The use of mobile phones is increasing among children and adolescents. Experts warn of the dangers, since children are more vulnerable to radiation.

In a recent study, an international research team concluded that mobile-phone use among children does not increase the risk of developing brain tumors.

Parents who might be breathing a sigh of relief at this should think twice. According to one Swedish expert, we cannot trust these results, and she is not the only one saying so.

According to professor Maria Feychting, Institute of Environmental Medicine at Karolinska Institute (KI), who led the Swedish part of the Cefalo study, the results show no increased risk of developing a brain tumor among young cell phone users.

The basis for this study is standardized interviews with 352 children and adolescents between the ages of 7 and 19 in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland who have developed brain tumors between 2004 and 2008.

Participants were asked about their mobile-phone habits. The responses were then compared with the cell-phone habits of 646 healthy control individuals of the same age. The results from the study were published in Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Results showed that children who had their own cell-phone subscriptions for more than 2.8 years were more than twice as likely to develop brain tumors.

Journalist and author Mona Nilsson has followed cell-phone risk studies for many years, and she does not find the results of the Cefalo study reassuring.

On the contrary, the results are very worrying. The study shows the opposite, that mobile-phone use increases the risk of brain tumors, even at relatively low use by today’s standards.

Nilsson believes that the scientists dismiss their own findings in the study and that these are the same scientists who tried to smooth over the increased brain-tumor risk in the international WHO study a year ago.

The scientists dismiss their own results on the basis that the Swedish statistics on brain tumors overall do not show an increasing trend. That’s like saying that smoking is not dangerous for youths based on the fact that lung-cancer statistics did not go up during the period when it became common for young people to smoke.

All cancer experts know that it takes several years for cancer to develop and show up in statistics.

This way of presenting the results is a gross betrayal of children and parents. Unfortunately, it reflects the enormous financial interests associated with research on mobile-phone health hazards.

The Cefalo study has also been called into question by professors Devra Davis and Ronald Herberman. Davis is a cancer specialist and has written several books on cancer. In 2010, she wrote the book “Disconnect” about the health hazards associated with mobile-phone use.

Herberman is a cancer expert and former head of 600 cancer specialists at the Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. Together with Lloyd Morgan, who is a member of the research organization The Bioelectromagnetics Society and director of the Central Brain Tumor Registry of the United States, they have reviewed the study and commented on it in a press release from the organization Environmental Health Trust.

“In fact, the JNCI researchers downplay their own finding that children who owned phones the longest had an increased risk of brain cancer. In addition, other studies indicate that children face a number of serious health risks from cell phones, including learning problems, autism, behavioral impacts, insomnia, attention disorders, and a broad array of disturbances to the developing nervous system,” they said in the press release.

Professor Joel M. Moskowitz of the University of California, Berkeley, who is also researching mobile-phone health hazards, is also critical of the study, which he believes is downplaying the possibility that mobile phones increase the risk of developing brain tumors among children.

He also questions research funded by the mobile industry: “Although the researchers argued that the study was conducted independently of the mobile industry, part of the funds were from industry and some are consultants for or carrying out research for industry. In the future, we need to fund such trials without funding from industry.

“In addition, we need to develop a research forum that operates independently of the industry in order to avoid potential conflicts of interest,” Moskowitz writes in an article.

So far, only one study looked at the risk of young mobile-phone users, and it showed that young people are at higher risk than adults for brain tumor if they use mobile phones. It is Örebro professor Lennart Hardell’s study in 2009 that was published in International Journal of Oncology, Nilsson says.

Almost all studies that take into account today’s normal usage and the expected latency for brain tumors show increased risk. The situation is very alarming, given the widespread use of cell phones, particularly among children and adolescents because they are more vulnerable and more at risk.

Children and parents must be warned now. There should be extensive information campaigns, Nilsson says.

Feychting said in an email to The Epoch Times that she had not read the articles that were critical of the Cefalo trial, so she was unable to specifically comment on them.

“The results of our study do not indicate a significantly increased risk for brain tumors in children using mobile phones, compared with children who do not use mobile phones. If there were an increased risk, we would expect that the risk would be higher among those who used a mobile phone for a longer time compared with those who used it for a short time. This was not the case,” she said.

She points out that the study is limited in size, however, and that there may be a low risk increase, as stated in the article. She believes that it is therefore important to follow up on the Cancer Registry of cancer morbidity over the next few years.

It is not true that the study did not find an increased risk with increased use. Several tests show just that, and the longer a child has had a cell-phone subscription, the greater the risk, Nilsson said.

The Swedish and Norwegian part of the Cefalo trial had no funding from the cell phone industry, but the Swiss and Danish part was funded in part by government and in part by industry. The study is supposed to be organized in a way that guarantees the independence of researchers, according to Feychting.

Original article in Swedish: http://www.epochtimes.se/articles/2011/08/14/21877.html