma is limited to something like "I think therefore I am." Everything else is based on rigorous observation and scientific methodology.
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Scientists have really dropped the ball on this one.
I think I have the phone number for the president of Science somewhere around here, let me find it for you so you can really give those Scientists a piece of your mind!