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Warning, Your Cell Phone May Be Hazardous To Your Health

EARLIER THIS WINTER, I met an investment banker who was diagnosed with a brain tumor five years ago. He’s a managing director at a top Wall Street firm, and I was put in touch with him through a colleague who knew I was writing a story about the potential dangers of cell-phone radiation. He agreed to talk with me only if his name wasn’t used, so I’ll call him Jim. He explained that the tumor was located just behind his right ear and was not immediately fatal—the five-year survival rate is about 70 percent. He was 35 years old at the time of his diagnosis and immediately suspected it was the result of his intense cell-phone usage. “Not for nothing,” he said, “but in investment banking we’ve been using cell phones since 1992, back when they were the Gordon-Gekko-on-the-beach kind of phone.” When Jim asked his neurosurgeon, who was on the staff of a major medical center in Manhattan, about the possibility of a cell-phone-induced tumor, the doctor responded that in fact he was seeing more and more of such cases—young, relatively healthy businessmen who had long used their phones obsessively. He said he believed the industry had discredited studies showing there is a risk from cell phones. “I got a sense that he was pissed off,” Jim told me. A handful of Jim’s colleagues had already died from brain cancer; the more reports he encountered of young finance guys developing tumors, the more certain he felt that it wasn’t a coincidence. “I knew four or five people just at my firm who got tumors,” Jim says. “Each time, people ask the question. I hear it in the hallways.”

I’m not sure what to think about this. I haven’t read the various studies myself (and there’s lots of them, a lot of them conflicting), but there’s not enough in the anecdotal evidence here to make any legetimate inference. That said, it would be interesting to see a few things which should be pretty straight-forward to gather:

Is there any increase in incidence in brain tumors?
Is there any decrease in age at brain tumor diagnosis?

If the answers to either of those is yes, then maybe an actual study would be justified. Make a decision about what constitutes “very high” and “normal” cell phone use, find people people in both categories, maybe adjust for the SAR from their phones, and watch them to see what happens.

Source: azspot