Is your mobile cell phone killing you? Why using your phone could make you ill

IT’S good to talk – or is it?

- By Lynsey Haywood - May 03, 2012 - The SUN

Scientists have called for urgent research into links between mobile phones and cancer after it was revealed there has been a 50 per cent increase in brain tumours since 1999.

At the Children With Cancer conference in London, Professor Denis Henshaw, of Bristol University, said: “Vast numbers of people are using mobiles and they could be a health timebomb, not just for brain tumours but also infertility.

"We should be openly discussing the evidence but it is not happening.”

The World Health Organisation advise pragmatic ways to reduce exposure to radiation such as using hands-free kits and texting instead of making calls.

Here, Sun Health’s LYNSEY HAYWOOD looks at the health fears about mobile phones, the research and the experts’ views.

'Children using mobiles risk memory loss and sleeping disorders'

STUDY: Dr Gerard Hyland, biophysicist at the University of Warwick, has been using a device similar to an ECG machine which uses a colour printout to depict changes in the brain’s electric make-up.

FINDINGS: Children are at risk because their skulls are thinner, so radiation can penetrate. Dr Hyland said kids’ immune systems are less robust and still developing. He added that the risk was not “brain heating” but low-intensity or non-thermal radiation.

PROBLEM: No case studies have been examined and effects on children have not been checked.

EXPERT VIEW: Dr Hyland said: “Radiation is known to affect brain rhythms and children are particularly vulnerable. The main effects are neurological. If phones were a food, they would not be licensed.”

'Increased risk of infertility in men'

STUDY: US researchers in Cleveland and New Orleans looked at 361 men undergoing checks at a fertility clinic. They were divided into four groups, with 40 never using a mobile, 107 using them for less than two hours a day, 100 using them for two to four hours daily and 114 making calls for four hours or more.

FINDINGS: Those who used a mobile for more than four hours a day had a 25 per cent lower sperm count than men who never used a mobile. Those with the highest usage also had poorer sperm quality. The swimming ability of sperm – a crucial factor in conception – was down by a third.

PROBLEM: All men had sought treatment at a fertility clinic so they may not have been representative of the rest of society. No control group used.

EXPERT VIEW: Prof Ashok Agarwal, of the Reproductive Research Centre in Cleveland, Ohio, said: “Mobiles could be having a devastating effect on fertility. It still has to be proved but it could have a huge impact.”

'Use a mobile for more than ten years and you will get brain cancer'

STUDY: In 2007, scientists in Sweden collated 11 studies of tumour rates in people who had used phones for more than a decade, drawing on research in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Germany, US and Britain.

FINDINGS: They found almost all users had an increased risk of a tumour on the side of the head. Long users were twice as likely to get the malignant gliomas, and two and a half times more likely to get benign tumours.

They said using the phone for just an hour a day was enough to increase risk.

PROBLEM: The study said risks did not differ between different cordless phones.

EXPERT VIEW: Professor Kjell Hansson Mild said: “I find it odd to see official presentations saying there is no risk. There are strong indications that something happens after ten years.”

'Using a mobile phone can trigger Alzheimer's disease'

STUDY: Researchers at Sweden’s Lund University found mobile phones damage key brain cells and could trigger early Alzheimer’s. Rats were exposed to two hours of radiation equivalent to that emitted by a mobile phone.

FINDINGS: The rats exposed to medium and high radiation levels had many dead brain cells, so scientists claimed waves from mobiles could damage areas of the brain associated with learning, memory and movement.

PROBLEM: The study used rats so it is hypothetical; there is no evidence a human’s brain is similarly affected.

EXPERT VIEW: Professor Leif Salford said: “A rat’s brain is very much the same as a human’s. We have good reason to believe that what happens in rats’ brains also happens in humans.”

'Children under eight are at higher risk of ear and brain tumours'

STUDY: A report by Sir William Stewart, of the National Radiological Protection Board, said there was cause for concern after four studies found evidence of potentially harmful effects.

FINDINGS: A ten-year Swedish study said heavy mobile phone users were prone to tumours in the ear and brain and a Dutch study suggested changes in cognitive function. A German study found an increase in cancer near mobile base stations and an EU project found evidence of cell damage.

PROBLEM: Studies were done in 2005. Many since found no evidence of mobiles causing tumours.

EXPERT VIEW: Sir William said: “These studies have yet to be replicated and are of varying quality but we can’t dismiss them out of hand.”

Mobile phone use 'raises children's risk of brain cancer fivefold'

Alarming new research from Sweden on the effects of radiation raises fears that today's youngsters face an epidemic of the disease in later life

- By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor - Sunday, 21 September 2008

Children and teenagers are five times more likely to get brain cancer if they use mobile phones, startling new research indicates.

The study, experts say, raises fears that today's young people may suffer an "epidemic" of the disease in later life. At least nine out of 10 British 16-year-olds have their own handset, as do more than 40 per cent of primary schoolchildren.

Yet investigating dangers to the young has been omitted from a massive £3.1m British investigation of the risks of cancer from using mobile phones, launched this year, even though the official Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research (MTHR) Programme – which is conducting it – admits that the issue is of the "highest priority".

Despite recommendations of an official report that the use of mobiles by children should be "minimised", the Government has done almost nothing to discourage it.

Last week the European Parliament voted by 522 to 16 to urge ministers across Europe to bring in stricter limits for exposure to radiation from mobile and cordless phones, Wi-fi and other devices, partly because children are especially vulnerable to them. They are more at risk because their brains and nervous systems are still developing and because – since their heads are smaller and their skulls are thinner – the radiation penetrates deeper into their brains.

