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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: May 15, 2016

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REAL LIFE NEWS: MOBILE PHONES DON’T FRY YOUR BRAIN – REALLY, THEY DON’T!

by Hazed

It’s a modern day scare story. Mobile phones cause brain tumours! They pump out radiation that fries your brain! It has led some jurisdictions to mandate warning labels on phones, and various instructions to restrict their use by children “just in case”.

But is there any evidence that the phones are dangerous? Well, people have been using mobile phones for over twenty years now, so if they did cause brain tumours then by now we should have seen an increase in brain cancers. But a new study has found no such increase at all.

The study has been carried out in Australia, where all cases of cancer are recorded so the authors were able to examine “the association between age and gender-specific incidence rates of 19,858 men and 14,222 women diagnosed with brain cancer in Australia between 1982-2012.”

They also looked at information about usage of mobile phones from 1987-2012.

Their conclusion was that there was no sign that mobile phones have any bad effects on the brain. Lead author Simon Chapman said, “In summary, with extremely high proportions of the population having used mobile phones across some 20-plus years (from about 9% in 1993 to about 90% today), we found that age-adjusted brain cancer incidence rates (in those aged 20-84 years, per 100,000 people) had risen only slightly in males but were stable over 30 years in females.”

The only increase in brain cancers they found was in those aged 70 years or over – but the increase began in 1982 which was five years before Australians started to use mobiles. The researchers think this rise is down to better diagnosis.

Of course, this won’t shut up the people who want to be scared of phones. Ah, they will say, what about long-term use? Cancer rates will surely rise in the future as mobile exposure increases. But Chapman has thought of that and he argues that if that were to happen then we would already be seeing an increase in the incidence of brain cancer – and we are not.

Added to the fact that phones emit non-ionising radiation which is not generally thought to damage DNA, it means your brain is safe from your phone.

Of course, you still have to worry about those alien mind-controlling rays…

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/06/29_years_of_data_shows_no_mobile_phone_brain_cancer_link/

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