Madam, – Scaring the public often happens in medicine. The latest example is mobile phones being classified as a cancer threat. This comes from an expert group citing its collective wisdom under the umbrella of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (“Home News, June 2nd).
That group published an "Interphone" study last year in the International Journal of Epidemiologywhich concluded "Overall, no increase in risk of gliomas or menigiomas was observed with the use of mobile phones. There were suggestions of an increased risk of glioma at the highest exposure levels but biases and error prevent causal interpretation".
Thus the IARC classification reported this week to make mobile phone use “possibly carcinogenic” seems outside a scrutiny of the published studies to date. I demur and encourage the worried to read the original papers themselves. – Yours, etc,