The Swedish research was reported this month at the first international conference on mobile phones and health.

It sprung from a further analysis of data from one of the biggest studies carried out into the risk that the radiation causes cancer, headed by Professor Lennart Hardell of the University Hospital in Orebro, Sweden. Professor Hardell told the conference – held at the Royal Society by the Radiation Research Trust – that "people who started mobile phone use before the age of 20" had more than five-fold increase in glioma", a cancer of the glial cells that support the central nervous system. The extra risk to young people of contracting the disease from using the cordless phone found in many homes was almost as great, at more than four times higher.

Those who started using mobiles young, he added, were also five times more likely to get acoustic neuromas, benign but often disabling tumours of the auditory nerve, which usually cause deafness.

By contrast, people who were in their twenties before using handsets were only 50 per cent more likely to contract gliomas and just twice as likely to get acoustic neuromas.

Professor Hardell told the IoS: "This is a warning sign. It is very worrying. We should be taking precautions." He believes that children under 12 should not use mobiles except in emergencies and that teenagers should use hands-free devices or headsets and concentrate on texting. At 20 the danger diminishes because then the brain is fully developed. Indeed, he admits, the hazard to children and teenagers may be greater even than his results suggest, because the results of his study do not show the effects of their using the phones for many years. Most cancers take decades to develop, longer than mobile phones have been on the market.

The research has shown that adults who have used the handsets for more than 10 years are much more likely to get gliomas and acoustic neuromas, but he said that there was not enough data to show how such relatively long-term use would increase the risk for those who had started young.

He wants more research to be done, but the risks to children will not be studied in the MTHR study, which will follow 90,000 people in Britain. Professor David Coggon, the chairman of the programmes management committee, said they had not been included because other research was being done on young people by a study at Sweden's Kariolinska Institute.

He said: "It looks frightening to see a five-fold increase in cancer among people who started use in childhood," but he said he "would be extremely surprised" if the risk was shown to be so high once all the evidence was in.

But David Carpenter, dean of the School of Public Health at the State University of NewYork – who also attended the conference – said: "Children are spending significant time on mobile phones. We may be facing a public health crisis in an epidemic of brain cancers as a result of mobile phone use."

In 2000 and 2005, two official inquiries under Sir William Stewart, a former government chief scientist, recommended the use of mobile phones by children should be "discouraged" and "minimised".

But almost nothing has been done, and their use by the young has more than doubled since the turn of the millennium.

WORLD BANK whistleblower ATTACKED by JUSTICE department - Global Currency Reset: Jigsaw Puzzle

"Global Currency Reset: Jigsaw Puzzle" Senior Counsel for the World Bank legal department reports corruption to US Congress, the World Bank's other member countries, and the public.

Karen Hudes studied law at Yale Law School and economics at the University of Amsterdam. She worked in the US Export Import Bank of the US from 1980-1985 and in the Legal Department of the World Bank from 1986-2007. She established the Non Governmental Organization Committee of the International Law Section of the American Bar Association and the Committee on Multilateralism and the Accountability of International Organizations of the American Branch of the International Law Association. What did Karen Hudes blow the whistle on? In 2007 Karen warned the US Treasury Department and US Congress that the US would lose its right to appoint the President of the World Bank if the current American President of the World Bank did not play by the rules. https://kahudes.net/about-us/

Why You Should Care About War on Whistleblowers

By the time President Barack Obama left office, his Justice Department had indicted eight journalistic sources under the Espionage Act, more than all U.S. presidents before him combined. Among these cases was U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake, and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. In some of these cases, people were sentenced to lengthy prison terms. In others, the government ruined the lives of the targets.

Then Donald Trump took power and immediately began using the playbook refined and sharpened by his predecessor, President Obama. Donald Trump is now surpassing Obama’s eight-year record in just over two years in office.

We are at an extremely dangerous moment in the history of this country. Donald Trump is using the same rhetoric used by Nazi officials in the 1930s and '40s to attack the press. He has said he wants to jail journalists who publish stories he doesn’t like. And he is wielding the Espionage Act like a chainsaw against journalistic sources.

What makes it all so much worse is that it was the constitutional law scholar and Trump predecessor, Barack Obama, who teed Trump up, who laid the groundwork, who blazed the trail for this extremely deranged and dangerous man currently occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

But look at the way these stories are covered in the broader media. With a few notable exceptions, the lack of solidarity or just basic understanding of how dangerous these cases are is just largely absent. Instead, there are attacks on the news organizations or reporters. For all of the talk of how dangerous Trump is to a free press, why hasn’t the Reality Winner case been covered more extensively? Why is a CNN reporter losing credentials a national scandal and threatening alleged whistleblowers with 50 years in prison is a nonstory?

This is about criminalizing journalism. It is about increasing the secrecy and decreasing the transparency. It is an assault on the very idea of a democratic society. At these moments, silence is complicity.

This is a precedent-setting moment, not just legally, but morally. Because this is not the end. This is the beginning, and they will eventually come for other news organizations. Or they will scare news organizations from doing high stakes national security reporting.

It doesn’t matter what you think of any of these individual whistleblowers. But it does matter that we all recognize that this is an attack on our basic rights to information about what the U.S. government does in our names and with our tax dollars. It matters that people who blow the whistle on crimes and war crimes be defended and not abandoned or portrayed as violent criminals or traitors. All of us must ask ourselves where we stand. History will remember our answers.