And yet, despite all this, one worrying finding did emerge. The heaviest users of mobile phones – on them for a total of 1,640 hours, equivalent to just half an hour a day over 10 years – were 40 per cent more likely to get glioma, the brain cancer that killed Ted Kennedy.
What kills a 77 year old isn\’t one of the Great Health Problems Of Our Times if we\’re to be brutal about it. There are still far too many things which kill 7 year olds to worry about…..those things which kill 7 year olds being reduced by the increased wealth which the use of mobile phones brings about.
It\’s also true that an increase in the incidence of a disease from 2 or 3 per 100,000 to 3 or 4 per 100,000 is not one of the Great Health Problems Of Our Times.
I would, just as an example, be willing to wager that 1 or 2 people per 100,000 have their lives saved by people using mobile phones to call for an ambulance…..
I detest the (mis)use of stats in all this type of alarmist health report which all seem to end in words to the effect “something must be done” ie “pay me lots of money so I can sit on my arse all day instead of getting a proper job”.
Percentages of percentages–aaaargh!! Death by being beaten to death with maths text books would seem an appropriate punishment.
40% sounds terrible and that we really ought to be worried – but a rise from 2-3 per thousand to 3-4 per thousand, as you more correctly put it, really shows the (lack of) significance of the report and the demand for more cash.
Tim adds: Ahem….3 or 4 per “hundred” thousand.
I am one of those who’s life was saved by a mobile phone calling an ambulance
A story about percentages and statistics and sausages – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8697122.stm
The problem isn’t that so many mobile phone users are being killed by the damn things, it’s that so few are.
Ooops, the red mist came down and I lost the other zeros.
“John Gielgud had a mellifluous, modulated voice nurtured by a daily ration of Turkish cigarette smoke. The fool persisted in this destructive habit until his early death at the age of 96.’
– from The Cigarette Book by Watkins and Harrald, reviewed in the current issue of the Spectator.
Relative risk below two or three is statistically meaningless in almost all epidemiological studies. Microwave radiation is non-ionising and there is not even a halfway plausible etiology for its having negative effects on health. We are bombarded with radiation of much higher frequency and much higher intensity on a daily basis (it’s called sunlight).
JUST PISS OFF AND DIE, YOU STUPID LUDDITE FUCKS.