UPDATE: 5 ways to make your mobile phone safer

UPDATE: For the first time, the possible link between mobile phones and cancer has been validated by the world’s premier health organisation.

The landmark announcement on Tuesday night followed a week-long meeting of 31 scientists convened by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the WHO’s cancer arm. The experts reviewed details from dozens of published studies, going further than the agency’s own Interphone study which concluded last year that there was no clear link between phones and cancer.

The scientists said their classification was based partly on an association between mobile phones and glioma, a particularly dangerous type of brain cancer. One study showed a 40 per cent higher risk of glioma among the heavier users, though the IARC panel did not itself quantify the overall risk.”

Now, the question has to be asked: are mobile phones the new cigarettes? Absolutely, according to author and researcher Dr Devra Davis who draws many ‘killer’ comparisons in her new book, Disconnect: The Truth About Mobile Phone Radiation, What The Industry Has Done & How To Protect Your Family.

It’s a potent comparison of two giant and mega-powerful industries, mobile phones and tobacco. There are two types of mobile phone users (it’s a rare bird who doesn’t have a mobile in 2011): those who think the radiation/cancer/brain tumour link to mobile phones is malarky and those who take it very seriously indeed.

The Mamamia office is fairly typical of the split. Mia is in the ‘taking it seriously’ camp. The rest of us use our mobiles incessantly and without fear. Some experts, including Dr Davis and Australia’s leading brain surgeon Dr Charlie Teo, fear that the potential future health consequences of our heavy mobile phone usage are enormous. Because unlike with tobacco, when only a small percentage of the population were ever heavy ‘users’, there are now 21 million mobile phones in use in Australia, that’s more than one per person!

But is this all just one big conspiracy theory? Another thing to be ‘scared about’, cooked up by conspiracy theorists?

I’ll be completely honest. I thought so. A part of me still kind of does. But if I’m going to be forthright, when Dr Devra Davis presents her evidence about mobile phone safety, she’s convincing.  I maintain a healthy degree of skepticism, but you should listen to what she has to say.

Dr Davis helped lead the charge in public health against tobacco companies in the 1970s and 80s, before it was necessarily popular and was the founding director of the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology of the U.S. National Research Council. And now she’s written this book called Disconnect about the ‘new smoking’.

She is blunt.

“Frankly, the risks of not acting on what we know today about mobile phone use are horrifying,” she says. “We know enough to take precautions and we should.”

“To my mind, we are watching an epidemic in slow motion.”

But where’s the evidence that something is amiss?

Dr Davis sets the scene first.

“Let me paint you a picture. When I was having these discussions with scientists and the tobacco companies regarding smoking, all the skeptics demanded of me to ‘show them the bodies’ but of course, we couldn’t. Well, we couldn’t directly and with 100 per cent certainty link them to smoking. We still can’t most of the time, but we now know we were silly to ignore the warnings,” Dr Davis says.

“This is not a simple conspiracy; it is far more complicated.

“Scientists study and love picking arguments with other scientists so that on any given issue there will always, always be legitimate uncertainty as some take different sides.

“But the mobile phone companies are very quick to exploit this and yell ‘the science is uncertain, therefore mobile phones are safe’. If we had acted in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s when we first knew about the hints of problems with tobacco, the incidence of lung cancer and other illnesses in the following decades would have been dramatically lower.

“The same will be said of mobile phone use. We, as a civilised world, didn’t even start using phones en masse until 1998, which means the lag time for cancers and tumours will be 10 to 20 years at least.

“Do you really think we can afford to wait? If we wait 40 years, we are treating our grandchildren as experiments.”

Here’s the evidence that might prove a link:

• Of studies of people who have been heavy cellphone users (defined as someone who has made a half-hour call a day for 10 years), there is a 50 percent increase in brain cancer overall. And among the heaviest users there’s a two- to fourfold increased risk.
• An Australian researcher Dr John Aitken has performed experiments on sperm (replicated by peers around the world) that show sperm live three times longer when not kept near mobile phone radiation.
• Children are more at risk as their brains are not yet encased in myelin, says Dr Davis, which is a fatty barrier that coats neurons and helps dim the impacts of radiation. Their skulls are also thinner.
• Warnings in mobile phone brochures are at odds with the public message that these phones are safe. The iPhone 4 warning, for example, says the phone should be kept at least 15mm from the body at all times. Does anybody?

So, the question now is, what should you do? Renowned Australian brain surgeon Dr Charlie Teo has joined forced with Dr Davis to come up with easy steps to make your phone safer while acknowledging that they are such an ingrained part of people’s lives. Here we go:

1. As often as possible, keep your mobile phone at least 5cm from your body. This includes when carrying it on your body (specifically for men). If you must carry it in a pocket, point the keyboard toward you. When on calls, use a headset or the loud speaker function. At a distance of 5cm, the radiation emitted is one fourth the strength.

2. Try to avoid using your phone when the signal is weak. Or when you’re driving at high speed (in a car) as this means the phone is continually searching for a better antennae signal, which results in higher bursts of radiation.

3. Switch sides regularly. This spreads out your exposure to different sides of your brain and reduces the effects in any one spot.

4. Choose a mobile phone with the lowest SAR rating. SAR stands for Specific Absorption Rate, which is a measure of the strength of what your body may absorb from the electromagnetic field.

5. Text message wherever possible. Especially if you are allowing a young child to use a mobile phone.

How much do you and your family use mobile phones? Do you worry about the radiation? Have you adapted your mobile usage because of this fear?

Note: There is no evidence that comprehensively proves a link between mobile phone us and cancer. But there is some evidence that suggests it. Dr Davis’ point is that we know enough to be concerned. She’s also calling for larger studies conducted today that focus on heavy users of mobile phones as she notes, minimal use is likely to do no harm at all and this is where the research should be focused.