Sometimes I wonder if the things people worry about are legitimate causes for concern, or if they are caused by those people in this world who overreact about everything, and take anything as a sure cause of their imminent doom. I also wonder if maybe those people out there are right in thinking that we are going to cause our own destruction... Flipping through channels a few nights ago I saw a news report on potentially increased cancer risk due to cell phone usage. I forget what news station I saw it on, so I can't exactly dive into the credibility of said news station, but I can say that, being a teenager who constantly texts people and carries a cell phone so much I have outlines in the denim of my pocket where I keep my cell phone, hearing that cell phones may increase cancer risk is rather concerning. And then, the more I thought about it, I realized that my dad, being the owner of a business and in charge of everything concerning his business, uses his cell phone a lot too, which was more concerning than my cell phone use, seeing as the news stated that people who use their cell phones to call people are more at risk. So today I started my research...
Here's what the National Cancer Institute has to say about cell phones.
Here's an article I found on PubMed that outlines some cell phone useage studies and how incomplete they are due to their starting times in relation to increased cell phone use and how they didn't test for long enough periods of time.
From what I can gather, cell phones don't seem to pose too much of a risk... They do emit non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation, which may be a cause for concern, but it poses less of a risk than ionizing electromagnetic radiation such as an x-ray machine transmits. And the ....
jk... just found another article... apparently the National Cancer Institute has yet to update their page, looking at it, its dated 5/19/2010, that's more than a year behind...
This article says that cell phones are "possibly carcinogenic to humans."
The thing all of these articles seems to agree on is that the cell phone poses the most risk to humans during a call, at which time it is transmitting and receiving wireless information from a cell phone tower. According to the PubMed article, the closer the antenna is to your head, the more exposure you receive from the phone. So today's phones, with the built in antennas, create more of a risk. I'm still not sure what to think because the World Health Organization's website is lagging, and their last article on cell phones and cancer risk is dated May 2010...
Either way, according to my genetics class cells have an increased risk of cancer because they divide improperly due to mutations in the genome that accumulate over time... Cancer is caused by a series of accumulated mutations, starting with the one that causes increased cell proliferation, followed by a gene checkpoint mutation, and then the subsequent mutations allow tumors to grow, and if not caught in time, travel throughout the body. I'll try to keep my cell phone at a distance from here on out, but honestly, who's to say its worse for me than any sort of carcinogen that's in the air right now?
Here we have it, I found an article from the World Health Organization on cell phone useage...
http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2011/pdfs/pr208_E.pdf it says that the best way to reduce risk is to text or to use a hands free device, and that calls put you at the highest risk. Also that an article will be released in July in The Lancet Oncology, outlining the research conducted.
More on that later then...
