Counterpunch: there’s no proof mobiles cause cancer

acotrel says:

07:11am | 08/05/12

Women can multitask.  They can put their lippy on while driving a car and talking on a mobile phone. The giveaway is when they burn your dinner while trying to do other stuff in the kitchen at the same time - like ironing your undies, and socks.

scumbag says:

08:14am | 08/05/12

....and ironing the sheets, which I arsed Mrs Bag to do. She dismissed my facetous remark with “don’t give me the sheets”.

Daemon says:

08:23am | 08/05/12

Erick… youre back…

MarkS says:

09:02am | 08/05/12

An incident that appears to prove that brain damage of some form comes from mobile phone use. This has been my observation as well. But I doubt that brain cancer is the form of mental damage that is taking place.

marley says:

07:27am | 08/05/12

Science came up with evidence that smoking caused damage, and Big Tobacco tried to counter the scientific arguments with a misinformation campaign.  This is a bit different, because science hasn’t come up with evidence that mobile phones cause damage

The most that science has been able to come up with is that they have no evidence of a link but would like to study the matter further.  That’s a bit different from identifying a clearcut correlation between smoking and cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Your Opinion says:

07:53am | 08/05/12

@marley

“For a long time there was ‘no proof’ smoking caused your health damage either.”

marley says:

08:29am | 08/05/12

@Your opinion - there has been scientific evidence of the health risks of smoking dating back to the 1930s.  The link between smoking and lung cancer was proclaimed by the US government in 1957.  Big Tobacco has been fighting that claim ever since.  But it has 80 years of science standing against it.

Science, however, the same science that established links between smoking and cancer, has never been able to establish a parallel link between mobiles and cancer. 

The two scenarios are different.

Bev says:

08:34am | 08/05/12

marley says:08:27am | 08/05/12

The most that science has been able to come up with is that they have no evidence of a link but would like to study the matter further.

The best way to impede research is to demand bigger and better proof.
Big Tobacco did that first.  The food industry is still doing it and from this article the telco’s are doing it.  Misinformation comes later.  The term junk science was originally coined to cover the antics of the food industry.  You can detect the same forces at work here.

Mark G says:

09:09am | 08/05/12

The key difference with the Tobacco companies is that the evidence WAS there and they just denied it. The health authorities were saying that smoking was bad for you long before the Tobacco lobby accepted that fact. That is why they are now paying so much in damages against class actions. The same thing happened with companies like James Hardy with Asbestos. The difference with mobile phone companies is that they are not denying anything because even the Health organisations such as WHO are saying that the evidence is inconclusive. There are no denials here from the phone companies. There doesn’t have to deny anything. I will be more interested in their response if or when the health organisations change their tone.

marley says:

09:10am | 08/05/12

@Bev - the difference is that, from the time scientists started looking at smoking, they found evidence of the damage it caused.  Most obvious was the increased rate of cancer as the rate of smoking increased. 

There is no evidence of damage caused by mobile phones, and , though mobile phone usage has increased exponentially, the rates of brain cancer have not.

I wonder if the smoking comparison isn’t the wrong one to use. Maybe we should be looking at the anti-vax crowd and their baying about the dangers of thimerosol in vaccines.  They blamed the vaccines and big pharma for the growth in autism rates - and they were totally wrong.  The alleged link has been disproven.

I say, leave the scientists to look at the problem, independently of big Telecom and of the general public.  If they want to do further studies (and they do) then let them do them.  But you can hardly take the evidence that they’ve come up with so far and claim it points to the kind of link that science had uncovered between smoking and cancer in 1935.

Kassandra says:

01:40pm | 08/05/12

No. Scientists did not “come up with evidence” about smoking and lung disease.

It came about through the clinical observations of medical experts who noticed something in their patients that was seriously in need of explaining, in much the same way as the link between silicosis in coal miners and lung disease was noticed, or between mesothelioma and asbestos exposure. Regular “science” came later and provided statistical support for what were initially clinical observations.

I don’t think most of you understand how the link between smoking and disease was established. There was no band of “scientists” lurking in laboratories doing “science” to examine rates of disease in smokers.

