NEW CONCERNS RAISED OVER CELLPHONE USE
NIC FLEMING, TELEGRAPH, UK - Fresh fears over the health hazards linked to using mobile phones have been raised after scientists found that handset radiation could trigger cell division. A study found that exposure to mobile phone signals for just five minutes stimulated human cells to split in two - a process that occurs naturally when tissue grows or rejuvenates, but that is also central to the development of cancer.
Previous research on the safety of mobile use has led to conflicting conclusions, with some suggesting links with tumors in the nervous system and others finding no risks.
The new research, reported in this week's New Scientist, supports the position of those researchers who argue that handsets can trigger potentially harmful changes to cells irrespective of temperature changes.
Prof Rony Seger, a cancer researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and colleagues exposed rat and human cells to electromagnetic radiation at a similar frequency to that emitted by mobiles but at only about one tenth of the power. . .
2 Comments:
This story contains several factual errors. The first minor errors is the statement that the research is published in New Scientist. It's not. It's published in the The Biochemical Journal, an academic biochemistry journal of decent quality with a good reputation. New Scientist is a magazine that does not publish basic research, but rather reports on it.
The second problem with this article is that it discusses radiation causing cell division, but fails to describe the cells that were used for the experiments. The actual cells used are HeLa cells, which are cervical cancer cells taken from Henrietta Lacks in 1951 < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa >. It's highly suspect to assume that the results of this experiment can be applied to "normal" human cells. This is because cancer cells themselves are immortal, growing and dividing forever as long as they have nutrients. Many normal processes are disregulated in HeLa cells, functions that might protect normal cells from this kind of low dose radiation. So while these results are somewhat interest peaking, they don't hold much real world evidence. More convincing would be to expose animals to this kind of radiation and measure the responses of their cells to the radiation. The results taken from cancerous cell lines are so blurred because of the pleiotropic nature of the cancer phenotype itself.
^ +1
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