Cell Phones Cause Cancer?

Sid - relax. It was a study based on medical data correlated to cell phone subscribers. Danish, not American. Follow the link.

And Bob - you won't wear a bluetooth headset because it makes you look like a geek?? (laughs) Sorry, but your personality will give such things away anyway ;-) In this part of the world bluetooth headsets are actually a fashion statement.

We pretty much swim in a sea of radiation - both natural and man-made. Sunscreen? Thats for radiation. Shielded cable, like for cable-vision? Thats to reduce radiation interference. Radio, TV, cell, CB, microwave, satellites, sat phones, visible light, heat, and the AC wires in your wall - they all work by radiation. Telsa, the perfecter of AC current worked on methods to broadcast electricity.

In all cases, the key is moderation. Don't stick your head in a microwave oven, nor hold an antenna against your head all day. Common sense.

How many people had cell phones for 21 years? I know they have been around for a long time (1980's for commercial use, but the cost, not to mention the size of the early mobile phones would make them available and desirable only to business and a few well-off folks. Even then, cell phone use would have been different from what is has been since the late 1990's. I would say that the proof, one way or another, in not yet in.

The study was funded by the Danish Strategic Research Council and the Danish Cancer Society. So, no this isn't corporate research. And, going beyond this, the actual study could be biased, yes, but their data set is the entire country of Denmark, so it gets around a lot of selection problems a lot of these studies can suffer from. One of the editorials I read on this (sorry, I forget which, I read a lot of them) pointed out that the funding agencies involved in this work actually want to figure out what's causing cancer!

Bravo David for the voice of moderation. Good comment Linda although the greater radiation output of the old units might balance off the greater use of the newer, lower emission units. I am just happy that my level of use probably won't endanger my health but moderation is still a good idea, and I do use my headset/speaker if it is practical to do so.

from my cynical point of view -- since i work in a large city and have seen no obvious decrease in cell-phone use -- i would more imagine that the headset manufacturers were the ones who started the cancer rumor in the first place. and now that the beauty of 'hands free' has been so widely touted, and supported by various city ordinances against driving with phone in hand, *fear* is no longer needed to drive sales.

Wow!!!! Man it doesn't look good for me!! I have had my hands in leaded gas and a Bluetooth strapped to my head for awhile now, really we should all be looking at the small amounts of contaminents that we ingest everyday in our food chain, in the clothes that we wear, the food that we eat, the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, miniscule yes, over a entire life time of use????? Hello!

It is totally expected that cell phones do not cause cancer - no matter how much they are used. Cancer is initiated by damaging DNA - by chemical carcinogens (such as tobacco smoke), ionising radiation (X-rays, UV) or specific viruses - the altered DNA chemical bonds resulting in mutation. Microwave photons can stretch or bend chemical bonds but cannot break then - the microwave photons just do not have sufficient energy. Visible light photons have far more energy than microwave photons but again, visible light, no matter what the intensity, will not alter DNA (unless the ionising radiation of UV etc is present).

Same applies with the widespread beliefs that power lines or microwave ovens cause cancer - just not possible.
A good book to read on a range of pseudoscience is "Voodoo Science" by Bob Park.

I am not sure if this is relevant to cancer but shall offer it for interest. As a kid, I used to keep homing pigeons and release them some distance from our home and measure the time they took to return. I found that if the local radio station lay between the point of release and our home, they took very much longer to get back. I afterwards found that others had observed this, as well. It seems that radio transmissions disturb the homing ability of pigeons, in which the brain presumably plays an important role. This information is not recent. Perhaps another reader can update it.

I just purchased a sony vaio laptop and cannot turn off the microphone on my computer . Could you please help on how to turn it off?

EDITOR'S NOTE: If your mic doesn't have a switch, go to Control Panel / Sounds / Audio tab, then click Volume under Sound Recording.

Here's and article that has a different take on the whole cancer and cell phone issue.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Cell-Phones-and-Cancer