We’ve been hearing for years now that mobile phones can be harmful to health, but so far, no one has been able to come up with irrefutable evidence that they are.
The last major report was back in 2000 when the Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones (IEGMP) led by Sir William Stewart, concluded that there was no clear evidence that mobile phone signals could harm health.
However, there have been other studies which have concluded that there is evidence of a risk to health.
Now, The Cohort Study on Mobile Communications (Cosmos) which is funded by the government’s mobile telecommunications health research programme (MTHR) is going to try and find out once and for all but it will take some time to get the results.
For the next 20 to 30 years they are going to monitor around a quarter of a million mobile phone users in the UK and Europe.
“Cosmos aims to fill in important gaps in our knowledge of mobile phones and health. By looking at large numbers of people across Europe over a long period of time, we should be able to build up a valuable picture of whether or not there is any link between mobile phone usage and health problems over the long term” said Prof Paul Elliott from Imperial College, London. Professor Elliot will be leading the British arm of the study.
The researchers will be looking for a link between mobile phone use and cancer, headaches, dementia, leukaemia, multiple sclerosis, motor neurone disease, and other health problems such as depression.
Nowadays just about everyone has a mobile, or even two or three in some cases, but we haven’t been using them long enough in order to see whether long term use is harmful to health or not.
Cancers tend to grow slowly over many years so it will be some time in the future that we will find out if increased mobile phone usage has led to an increase in cancer or anything else for that matter.
“The balance of scientific evidence to date does not suggest that mobile phones cause cancer but, because of the uncertainty, we cannot rule out the possibility that it might” said Professor Lawrie Challis, of the MTHR management committee.
“With many cancers it takes 10 or 20 years for symptoms to show, and most of us have not had mobile phones that long. There just hasn’t been enough time for cancer to develop.”
It’s all very well but in a couple of decades it will be too late for all of us.