Doctors noticed a long time ago that they were seeing more cases of lung cancer, especially in men, and that they were usually smokers. Later this association was confirmed by epidemiological studies from health service statistics, largely from data generated in hospitals.

Respiratory physicians also noted that more often than not their patients in the respiratory wards with emphysema and chronic bronchitis were smokers and vascular surgeons noticed their patients with aortic aneurisms and peripheral vascular disease were usually smokers too.

Now neurosurgeons, the doctors who are the experts on brain cancer, are saying something similar about mobile phones and brain cancer. It may not turn out the same as for smoking and lung cancer but I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the opinion on this of the people who are the experts on this type of disease. In the past doctors raising this kind of concern have usually turned out to be right.

marley says:

03:04pm | 08/05/12

@Kassandra - sorry, I disagree with your comparison.

First, not all science relies on scientists lurking in labs murdering.  Epidemiology is a legitimate scientific tool.

Yes, physicians noticed that smokers had poorer health than non-smokers, but it was epidemiologist who identified the link between smoking and lung cancer, not to mention other diseases, in long term studies dating back to the 1930s   Their findings were subsequently confirmed by white-coat scientists in labs over the next 20 years.

But here we have those same epidemiologists conducting similar studies and proving unable to find a parallel link between mobiles and cancer.  Brain cancer incidence rates are stable in both the US and Australia. 

And so far as I can see, neurosurgeons are not claiming the kind of link that you are suggesting:  they are not arguing that their brain cancer patients are all heavy cell phone users.  The are asking whether a link might possibly exist, which is a very different thing to what physicians were saying about smoking in the 1920s.

Further, Dr. Tao seems to have got one thing wrong, in implying that the studies done to date lack real data about actual mobile phone use. It would seem that, at least for Australia, that data did exist; I would suspect it exists for other countries as well.

Now that is not to say that, longer term, there may be a measurable relationship between mobiles and cancer, but it is nothing like as clearcut as the relationship between smoking and cancer was when first confirmed by, yes, scientists.

Kassandra says:

04:24pm | 08/05/12

Thank you marley but I understand epidemiology very well.

There is a constant problem in establishing links between putative environmental pathogens and low to very low frequency diseases. There are problems with controlling for potential confounding variables but the greatest difficulty is in getting sufficiently robust and accurate measures of exposure in sufficiently large numbers of people. In this area the best available measure of exposure to mobile phones is usage data. This needs to be in a usable form for analysis. My understanding is that this data is not available in the form needed and the telcos are not providing it. This means the type of analysis that needs to be done to resolve the issue can’t be done. If you read Charlie Teo’s article I think you’ll see this is the main point he is making. We need this type of analysis to find out but we can’t yet do it. The analyses done so far are inconclusive ie. no link proven, but neither can one be discounted. No evidence of a link is not evidence of no link. This is unsatisfactory. We need more research on this as it affects potentially 20 million Australians alone.

In the meantime, my point is that the earliest “signal” involving diseases with proven links to environmental pathogens in the past has been clinical observation. I could give more examples but the point is the same. In the 1930’s disease data and epidemiology were very primitive and there were no computers to trawl through large databases looking for correlations. They needed a signal to know what to look for and that signal came from doctors like Charlie Teo’s equivalent at the time. My point is, whether he is right or not, and I don’t know one way or the other, you should not dismiss his opinion lightly.

marley says:

04:56pm | 08/05/12

@Kassandra - I don’t think we’re very far off agreement.  I’m not arguing that we should ignore or reject what Dr. Tao has to say, but I don’t think he has made a convincing case.  From what I’ve been able to see, the incidence of brain tumours hasn’t increased in the 25 years or so that we’ve had cell phones, and there’s no evidence of a physiological link from studies on animals either.  This is quite different to the scenario that smoking presented and I think we have to recognize the difference.

