No increased risk of childhood cancer if born near mobile phone stations: Study

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDJun 22 2010

There have been concerns regarding increased risk for cancer in children born to mothers who lived near mobile phone stations during their pregnancy after a report of a cluster of childhood cancer cases near such stations. A newly published study in the British Medical Journal refutes such beliefs and has found no link to early childhood cancers and living near mobile phone masts.

The number of users of mobile phones in the UK has risen from 9 million in 1997 to 74 million in 2007 with 4 billion connections worldwide. Worries about their influence on health like brain cancers, migraine, vertigo and other problems have also risen. Several studies, including the Interphone study involving more than 10,000 people from 13 countries, published last month, have found no damaging health effects from the low radiations of the mobile phones themselves. The radiations waves produced by mobile phones are non-ionising. X rays have ionising rays which are known to cause cancer. Thus mobile phone radiations are not strong enough to damage DNA molecules. So there is no known mechanism by which mobile phone radiation can cause brain tumors.

This study, the first of its kind, involved 1,397 children under five who were diagnosed with leukemia or a tumor of the brain or central nervous system between 1999 and 2001. It studied nearly 81,000 mobile phone stations across Britain. Researchers from Imperial College London compared each child with four children of the same gender who were born on the same day but had not developed cancer. They also assessed the distance of the mother's home at the time of the birth from a phone mast, the total power output for base stations within 700 meters and the power density for base stations within 1,400 meters.

Professor Paul Elliott one of the authors of the study and director of the MRC-HPA centre for environment and health at Imperial College said, “We found no pattern to suggest that the children of mums living near a base station during pregnancy had a greater risk of developing cancer than those who lived elsewhere.” Further study will involve the exposure of the children to mobile phone masts rather than pregnant women.

The authors concluded, “The results of our study should help to place any future reports of cancer clusters near mobile-phone base stations in a wider public-health context.”

Expert speak

John Bithell from Oxford University in the same issue of the journal wrote in a commentary that mobile phones are a leading cause of death when used while driving even with hands free sets. Exposure to cigarette smoke, lead etc. are also more dangerous than mobile phone radiation.

Dr Eileen Rubery, former head of the public health prevention department at the Department of Health applauded this study saying, “It is reassuring that no adverse affects have been found and this fits with the anticipated and known biological affects from such sites, and so is consistent with the physiology and biology.”