Cell Phones and Brain Cancer: A Mother Jones Symposium

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From Mother Jones this morning:

It’s the moment we’ve all been dreading. Initial findings from a massive federal study, released on Thursday, suggest that radio-frequency (RF) radiation, the type emitted by cellphones, can cause cancer.

I guess it’s up to me to present the authorized opposing viewpoint. I’m going to outsource it to Aaron Carroll, who’s pretty annoyed:

 It was a rat study….9 hours a day, seven days a week….At the end of the study, survival was lower in the control group of males than in all the exposed males. Survival was lower in the control group of females for two of the three exposed groups. Yet no headlines blared that cell phones extend life.

….Now let’s get to brain cancer….no significant differences in the incidences of lesions in exposed male rats compared to controls….No differences were seen in the female rats at all. The cardiac schwannomas were more compelling, but again, only for males. No differences for females.

….I didn’t see any sample size calculation….power calculation….about 14%. This means that false positives are very likely. The cancer difference was only seen in females, not males. The incidence of brain cancer in the exposed groups was well within the historical range. There’s no clear dose response….Also, this: Cell phones are UBIQUITOUS in the United States. If they were causing cancer, we would expect to see rates of cancer going up, right? That’s not what we’re seeing. They’ve been decreasing since the late 1980’s.

I’d add one more thing. This is going to sound snarky, but honest, it’s not. Here it is: people don’t use their cell phones much to make phone calls. This is especially true of young people, which means it’s a trend that will only get more pronounced with time. But there’s really no way that a cell phone used for, say, texting or Snapchatting could cause brain cancer. Maybe skin cancer? Fingertip cancer?

On the other hand, maybe it’s not the cell phones at all. Maybe it’s the cell towers. Has everyone here read Waldo? Maybe you should.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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