As Smart Phones Boom, Cancer Study Starts

WASHINGTON (TheStreet) -- Rats may get tumors, and cell-phone companies may feel their pain.

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) will act as chairman of a hearing today called "The Health Effects of Cell Phone Use" in a meeting of the Senate Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services. The discussion comes as Americans' use of cell phones increased 50% last year, driven by smart phones, including Apple's(AAPL) iPhone, Research in Motion's(RIMM) BlackBerry and Palm's(PALM) Treo and Pre.

The lead panelist in the hearing will be John Bucher, associate director of the National Toxicology Program at the National Institutes of Health, which is in the initial stages of a long-term study of the effects of radio-frequency signals on mice and rats, the most definitive to date. The rodents will be exposed to cell-phone-equivalent levels of radiation for two years, starting in utero, for several hours a day in a reverberation chamber.

Previous studies by other organizations have been flawed in that the rodents were exposed for only a couple hours a day, which doesn't reflect the excessive number of hours most humans are exposed to their mobile phones.

Indeed, Americans spent a total of 2.2 trillion minutes on their mobile phones in 2008, up from 1.5 trillion the previous year, according to the CTIA -- The Wireless Association, an industry lobby group in Washington. The worldwide installed base of mobile devices for 2009 is more than 3.5 billion, according to technology consultancy Gartner(IT). An estimated 1.7 billion new mobile devices will be sold worldwide in 2009, Gartner says. Of those, 125.5 million will be can't-put-the-thing-down-or-I-might-miss-something smart phones. Some of the largest users of cell phones are small-business persons, whom wireless companies target as a separate group from individual and corporate customers.