That isn’t to say there might not be a link, but to assume there is one, or that Big Telco is hiding the information, is a bridge too far for me.

acotrel says:

05:05pm | 08/05/12

@marley
To prove that mobile phones cause cancer, we’d probably need to do a statistics based cohort study and compare between users and non-users.  A bit more difficult with phone users than smokers.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that mobile phones cause brain tumours. If you used that as an approach to fight the tobacco lobby, you’d lose immediately.  The ‘proof’ that smoking causes lung cancer was based on statistics. What we never hear about is the associations, e.g. with asbestos, and the cause of most smokers deaths which are bacterial lung infections combined with damaged lung clearance.

marley says:

07:28pm | 08/05/12

@acotrel - I have no idea what you’re trying to say. 

For smoking, the epidemiological evidence of the link between smoking and cancer was established in the 1930s.  The physiological link was established not much later.  You know, lab rats and all that.

The epidemiological evidence for cell phones and cancer hasn’t been established at all, notwithstanding that there are cohort studies out there.  Nor has the physiological link.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t one;  it means it hasn’t been established. But if you’re suggesting that anecdotal evidence is sufficient to establish a link, then all I have to say is that your years of science education were wasted because you don’t understand the principles at all.

Pete says:

01:52pm | 08/05/12

This sort of Teo stunt is why he’s not held in particularly high regard by his colleagues. He hit a new low auctioning off time to watch him do surgery, with the obvious criticism of his patients being in a position to provide formal consent.
I think he’s let the God complex get to him, and now he’s applying his expertise to things in which he admits he has little or no training in ie. ionising radiation.
If mobile phones did cause brain cancer, their sheer usage would have provided us with good statistics - now. That hasn’t happened, and it hasn’t happened because radio waves don’t seem to have much effect on biological organisms. Same goes for high voltage lines: one or two studies have found an association with cancer, but the vast majority found no impact at all. Of course there still could be some effect we haven’t seen, so no-one can state they are safer than not using a phone at all, but to compare the risks to things like smoking, or living in a house full or radon is ridiculous.

Teo gives a lot of people hope when others have given up which is a very good thing. But medicine is about more than hope, and his clinical outcomes don’t seem to be any better or worse than his quieter colleagues who eschew the limelight, and in some cases, he exposes his patients to a great deal of unnecessary surgery with all the negatives that entails.

Emmy says:

03:48pm | 08/05/12

@Pete…..are you a telephone salesman

marley says:

08:33am | 08/05/12

Here’s a report which is independent of any funding from the mobile phone companies, but which supports the finding of the Interphone report.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3297541/?tool=pubmed

Daylight robbery says:

10:19am | 08/05/12

Fluoride occurs in water naturally.  The water is dosed under strict monitoring.
The alternate is the incident that occurred in Victoria where parasites made a percentage of the population ill.
Fluoride helps kill bacteria etc that may occur in the large water pipe infrastructure that makes its way to your house.
Fluoride also reduces tooth decay in the modern diet with higher processed sugar levels.  Tooth decay is linked to other disease like heart disease.
Many people are quick to blame everything else on thyroid except their lack of exercise usually with a cigarette hand out their mouth.
People live longer lives now on water quality. 
Gone are the days of giving your children beer or boiling water every time you want a drink.  Making a cup of tea to rid the taste.
If your concerned about fluoridation have a water filter system fitted under a sink.
Fluoride in toothpaste is much much higher and obviously isn’t to be swallowed but maybe some people have a habit of it.
Beats being that 6ft caveman 13 years of age found outside a cave preserved after committing suicide by thrusting himself into the snow because the tooth abscess.
Apparently with the increase in bottled water tooth decay has increased.
Maybe the Punch crew can do a story with reference to the W.H.O. website?

