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Times: T-Mobile, the mobile phone giant, has been accused of “burying” a scientific report it commissioned that concluded handsets and masts contribute to cancer and genetic damage.The report argued that officially recommended limits on radiation exposure should be cut to 1/1000th of those in force. The suggestion has not been taken up by the company or by regulators.

Campaigners claimed T-Mobile’s handling of the report was part of a wider pattern of behaviour by the industry in its efforts to keep discussion of the health risks off the agenda. (more…)

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Heise: In the wake of the publication of the results of a new study pointing to mobile phones as a possible human health hazard the German Cancer Aid foundation has warned against “spreading panic.”

In a talk with the German daily Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung the head of the advisory committee of the German Cancer Aid foundation, Professor Otmar Wiestler, said that to this day the mechanisms by which brain tumors develop are essentially unknown.

“Even the data of the study conducted in the five North European countries does not provide unambiguous proof that will stand up to scientific scrutiny,” Mr. Wiestler said.

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Anna Lahkola of the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority together with colleagues from Sweden, Denmark, Norway and the UK had interviewed some 1500 patients suffering from glioma, a malignant tumor of the connective tissue of the brain, the southern German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung citing information provided by the study reports. Thus after more than 10 years of use there was a 39 percent increase, according to the study, in the risk of developing a glioma on that side of the head to which a person normally held his or her mobile handset.

However there is still an intense debate about whether or not the electromagnetic radiation emitted by mobile handsets represents a health hazard. Thus Danish researchers at the end of last year had concluded from the results of a large-scale epidemiological study that mobile phone use, even if continued for decades, did not increase cancer risk. Earlier studies, on the other hand, have, like the present one, detected an increased cancer risk on that side of the head to which a user commonly holds his or her handset.

Such studies have multiple sources of error, however.

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Newlaunches: According to British expert Professor Lawrie Challis mobile phones could turn out to be as damaging to health as cigarettes. Prof Challis is preaparing to undertake a mass study of long-term phone users amid fears they are at greater risk of brain cancer. Around 200,000 volunteers will be monitored for at least five years to check for signs of an increase in diseases such as cancer, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

The chairman of Britain’s government-funded mobile phone safety research program said soon-to-be-published results revealed using mobiles was safe in the short term. The data revealed “a hint” of problems for people who used them for more than 10 years, he said. detailed follow-up study into long-term phone users was vital because the effects of cancer often took more than a decade to show up, he said.

However there is a silver lining as a recent Danish study of 420,000 mobile phone users in Denmark for up to 21 years and found mobile phone users had the same chance of developing the disease as the general population.

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Yahoo: Using a cellular phone does not increase a person’s risk of cancer, according to a broad study released on Tuesday involving more than 400,000 Danish cellular telephone users.

A team of researchers used data on the entire population of Denmark to determine that neither short- nor long-term use of cellular phones, also called mobile phones, was linked to a greater risk of tumors of the brain and nervous system, salivary gland or eyes, leukemia or cancer overall.

It is estimated that more than 2 billion people worldwide use cellular phones.

“I think the results of this study are quite reassuring,” Joachim Schuz of the Danish Institute of Cancer Epidemiology in Copenhagen, the lead researcher, said in an interview by cellular phone from Denmark.

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