Bad signal - Mobile phones and Cancer

Can mobile phones give you cancer?

There's few things as hard to tame as irony. It is like buying an alligator as pet: sooner or later, someone loses a finger... or more; and you know who's fault is it.
One of my favorite ironies in this latter years are the complaining tweets of some people about technological progress (from people complaining about their computer to their phone, to others complaining about a thousands of years human tech GMOs). They profusely vomit disgust, as they use computers several times more powerful than the ones 2 or 3 years older... and they fit in their hand: Phones.

I doubt there's been any deeper change during the history of humankind in the way we communicate thanks to the availability of mobile devices (one of the times I recall a count, there was more than 6 billion mobile phone numbers in the world; there's an estimate that says that there's more phones than people). This is just an opinion, comparing this to fire taming, development of written language, printing press also count... They are all at the same league.

We know that the fact that we are constantly expecting our phones to ring is affecting us. It affects our memory, affects our productivity. Affects, either in a positive or negative way, depending in a lot of things, starting with having criteria while exploiting this tool... And considering what we do consider "positive and negative".

The good thing is that we still have ideas that are pretty much unanimous, and one of them is that having a tumor in our brain if far from "good". The question then is: Is it true or just a paranoia? Will the selfie making device kill us all with its radiation and mutation force?

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There's a problem that shows up every single time one attempts to list something into absolute listings: "they give you cancer" - "they don't", because, to begin with, life gives cancer, more precisely: evolution.
If we were organism that copy their genetic material perfectly, we would not have selfish cells that break the harmony in the critter they form and decide that it's time to eat or reproduce as if there were no tomorrow. At the same time, if we didn't make a mistake in our DNA copying process from time to time, we would have no variability in our species, where to select the most adapted ones in the environment they reside... and: That would be "it" for the dominant complex species on earth.
Luckily, more patched than windows XP as we are, we are doing great, and we've a bunch (yes, here is my word) of mechanisms to repair damage and control those mutinies that generate for our own mistakes, natural aging or external causes, either biologic, chemical or physic. The thing is that among the physic ones there's radiation, and there: EVERYONE TO THE BOATS! PHONES GIVE CANCER!!!
Cancer, yes. Because, amazingly the radiation that comes out of the phone "can" cause damage to your DNA. The crazy thing is that the test was done over a cellular strain derived from spermatocytes and then we've a NEW headline: PHONES GIVE CANCER AND LEAVE YOUR LITTLE FISHIES SWIMMING IN CIRCLES!!!.

The weird fact is that we are not with wheelbarrows as Randy Marsh did. And this probably has something to do with the fact that assuming that a cellular study can be copypasted into a conclusive evidence for a full organism, is something not even the most ignorant would do (Peaches & pears). Here's where specific studies should always kick in.

To triple the risk of gliomas sounds like a LOT, and in fact is is, but when we know that the normal rate is 3 in 100000 and that will become 9 out of 100000, stats get weird, mainly because of that "thing" we are always skeptic about: How is a research done and how does it stand over a statistic. In this case the study is specifically made over cases, this means that they gathered a group of people with gliomas and tracked back information researching the use of mobile phones. The odd thing is that they did not ask the patients, but the families and relatives, something that implies a risk of getting an rather blurry response when you ask someone if they lost a relative because they used the phone too much, thing that may end up with a relative accusing a cause traits of an effect: Forcing data to fit the statistics.

Now, the other option is doing prospective observational studies, this is, get a HUGE amount of people, take the same data out of them and attempt to measure if "using the phone a lot" and "glioma" correlate, somehow. As far as I am aware of, 2 studies were made, one at an entire population in Denmark (3.8 million samples), in which they found that the risk of developing a tumor in heavy duty phone users was basically the same than at the rest of the population. This result was repeated at the other study (with another million samples) in Great Britain. So, doing a different experiment DOES clearly give a different result. And some trendy people is annoyed by that.

The problem relies in not having a perfect experiment. The best option es gather 2 million people, give phones to one, forbid it to the other half, and see what happens. This would be one of the hardest budgets to argue for in my life. Since it cannot be done, we need options. We need to ask ourselves if there was a similar era ever, in which no phones were around to compare. There come to the rescue the 80s and 90s... The data is right there.

This is what another group attempted to shed some light over the topic. If mobile phones cause glioma, the increase in the usage should have drastically increased the glioma rates.

Changing the question used to solve a problem gets us closer to an answer (think outside of the box). The result was "no", not even close. That if the study that claims that phones cause glioma, we should see the cases multiply several times... And it is NOT HAPPENING.

Does this mean that we are saved? That mobile phones are innocuous and we should start building cradles out of recycled phones to protect our offspring? Not necessarily, but it does mean that we should stop wearing tin foil hats and start worrying about risks that are in plain sight, measured and observable without having to rely on studies that cover millions of test subjects. I'm pretty sure that having the phone on you while you eat a hamburger in front of your PC is one of the lesser problems we face.

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