Cell Phones tied to tumors
Chatterboxes who spend long hours with a mobile phone glued to their ears may have a significantly higher risk of developing brain tumors, Swedish researchers said yesterday.
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Good. I'm weary of the businessmen and scatterbrained housewives weaving all over the road as they gab away, but they've already passed such ignorant genes down and that's that. If the study contains ANY validity though, perhaps the up and coming generation will be weeded out before THEY can cause havoc on the highways or pass their Darwin-Award winning peabrains along.
One can only hope.
4 comments:
*yawn*. Another case-control study beset with recall bias, selection bias, and shoddy design. Another attempt to link cell phones to some horrible thing.
Fact: Cell phone use has exploded from nothing to ubiquitous over the past twenty years.
Fact: Brain tumors remain rare, sporadic, and unexplained. If you parse the studies carefully, you'll find that compared to cell phone use, brain cancer incidence hasn't changed very much.
Conclusion: The effect of cell phones on brain tumors, if there is one, must of necessity be very small. The numbers simply don't work any other way.
And so when a study comes out linking cell phones to brain cancer, I tend to look at the flaws in the study first. If a prominent government-funded researcher from a reputable socialist democracy like Sweden "proves" that black is really white, I don't spend a lot of time wondering if they're right.
Footnote for the numbers geek: Although reported brain tumor incidence has increased over the past several decades, confounding factors include better treatment of other cancers (we know that post-chemotherapy, you have a higher incidence of brain tumors), better treatment of other diseases (if you don't die of something else you're more likely to die of cancer), and, most significantly, the introduction of CT and then MRI, enabling dramatically increased diagnosis. Fishing these things out is a herculean task, and one that's not worth the effort unless you're tracking a strong connection, like the abovementioned one between chemotherapy and subsequent cancer.
Hey now, dammitall. I know this nonsense pops up every now and again but let me dream, okay.
Dreams I understand. Wishing cellphone nitwits would get theirs is cool. Unfortunately, brain tumors aren't on their horizon.
Sadly, about the worst thing most of the serious talkers get (other than the karmic burden of standing there for hours, looking like a twit, babbling into a little plastic box) is neck stiffness.
That's cool. I'll settle for them driving over bridges and into abutments.
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