Technology Article #1

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/mobile-phones-more-dangerous-than-smoking-802602.html

Do you have a mobile phone? If so, how long have you had it? This is a question to bare in mind when reading the article in the link above. Dr Vini Khurana, a neurosurgeon who has impressively written over 3 dozen scientific papers and reviewed more than 100 studies on the effects of mobile phones, has found that using a mobile phone handset for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. The reason for this being that cancers take at least ten years to develop. Previous official saftey assurances were based on studies that included few people, if any, who had been using mobile phones for that long. Dr Khurana has deduced that mobile phone usage could potentially be more fatal to the population than smoking because there are three times as many mobile phone users in the world than there are smokers. The findings are currently only up on a brain surgery website, as the paper that was written on the research is still being peer reviewed for publication.

I personally use my mobile phone an awful lot and have done so for about 8 years so this article was, to say the least, scary! The Mobile Operators Association have, however, dismissed the study. According to them, it's "a selective discussion of scientific literature by one individual" and "reaches opposite conclusions to the WHO (World Health Organisation) and more than 30 other independent expert scientific reviews." Dr Khurana believes that the government and mobile phone industry need to take immediate and decisive action before the rate of malignant brain tumours and consequently, the death rate, rises globally. Watch this space!