One thing I love about TV in Korea: Larry King Live is on CNN Asia when I get home from work. I have to suffer through CNN Asia’s shitty and repetitive and self-promoting commercials, but I get to watch a decent talk show I’d never bother with otherwise.
Today on Larry I’m learning that I and many other people have been paranoid about for five or more years is probably true: cell phones are killing us.
The peeps at good ol’ Pitt are talking with Larry about studies that contradict the latest one out by the IARC.
My layman’s summary of what the four people on Larry are saying:
The antenna of a cell phone OR a cordless phone should be kept away from your body. Talking with it next to your head, carrying it in your breast pocket, and holding it in your lap while driving-which is distracting anyway-are all BAD IDEAS.
A study of teenagers who used cell phones daily and often showed that they were FOUR TIMES (yes, a 400% increase in probability) as likely to get a brain tumor. Of course my generation was the first one to get ”cellys” as gifts for Christmas in high school. I still remember getting our first “car phone” in mom’s explorer as a kid, and getting my first cell phone freshman year of high school. Ashley and I were the first in our grade (only now do I realize how spoiled everyone must have thought we were)…she got a red Nokia and I got a silver LG, I believe. Our dads were worried about keeping track of their babies. We were both boy-crazy and in a million after-school activities. Can you blame them?
But now I am regretting all those long calls home from the quad at Colgate and on the road to and from here, there, and everywhere. On the one-mile journeys to and from the Columbia Heights metro. Every day after school to coordinate plans with John.
They showed a model of the effects of radio waves on a child’s brain and on an adult’s brain. The child’s brain was almost entirely bright blue, where the blue represented ill effects from radio waves. It was creepy.
Larry’s scientist guests also pointed out that the study only looked at two types of tumors. It did NOT track cheek cancers or cancers of the auditory canal or nerves.
So the point is not that the study is wrong or mal-intented. But just taking the “results” without digesting the method by which they were achieved would be…misleading.
Meg, I’ve never had a better reason to not answer my phone.
