April 1st, 2008
Who kicked up the cell phone scare?
His name is Vini Khurana (right). Doctor Khurana to you.
Best known (until now) for having performed the first brain keyhole surgery (with the patient awake), he has now compiled a review of all the data he could find on cell phones and brain cancer. (The last link is to a PDF version of Dr. Khrana’s report.)
His conclusion: this is no April Fool’s joke.
Given how much young people use phones, and how close the antenna is to the ear, he calls it “an emerging global health concern” with “far broader public health ramifications than asbestos and smoking.”
Since this is a review of literature, and much of his evidence is anecdotal, the concerns have proven easy to dismiss.
The good news, Dr. Khurana writes (but few report it), is that these risks can be minimized, if designers get serious now about shielding the antenna. If not, he says, the link will be proven in 5-10 years and the resulting lawsuits will bankrupt the industry.
That wave of lawsuits has already begun, he writes, with Sharesa Price of California the first “winner.”
There are also companies now emerging to make money off the problem, like Aegis Corp. of Lafayette, Colo.,which already claims to have produced shielding equipment.
It’s easy to call this scaremongering, but the timelines add up. That is, Dr. Khurana writes, tumors are starting to be found in countries like Sweden which developed mobile mass markets early, and in the Australian outback, where signal strengths must be high to reach large distances.
On CNN this morning, Dr. Sanjay Gupta was bragging about his wired earpiece, but Dr. Khurana’s report says these are not safe without shielding, since they essentially turn your head into an antenna.
The safest alternative, he writes, is actually to use a phone’s speaker option, but most phones (like my Razr) have horrible speakers.
Having covered this area for many years now, I can tell you that this cell phone-brain cancer scare comes up every few years, and in the past it has always been dismissed. But even if the risk is minimal, why is the industry taking it?
That’s a question their liability insurers should start asking.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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