It's the New Game Show: Will Your Cell Phone Give you Cancer OR NOT!?!?

ARG! As if technology doesn’t give us enough troubles as it is, here comes a post from Gizmodo called “New Studies, Cellphone Manufacturer Legalese Revive Brain Cancer Debate“  here are a couple cuttings:

The latest troubling study, and companies’ own cellphone instruction manuals, says they might. Again.

Randall Stross, writing for the New York Times reports on the latest “do they or don’t they?” findings:

But the legal departments of cellphone manufacturers slip a warning about holding the phone against your head or body into the fine print of the little slip that you toss aside when unpacking your phone. Apple, for example, doesn’t want iPhones to come closer than 5/8 of an inch; Research In Motion, BlackBerry’s manufacturer, is still more cautious: keep a distance of about an inch.

Continuing on, Stross writes that the manufacturer’s consumer guidelines were brought to his attention by Devra Davis, an epidemiologist and author of “Disconnect,” a book on cellphone radiation. Overall, the average number of brain-related cancer cases has not increased since the introduction of cellphones to society. That said, there’s a caveat: brain cancer in the 20-to-29 age group has actually increased in that period, while dropping in the older population. Confusing!

I’ll say! Then there’s this:

Furthermore, Henry Lai, a researcher with the University of Washington, currently maintains a database of 400 papers related to radiofrequency radiation and damaged brain DNA. What has he found in all that data?

He found that 28% of studies with cellphone industry funding showed some sort of effect, while 67% of studies without such funding did so. “That’s not trivial,” he said.

GAH!!!

Personally, I use my cell phone for surfing, email, GPSing and other functions MUCH more than I use it for actually talking.  Does this mean I’ll get hand-cancer?

What’s even more fun is the crazy inconsistency between studies funded by cell phone companies and studies NOT funded by cell phone companies. It’s just a big mess.