New headlines are a red herring for cellphone cancer risk

If there were ever a perfect example of putting the cart before the horse… it would be where cellphones are concerned.

Do they cause brain tumors and other kinds of cancers? Are they safe to hold up against your head? What about kids — should they be allowed to use them?

These are questions that should have been answered before these devices took over our lives, don’t you think?

But sadly, that didn’t happen. And it can be tough to keep those worries tucked far away in the back of your mind – especially every time that snippet of your favorite song goes off and you reach for your phone.

I know someone who’s so terrified of the radiofrequency (RF) radiation emitted by their smartphone that they almost never leave it on!

So, just how dangerous is using a cellphone? Two new animal studies attempted to find that out.

But I wouldn’t take the lead authors’ recommendations at face value — because based on the actual results of this research, it could turn out to be some really bad advice.

Of mice and men

I must say, I was a little surprised when a “Breaking News Alert” from the website Medpage Today popped up in my email saying, “Cell phone radiation unlikely to cause cancer.”

Really? What about the 2016 study on rats — described as the largest of its kind — that found that cellphone RF radiation was linked to both malignant schwannomas of the heart and malignant gliomas, a deadly type of brain cancer?

And as we’ve warned you in other eAlerts, cellphone radiation has been shown to be especially risky to expectant moms and their babies. For example, when Dr. Hugh Taylor of the Yale School of Medicine put cellphones on top of cages containing pregnant mice, their offspring exhibited behavior that resembled ADHD and autism.

But in stark contrast to those findings, this new study went on to claim that “rare cancer in rats” is “likely not an issue for humans.”

Why study rats in the first place, then?

The real truth is this: These rodents might be the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. And how they react to cellphone radiation can tell us a lot about what it might be doing to our bodies.

The latest research shows that male rats exposed to RF radiation over the course of two years developed very rare and deadly tumors around their hearts — the exact same kind of cancer found in that 2016 study I just mentioned.

As if that weren’t scary enough, they also showed a marked increase in cardiac problems and DNA damage.

The mice didn’t fare much better. The females had a “statistically significant” increase in cases of lymphomas, and the males had “heightened rates” of liver cancer.

Of course, with those kinds of results, that headline could have just as easily read, “Studies find cellphone radiation deadly!”

Instead, the news was peppered with quotes from experts saying that those findings don’t “translate to people.” And the lead scientist in that research, John Bucher, Ph.D., was obnoxious enough to say that the results haven’t caused him to change the way he uses his cellphone one bit.

Well, I hope that means that he was already keeping the phone far, far away from his head – and the rest of his body, for that matter. Because that’s exactly what everyone with one of these devices should be doing!

Look, we already know quite enough – and there’s no reason to wait for some so-called “definitive” study to finally come along and spill the beans about how putting these ticking time-bombs next to our heads all of these years was a really bad idea!

Remember: Anytime your phone is turned on, it’s emitting RF radiation. So, increasing the distance between that device and your body (especially your brain!) is an important safety measure.

Even the iPhone instruction manual tells you to do that!

So, use the speakerphone function or a headset… text whenever you can… and never ever stow a turned-on device in your shirt, bra, or pants pocket.

That won’t eliminate RF exposure altogether, but it will lower it.

And to bring those levels down even more, take a leaf from my friend and turn your phone off when you’re not using it!

“We still don’t know if cell phones cause cancer or not” Zoë Schlanger, February 9, 2018, Quartz, qz.com