Testing Ourselves

Very often we witness discussions on possible adverse health effects of mobile phones in the news. Nowadays, there are many more discussions because of the Interphone study [1, 2], coordinated by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (JARC), a part of the World Health Organization (WHO) (http://www.who.int). This is research trying to determine whether mobile phones increase the risk of humans developing cancer involving the tissues around the ears and mouth (acoustic neuroma, glioma, meningioma, and tumors of the parotid gland). Part of the funding comes from the Mobile Manufacturers Forum (MMF) (naturally, this suffers from the standpoint of reliability). It is a 10-year multi-national (epidemiologic) study, and includes nearly 13000 human subjects from 13 countries all around the world.