Surprise! Cell Phones May Not Be to Blame for Brain Tumors

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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
Doug Lung
Contributor

Doug Lung is one of America's foremost authorities on broadcast RF technology. As vice president of Broadcast Technology for NBCUniversal Local, H. Douglas Lung leads NBC and Telemundo-owned stations’ RF and transmission affairs, including microwave, radars, satellite uplinks, and FCC technical filings. Beginning his career in 1976 at KSCI in Los Angeles, Lung has nearly 50 years of experience in broadcast television engineering. Beginning in 1985, he led the engineering department for what was to become the Telemundo network and station group, assisting in the design, construction and installation of the company’s broadcast and cable facilities. Other projects include work on the launch of Hawaii’s first UHF TV station, the rollout and testing of the ATSC mobile-handheld standard, and software development related to the incentive auction TV spectrum repack. A longtime columnist for TV Technology, Doug is also a regular contributor to IEEE Broadcast Technology. He is the recipient of the 2023 NAB Television Engineering Award. He also received a Tech Leadership Award from TV Tech publisher Future plc in 2021 and is a member of the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society and the Society of Broadcast Engineers.