Blue Light says:

11:28am | 08/05/12

@Daylight robbery, fluoride occurs naturally but the fluoride in our tap water is actually a by-product of the fertilizer industry. It is actually toxic waste. It is a sedative and causes damage to the teeth through fluorisis. Infants are not legally supposed to have any fluoride as it affects their teeth and bones but it’s added anyway. Fluoride is the only drug I know of that is administered to the public without their consent and without a dosage regulation.

egg says:

11:53am | 08/05/12

@John, really? Do vaccinations cause autism, too? *rolls eyes*

Blue Light says:

01:00pm | 08/05/12

@egg, actually they do, according to research conducted by Laura Hewitson et al from Pittsburgh University.
http://www.naturalnews.com/035787_vaccines_autism_monkeys.html

marley says:

01:44pm | 08/05/12

@Blue Light - if you look the authors of that report, you will see the name “Thoughtful House” in there.  That’s the outfit that disgraced British medico Andrew Wakefield works for.  They are an anti-vax outfit, pure and simple.

And if you read the report, it’s based on observations of a total of 9 monkeys, only 2 of which were controls.  That’s hardly definitive;  in fact, it’s hardly scientific.  It’s true junk science.

Daemon says:

08:39am | 08/05/12

Perhaps the water causes that?

Inky says:

08:59am | 08/05/12

Cockeyed logic? From OUR general public?

Surely you jest!

Jeremy says:

09:34am | 08/05/12

Just enough doubt on causality? There isn’t a shred of evidence that cancer can be caused by the frequency of radio waves mobile systems use. If you find it comfortable wrapping yourself in paranoia, that’s your prerogative. By the way, WHO rates the correlation of mobiles to cancer in the same category as coffee and spinach, “highly improbable”.

marley says:

01:45pm | 08/05/12

The brain surgeon is an expert at identifying and removing tumours.  He’s not an expert in the epidemiology of disease,.

Emmy says:

03:44pm | 08/05/12

@marley…..and the paid spin merchant for telephone salesmen is

marley says:

04:17pm | 08/05/12

@Emmy - actually, I’m an unpaid spin merchant for the virtues of science and reason.  I am not going to accept Dr. Tao’s word that cell phones may cause cancer, without also looking at the research which says there’s no correlation. I’ve looked at both, and while the latter is certainly not conclusive, its stronger than Dr. Tao’s argument. 

Now I should like to hear your arguments as to why the research into cell phones is wrong.

Emmy says:

04:54pm | 08/05/12

@marley..First of all let me say that you are the most well read, well researched person on this blog, that is in your opinion. I, however am just a poor stupid home person satisfied with myself to the extent I don’t need to boast about my qualifications to other commenters. I am not an expert on telephones and therefore I am happy to listen to people such as Dr Teo rather than take the word of organisations and people with vested interests.
It’s amazing that people will shout loudly that we should take action even if there maybe doubts about the effect of taxing carbon because it is better to take precautions than not act, yet when applied to something like this subject the response is to hell with caution.

marley says:

07:18pm | 08/05/12

@Emmy - I have never claimed to be the best read person on this blog.  I have never said I’m an expert on this subject, because I’m not. 

I’m saying that, having read different views, the science on this appears to me to be more with the “no correlation”  than with the “correlation.”  With AGW, the science is more with the “correlation” than with the “no correlation.” 

I go with the science. On both subjects. At the moment, the weight of the evidence is against cellphones causing cancer, and for human activity accelerating climate change.  That doesn’t mean we should not continue to investigate and study both issues, but it does mean we need to think of them in different terms.

Emmy says:

07:02am | 09/05/12

@marley… actually you have just proved that when you do read you only take out of it what you want to take out of it and not what has been written or said. I made no comment about human activity and global warning and whether or not it is happening and where the science is on it. My comment was about a tax on carbon and the proof that the said tax will have any effect. The proof at present is that a tax in itself will not have an effect and then couple the tax with rebates to counter the cost to individuals and companies and it is a complete waste of time. But the believers are still screaming the tax should be imposed “just in case” it does have an effect. And I am saying we should be listening to Dr Teo “just in case” he is right.

marley says:

03:50pm | 09/05/12

@emmy - I have no idea what you have written on the carbon tax.  And frankly, I don’t give a damn.  I was talking about science and the preponderance of evidence in general, not something you said that I never read.

And no, you’re not saying we should listen to Dr. Teo just in case he might be right;  you’re saying that anyone who has any reservations about what Dr. Teo says must be a paid shill for the telephone companies.