As Smart Phones Boom, Cancer Study Starts
WASHINGTON (
) -- 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) - Get Report
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) - Get Report
. 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.
In the past, smaller studies with scary results didn't seem to influence sales. For example, a 2007 Israeli study found that people who spend excessive amounts of time on cell phones have a 50% increased risk of developing a salivary gland tumor, notably on the same side of their face they hold their phone. The
study
included 460 people with salivary gland tumors and a healthy control group of 1,266. (Siegal Sadetzki, an epidemiologist in Tel Aviv and co-author of that study, will be testifying at the Senate hearing.) Still, sales of mobile devices in the Middle East and Africa jumped from 119 million devices in 2007 to 133 million in 2008, according to Gartner. Worldwide, sales in those years rose from 1.15 billion to 1.22 billion. But this newest study will be the biggest rat experiment to date, with the best potential to effect public policy in the U.S.
Tests on the rodents should be done by 2012, Bucher says. Gartner estimates the worldwide installed base of mobile devices will reach about 4.7 billion by 2013.
In the meantime, safety advocates have argued that we can't assume cell phones are definitively safe just because we don't yet know if they're definitively dangerous.
Devra Lee Davis, a professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh, who also will be a panelist at today's hearing, has publicly equated cell phone use with "playing
Russian Roulette
with your brain." She is one of the organizers of the Expert Conference on Cell Phones and Health, which coincides with the hearing.
Panelist Dariusz Leszczynski, another co-organizer of that conference and a professor at the University of Helsinki, is concerned about a
between cell phones and cancer.
And panelist Linda Erdreich is a senior managing scientist at scientific consulting firm
Exponent
(EXPO) - Get Report
. She has been a longtime professional defendant of cell phones and cellular towers with regard to safety, including an appearance on
Larry King Live
. Exponent's clients include wireless industry companies, including
Motorola
(MOT)
.
-- Reported by Carmen Nobel in Boston.
