Cell Phones, Cancer, and Children

Extract

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 ).