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The tinfoil hat brigade

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With the publication last month of Devra Davis’ book Disconnect, you’ll likely find yourself reading a lot of this sort of thing over the next few months, as “science” and “health” reporters breathlessly repeat her contention that cell phones are somehow causally linked to a parade of medical adversities, including brain cancer and male infertility. For anyone who remembers the (now thoroughly discredited) anxiety over electromagnetic fields from the 1980s and 1990s, the “Cell Phones are Killing You” narrative is a mildly more sophisticated offspring of the belief that power lines will give your children leukemia.

The issue of mobile phone safety has received an extraordinary amount of attention over the past two decades, and the published literature is filled with contradictions and burdened with some pretty knotty methodological problems (including the question of how researchers can overcome recall bias to gain an accurate portrait of cell phone usage). Nevertheless, the weight of the evidence — contrary to the claims of Davis and the rather small group of researchers who have enabled the the bulk of Davis’ argument — leans pretty strongly against any meaningful association between mobile phones and poor health.  Robert Park’s 2001 piece in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute is still the clearest summary of the first generation of epidemiological work on cell phones and cancer; more recently, Steven Novella had a useful commentary of some of the latest research, including the massive (and widely misreported) Interphone study, which once again failed to detect the sorts of perils that Davis is now exaggerating on a daily basis during her promotional appearances around the country. For those of you with more free time than good sense, some time with PubMed will amply reward your skepticism.

Although Davis — an actual epidemiologist — isn’t quite in the same league as the quacks who guide the anti-vaccination movement, she seems to have a penchant for selecting evidence that allows her to repeat the same essential narrative that worked in her previous books, When Smoke Ran Like Water and The Secret History of the War on Cancer: Loathsome corporations, with the assistance of the government, are suppressing evidence proving their complicity in the erosion of human health. Though I have no doubt that telecommunications companies are loathsome, there’s a simple problem with applying this formula to mobile phones. Whereas we have highly plausible mechanisms to explain the adverse effects of airborne industrial toxins, for example, we have no similar way to explain how low-frequency, non-ionizing radiation — the kind bombarding you as you read this post — is supposed to cause the sort of cell damage that leads to cancer.  (Davis, however, insists that experimental studies have begun to reveal the dangers of pulsed EMF; even if that were the case, and non-ionizing radiation was magically capable of splintering DNA, a few experimental studies would hardly seem to provide enough muscle to forge a book-length expose on how your iPhone is going to put an olive-sized tumor in your head.)

At the end of the day, the most depressing aspect of all this is that Davis’ book — like Andrew Wakefield’s bullshit observations about the MMR vaccine — will provide a lot of people with a convenient (and almost certainly false) explanation for why they or their loved ones are suffering.  With press coverage almost unanimously praising Disconnected for its “convincing” argument, the wider body of evidence just won’t receive much attention.  Before long, maybe we’ll even hear that cell phones are responsible for Glenn Beck’s mysterious affliction.

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