Mobile Phone Risk: Cancer Not a Concern, Study Says

Mobile phones are like the eggs of technology- one day they’re killing machines, the next, totally safe and not a worry.

It seems that the back and forth studies over the years have done little to quell concerns that mobile phones are piping cancer causing cells straight into your head, and many rely on earpieces to minimize the damage they believe cell phones carry in causing tumors and disease. But if you’re firmly attached at the ear to your iPhone, a new study might do a bit to calm worries that your mobile phone could make you sick one day down the road.

The study, out of Denmark, seems to be of a large enough scale to comfort those concerned with mobile phone risk. Data was culled from Denmark’s centralized cancer registry and cell phone records for nearly 360,000 Danes who were at least 30 years of age between 1990 and 2007. In the study, no higher risk of any form of cancer or brain tumors was discovered in those whose data was examined.

The study was funded by the Danish Strategic Research Council (note, not Motorola or Nokia) and Anders Ahlbom, a professor at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm said in an editorial:

“The absence of a trend in the incidence of brain tumors in national statistics is reassuring,. Continued monitoring of health registers and prospective cohorts is warranted.”

Bloomberg cites some conflicting evidence about mobile phone risk in a piece on the findings, although it seems this particular research can go in the “mobile phone risk neutral to benign” category:

The International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the Geneva-based World Health Organization, said in June that mobile phones may cause brain cancer. A month later, the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection’s committee on epidemiology undermined those findings, saying that using the technology may not increase the risk of tumors after reviewing studies from several countries.