We'll know for sure in 20 years
While to date there has been no evidence to support an increased likelihood of getting brain cancer as a result of using mobile phones, it's both reassuring and slightly unsettling that a new long-term study has been set up to establish, conclusively, what the risks are.
It's call Cosmos, which is a semi-acronym of: cohort study of mobile phone use and health. It seems to be the brainchild of the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research Programme (MTHR), which reckons we need to know about the effect of zapping our brains with radio waves over a longer period of time than has been studied to date.
A recent MTHR report said: "...short term (less than ten years) exposure to mobile phone emissions is not associated with an increase in brain and nervous system cancers. However, there are still significant uncertainties that can only be resolved by monitoring the health of a large cohort of phone users over a long period of time."
Hence, with support from the Department of Health and Imperial College in the UK, it will sign-up a total of 250,000 mobile users and monitor them over at least 20 years. It will be looking for any health issues resulting from being in the close proximity of a mobile device for extended periods, not just brain cancer.
While this looks like a handy bit of tax-payer funded work for the MTHR, it's probably needed too. There's no doubt we're going to be surrounding ourselves with a multitude of devices receiving and emitting various bits of the electromagnetic spectrum in future, so we should probably find out, for once and for all, if they can do us any harm.
