Michael Fumento

If you're getting a headache from spending to much time on your cell phone, it's probably from yakking too much. But it's not from brain cancer. Not from the phone, anyway, as yet another shows. No, this wasn't one of those "let's put some mouse brain cells in a Petri dish and stimulate it with magnetic waves and see if it makes them do anything unusual" tests. This was an epidemiological study of lots and lots of Scandinavian cell phone users.

Specifically, as reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, "national registry data from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden from 1974 to 2003 showed rates of the brain cancers glioma and meningioma had either remained stable, decreased, or followed the same gradual increase observed before mobile phones became popular in the 1990s."

On average, it's believed it takes about 20 years for a brain tumor to appear after the initial insult. But that's spread over a wide bell curve of a few years to 40 years. Five to 10 years, if using a large enough population, is enough for trends to start showing up. Yet the four Scandinavian countries had a mobile phone network since 1981, two years before the service launched in the U.S. So there's been plenty of time for tumors to show up.

All that's appeared is crummy science perpetrated by the usual anti-technology cell-out doomsayers.