The killer in your top pocket

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Let’s begin this week with a quote from the New American Standard Bible: “Seek, and you will find” (Matthew 7:7). So just what made me consult a bible?

It was a report in the New England Journal of Medicine that stated South Korea has experienced a thyroid cancer epidemic in recent years. “Thyroid cancer is now the most common type of cancer diagnosed in South Korea.”

So has North Korea managed to produce a thyroid cancer agent they are hurling across the DMZ? No. This is what I call a ‘pseudo’ epidemic. Even the authors of the scientific paper attribute the “epidemic” to a government-sponsored cancer screening program. Back to the “Seek and you will find!”

This is one of the dangers of wide-net screening. Are we turning up cancers that would never have been a problem if we had left them alone? In other words, are we looking just too intently?

It also would appear that the same “epidemic” has been seen in other developed countries. The Martians must be putting the cancer agent into the chemtrails left by jet aircraft.

However, the doomsayers ask, could exposure to the electromagnetic radiation (RF and ELF) emitted by cell phones and cordless phones be contributing to this worldwide thyroid cancer epidemic? Isn’t it time for our government to fund research on the risk factors underlying this epidemic?

According to the American Cancer Society, although some thyroid cancers can be linked to exposure to ionizing radiation, “the exact cause of most thyroid cancers is not yet known.”

Now far be it for me to suggest that this could be a giant waste of money, researching something that produces asymptomatic cancers. The old adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” comes to mind. The research budget to look at cancers that don’t kill you or adversely affect your quality of life, is not money well spent in my view.

I have written before about the adverse health effects of mobile phones, and to be honest, I do not believe there are any. It seems that all over the world there are groups of scientists devoting their laboratory lives to studying the effects of radiation from mobile phones. One group even went so far as to suggest that pregnant women should not place their mobile phones on their abdomens as the radiation can get as far as the developing brain in the fetus as the skull is so much thinner than adults.

If that was not chilling enough, Australian scientists are investigating if children really are more vulnerable than adults to the effects of radiation from mobile phones.

Apparently, a study of 110 adults at the Australian Centre for Radiofrequency Bioeffects Research, partly funded by the Federal Government, confirmed mobile phones cause a change in brain function by altering brainwaves known as alpha waves.

“Although there’s a tiny effect on healthy young adults, there is a possibility that it could be much stronger in children or the elderly,” said Professor Rodney Croft. However, there was no indication from the adult tests if the effect on health was positive or negative.

There have been claims that using mobile phones produces brain cancer because people with brain cancer have used mobiles, and that is about as stupid as claiming that shoes are the greatest killer in the western society because 99 percent of people who died last year wore shoes. Lies, damned lies and statistics.

Now one of the articles I read admitted that scientists worldwide agreed there is no evidence linking electromagnetic radiation emitted by mobile phones to adverse health effects, but claims still persist that frequent use can cause headaches, nausea, problems with concentration, cancer and brain tumors, and I think you can pop thyroid cancer in there too.

Professor Croft admitted Australian studies using unborn or newborn mice had failed to find significant changes in growth rate, brain function and behavioral development. However, I also believe we should keep mobile phones away from mice as they can play havoc gnawing on the cases.

Let’s divert the research dollar from pseudo epidemics to real problems like lung cancer, liver cancer and brain cancer for example.