Cell Phones, Cancer, and Children

Abstract

JNCI | Editorials 1211 We live in a high-tech world of electronics, constantly strolling through invisible fields of radio waves, television waves, microwaves, radar, and Wi-Fi networks. In the 1980s in the Nordic countries and in the 1990s in the United States, a new source of radio frequency waves came into widespread use: The cell phone, which emits nonionizing radio waves through an antenna commonly held close to the head. By 2009, the cell phone had become an integral part of everyday life, with more than 285 million subscribers to cell phone service in the United States (91% of the population) and more than 5 billion worldwide. This ubiquitous exposure to an emerging technology prompted the initiation of large-scale health studies (some started over 20 years ago) in the United States (1,2) and throughout the world (3,4). The results of these epidemiological investigations have been largely consistent and reassuring, with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US National Cancer Institute concluding that there is no conclusive or consistent evidence that nonionizing radiation emitted by cell phones is associated with cancer risk (5,6). Amid this encouraging evidence from human observational studies, coupled with the negative findings from virtually all exper imental animal and in vitro studies and the absence of any known biological mechanism by which weak nonionizing radio waves emitted from cell phones could damage DNA and lead to cancer (7–9), it may therefore seem surprising that a monograph committee of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an agency of the WHO, recently announced that cell phones may be “possibly carcinogenic to humans” (10). The change from “no conclusive evidence” to “possibly carcinogenic” was not new research (11), and it has understandably led to widespread public as well as media concern and confusion (12). The footnote accompanying the IARC press release (10) is often missed—that a “possibly carcinogenic to humans” (2B) classification by IARC is based on “limited evidence of carcinogenicity” and that “chance, bias, or confounding could not be ruled out with reasonable confidence” for the few positive associations reported in the literature. A published summary of the IARC Working Group conclusions (13) noted that some members found the epidemiologic evidence to be inadequate to support the 2B classification. Viewed in