Shame on The Wall Street Journal for sensationalizing the claim that certain cell phone frequencies lead to a tiny...
Shame on The Wall Street Journal for sensationalizing the claim that certain cell phone frequencies lead to a tiny increase in glioma incidence in rats. Most readers won't go past the headline and deceptive blurb before the lede.
In fact, many lab rat strains are highly predisposed to spontaneous tumors so even a small but reproducible effect in this experiment doesn't mean this is relevant to humans. As the article notes:
The U.S. government’s official position is that the weight of scientific evidence hasn’t indicated health risks. In 2011, the World Health Organization said cellphone radiation was a group 2B possible carcinogen. Illustrating the ambiguity of the designation is the fact that certain pickled vegetables and coffee are also considered possibly carcinogenic.
There also are many studies showing no harmful health effects. Just this month, a survey of brain cancer rates in Australia found no increase since the introduction of mobile phones there almost three decades ago, a finding also seen in other countries.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/cellphone-cancer-link-found-in-government-study-1464324146
In fact, many lab rat strains are highly predisposed to spontaneous tumors so even a small but reproducible effect in this experiment doesn't mean this is relevant to humans. As the article notes:
The U.S. government’s official position is that the weight of scientific evidence hasn’t indicated health risks. In 2011, the World Health Organization said cellphone radiation was a group 2B possible carcinogen. Illustrating the ambiguity of the designation is the fact that certain pickled vegetables and coffee are also considered possibly carcinogenic.
There also are many studies showing no harmful health effects. Just this month, a survey of brain cancer rates in Australia found no increase since the introduction of mobile phones there almost three decades ago, a finding also seen in other countries.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/cellphone-cancer-link-found-in-government-study-1464324146
Are these lab rat strains prone to tumors as a desired or incidental trait?
ReplyDeletePeter Ciccolo , I haven't read the study yet (it wasn't out at the time this piece was posted), so I don't know which rats they used. I know of tow widely used rat strains --- Sprague-Dawley rats and Lewis rats --- where the high spontaneous rate of tumors is considered a confounding variable that makes them unsuitable for tumor initiation studies according to many but not all researchers. I believe other strains are also reported to be tumor-prone. While it's interesting to speculate that these characteristics are desirable if you want to detect a very low oncogenic signal. I'm not sure whether they're used that way deliberately or not.
ReplyDeleteMore details here: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/questions-abound-after-study-links-tumors-cellphone-radiation
ReplyDelete