The Guardian recently published two articles concerning the cancer risks of mobile phone use. The first was entitled, The inconvenient truth about cancer and mobile phones. The second, published one-week later, was headed, Mobile phones and cancer – the full picture.
In the first article the two journalists highlighted a recent study that found that mobile phones caused cancer in rats. They wrote,
The study concluded that there is “clear evidence” that radiation from mobile phones causes cancer, specifically, a heart tissue cancer in rats that is too rare to be explained as random occurrence.
The journalists continued,
Not one major news organisation in the US or Europe reported this scientific news. But then, news coverage of mobile phone safety has long reflected the outlook of the wireless industry. For a quarter of a century now, the industry has been orchestrating a global PR campaign aimed at misleading not only journalists, but also consumers and policymakers about the actual science concerning mobile phone radiation. Indeed, big wireless has borrowed the very same strategy and tactics big tobacco and big oil pioneered to deceive the public about the risks of smoking and climate change, respectively. And like their tobacco and oil counterparts, wireless industry CEOs lied to the public even after their own scientists privately warned that their products could be dangerous, especially to children.
The story was picked up by other media, both in the UK and in the US, and spread rapidly across social media.
The second article in The Guardian, written by Dr David Robert Grimes, a physicist, cancer researcher, and science writer based at Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Oxford, completely refuted the first article.
He argues that the study cited in the first article is flawed, and accuses the journalists of cherry-picking and misrepresentation, saying they had ignored data that contradicts their hypothesis and retained only evidence that fitted the desired story. He writes that, this is antithetical to science, where the totality of evidence must be assessed in concert.
He continues,
Since the early 1990s, mobile phone usage worldwide has grown at an exponential rate. If phones are linked to cancer, we’d expect to see a marked uptick in cancer with uptake. Yet we do not. American mobile phone penetration increased from almost nothing in 1992 to practically 100% by 2008 and there is zero indication glioma (cancer) rates have increased, a finding replicated by numerous other studies.
And adds,
The scientific evidence points to a conclusion totally at odds with what the authors postulate. The analogy to industry bamboozling the public to ignore findings doesn’t hold if there is no strong scientific consensus from which to deflect, rendering it cynical or ignorant to equivocate the twain. This is not a case of an industry trying to distract from an inescapable scientific conclusion – the reality is there is nothing of substance from which to deflect.
All this might sound familiar to those of you who are in the business of producing and supplying sugar to an increasingly reticent public. In most people’s minds sugar has now been identified as “the cause” of obesity. This has become an almost irrefutable fact, despite there being little—or no—scientific evidence that a sugar calorie is more fattening than any other calorie. Meanwhile, the sugar industry has been accused of lying to the public and conspiring to conceal the harmful nature of their product.
In his article Dr Grimes argues that the fact that cancer rates have not increased in line with mobile phone use suggests that there is no link between the two. There is no correlation. As far as sugar is concerned, per capita sugar consumption has been falling while obesity has been increasing. This is an inverse correlation.
I will leave the final words to Dr Grimes whose strong criticism of the first article may strike a cord to those of you in the sugar industry.
As enthralling as (the) narrative might be, it is strewn with rudimentary errors and dubious inferences. As a physicist working in cancer research, I found the authors’ penchant for amplifying claims far beyond that which the evidence allows troubling. And as a scientist deeply invested in public understanding of science, I’ve seen first-hand the damage that scaremongering can do to societal health. While it is tempting to rage into the void, perhaps this episode can serve as a case study in how public understanding of science can be mangled, and what warning signs we might look out for.
Photos under creative commons from Pixabay