You will often see a claim on the internet that “cancers
of the head and neck are increasing in Sweden”, with the
implication that mobile phones are to blame. This is really a
misinterpretation of statistics. The headline is only possible by
including cancers in regions not exposed to phone signals, such as
the thyroid and pituitary, and for which other risk factors in the
target demographic are known other than RF, such as smoking and
alcohol. If one avoids the Texas
Sharpshooter fallacy then the claimed association vanishes.
When we dive down into the glioma data, we uncover another problem.
There is no overall increased risk of brain cancer but instead some
temporal differences in rates of gliomal subtype classification.
Now, this could be an effect of RF changing the ferocity of
gliomas, but if it were we should expect to see temporal bunching
associated with the introduction of phones, i.e a spike as slower
growing cancers are accelerated and then a dip as those cancers
drop out of the statistics. And we don't. The more likely
explanation is better diagnosis, tighter classification and more
careful recording with time. Of course one can never be certain,
but Occam's Razor applies, and p-mining to find
minutiae of data to support an a priori hypothesis, as
this is, is always a big warning sign.
One must also note that the Swedish Radiation Protection Foundation
is not an official body, and not to be confused with the Swedish
Radiation Safety Authority, which is. The Foundation is an anti-RF
campaign, and not an independent expert scientific body. Its claims
should be read in that context.
Two recent analyses bring more to bear on this issue. The first is
from Australia:
Main findings:
The second is a
detailed analysis by Frank de Vocht of his own published work
on brain cancer rates, which has been claimed by Microwave News as
being evidence that phones cause brain cancer. Frank's own analysis
draws rather different conclusions
He says:
I think the main points from these analyses are clear, and
indicate that mobile phones use is increasingly unlikely as an
important risk factor for the observed trends in glioblastoma
multiforme while they further are suggestive of improvements in
medical procedures over the last 30 years being a plausible cause
for the observed effects, at least in part.
So it seems that neither in Sweden nor Australia nor UK nor
anywhere else we look are we seeing the bodies piling up from phone
use. We can conclude that it's at most a risk that is too small to
show up after 20-30 years of half the planet being used as guinea
pigs, and in fact appears indistinguishable from zero. Given that
there is no plausible biophysical mechanism for RF to cause cancer
this should not be a great surprise, but it's interesting that we
really are reaching (in fact are arguably now well past) the point
where any risk should definitely have shown up by now. As the data
come in that risk continues to fail to materialise.
