Brain expert warns of huge rise in tumours and calls on industry to take immediate steps to reduce radiation
Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded. He says people should avoid using them wherever possible and that governments and the mobile phone industry must take “immediate steps” to reduce exposure to their radiation.
The study, by Dr Vini Khurana, is the most devastating indictment yet published of the health risks.
It draws on growing evidence – exclusively reported in the IoS in October – that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. Cancers take at least a decade to develop, invalidating official safety assurances based on earlier studies which included few, if any, people who had used the phones for that long.
Earlier this year, the French government warned against the use of mobile phones, especially by children. Germany also advises its people to minimise handset use, and the European Environment Agency has called for exposures to be reduced.
Professor Khurana – a top neurosurgeon who has received 14 awards over the past 16 years, has published more than three dozen scientific papers – reviewed more than 100 studies on the effects of mobile phones. He has put the results on a brain surgery website, and a paper based on the research is currently being peer-reviewed for publication in a scientific journal.
He admits that mobiles can save lives in emergencies, but concludes that “there is a significant and increasing body of evidence for a link between mobile phone usage and certain brain tumours”. He believes this will be “definitively proven” in the next decade.
Noting that malignant brain tumours represent “a life-ending diagnosis”, he adds: “We are currently experiencing a reactively unchecked and dangerous situation.” He fears that “unless the industry and governments take immediate and decisive steps”, the incidence of malignant brain tumours and associated death rate will be observed to rise globally within a decade from now, by which time it may be far too late to intervene medically.
“It is anticipated that this danger has far broader public health ramifications than asbestos and smoking,” says Professor Khurana, who told the IoS his assessment is partly based on the fact that three billion people now use the phones worldwide, three times as many as smoke. Smoking kills some five million worldwide each year, and exposure to asbestos is responsible for as many deaths in Britain as road accidents.
Late last week, the Mobile Operators Association dismissed Khurana’s study as “a selective discussion of scientific literature by one individual”. It believes he “does not present a balanced analysis” of the published science, and “reaches opposite conclusions to the WHO and more than 30 other independent expert scientific reviews”.

E-mail was a novelty when Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) logged on to her laptop in the opening scene of the 1998 hit romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail.” A mere decade later, e-mail is a cornerstone of modern communications. But a growing body of research suggests we’ve yet to adapt our social behaviours to fit with an era where every message we send is next to impossible to digitally erase.

“People don’t quite grasp that aspect of it,” says Charles Naquin, an assistant professor of management at DePaul University in Chicago. The disconnection may help explain why the research he and his colleagues are pursuing shows that e-mail is the most deceptive form of communication in the workplace.

In one recent experiment, the researchers handed 48 business students a hypothetical $89 to divide between themselves and a fictional person who knew only that the amount lay somewhere between $5 and $100 and would accept whatever came his way. Half of the students were told to conduct the transaction via e-mail; the other half with a handwritten note.

A whopping 92 percent of the e-mailers lied about the size of the pot – and how much the other person would receive – whereas less than 64 percent of the handwritten note writers lied. What’s more, the lying e-mailers told more egregious lies about the size of the pot – and felt more justified about their lying, to boot.

“They do not have this social obligation toward the other party when they communicate via e-mail versus pen and paper,” says research team member Liuba Belkin, an assistant professor of management at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. Terri Kurtzberg from Rutgers University also contributed to the study.

The team suspects the rate of lying was nearly 50 percent higher in e-mail than pen and paper due to the perception of handwritten notes as more formal and personal than e-mails. This would fit with earlier work showing that people are more willing to break social norms in an online environment versus face-to-face interactions.

Jeff Hancock is an associate professor of communications at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. He says the level of e-mail lying found in the study is fascinating, especially in an age when people should be aware that e-mail leaves a digital, searchable trail that makes hiding deception difficult at best.

Research conducted in Hancock’s lab indicates people lie most over the phone, which is less personal than face-to-face communication and, presumably, not recorded such as in an e-mail or text message, and thus cannot be used to challenge their honesty.

“We think that people have a sort of unconscious knowledge of when to play it safer,” he says. “But they don’t have a conscious knowledge, and that’s why you see these big, huge errors.”

For example, e-mails pulled from Enron’s servers helped the federal government build its successful cases of fraud and conspiracy against executives at the former energy-trading giant.

“We are used to nothing being recorded,” says Jeff Hancock, adding that soon everything we say and write may be recorded forever. Ultimately we’ll adapt our behaviour to fit the new reality.