Cellphones’ non-ionizing radiation, explained Before we get into why, and what we know, we need a quick primer on cellphone radiation.
With the help of clinical epidemiologist Dylan Collins, I scoured the best available medical studies on cellphone radiation and head and neck cancers or benign tumors, as part of Vox’s Show Me the Evidence series.Īs Jonathan Samet - the dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, who advised the World Health Organization on cellphone radiation and cancer - told me, you can argue anything based on the science we currently have “because there’s not enough evidence to start with.” Actually, there’s not enough high-quality evidence. And while the coming rollout of 5G, or fifth-generation, wireless networks is expected to transmit data faster than ever, it will also increase the number of antennas sending signals to mobile devices, and potentially our exposure to radiation, with unclear health effects. We’re also exposed to radio-frequency radiation from the networks that connect our phones.
Welcome to Show Me the Evidence , where we go beyond the frenzy of daily headlines to take a deeper look at the state of science around the most pressing health questions of the day. Not a lot of research has been on this, though studies are underway. Our cellphone dependency now starts in childhood, “where their brains and skulls are developing,” said Otis Brawley, the chief medical and scientific officer for the American Cancer Society. John Bucher, a senior scientist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and a co-author of the NIH studies, told me, “ go against the notion that non-ionizing radiation is completely harmless.” In other words, he’s found that the type of radiation cellphones give off could cause biological changes, like promoting tumors, at least in animals.Īs I started poking around on cellphone radiation, many researchers expressed the same concern: We can’t fully understand its potential impact on human health because the way we live with these radiation-emitting devices keeps changing. Yet as cellphones have become more and more ubiquitous in the US over the past decade and a half, brain tumor rates - both cancerous and benign - have not been going up.īut there is also some ambiguity about cellphone radiation’s health effects. (Even the Earth itself, the air we breathe, and the sun and stars in our galaxy constantly give off radiation.)Īdding to the confusion: Wireless companies have reportedly attempted to shape cellphone research and discredited researchers whose findings are inconvenient. In some cases, they have exaggerated what we know about the risks to kids, and rarely note that cellphones are also just one of many radiation sources we all live with. Parents and consumer advocacy groups occasionally capture attention for voicing concerns about cellphones and other types of non-ionizing radio-frequency radiation exposure, such as the energy emitted from wifi routers in schools. Even there, researchers had an difficult time forming conclusions.
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In 2011, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the devices are a “Class 2B carcinogen,” meaning they possibly can cause cancer in humans - but that’s also a distinction they share with pickles, aloe vera, and being a carpenter.Ī much-anticipated series of studies, released in final form in October 2018 by the National Toxicology Program of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), went to great lengths to study the effects of cellphone radiation in rats and mice. Single studies have alternately suggested cellphones are driving up cancer rates and that they pose no health threat at all.
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