Don't forget the pot smoking and coke sniffing some also do.  Far too easy
to blame mobile phones.  The annoying thing is that most of the protestors
have mobiles.  They want to use them but don't want anyone else to.  One
case in merseyside showed a load of people saying, "church cross used to
download porn on phones".  It shows how mis informed they really are as they
thought a church cross was the aerial !  Orange had paid a church £6k a year
to put the aerial and equipment at the top of a church tower.  All of it
inside so nothing visible from outside.  I would love to see the protestors
or "rent a mob" coughing up the £6k each year from their benefits they
scrounge.
The only place I wouldn't stay too long is right next to an aerial on a
transmitter mast or inline with a microwave transmitter.  Anything else - no
problem.  One example is police, remember the old radios they had that meant
the aerial was right by their eyes when transmitting ?  (blue ones with
stubby aerials)  Not one single case of anyone being affected.  Many of us
have had mobile phones for years and use them all day - no problems
reported.
It's all down to one thing - the compensation culture we live in and people
trying to get a name for themselves.

Here's your answer:

Quote,
    
Mobile phone use and risk of glioma in adults Hepworth SJ, et al, Mobile
phone use and risk of glioma in adults: case-control study

BMJ Online First, 20th January 2006

Click here for early view of full paper tonight:
http://press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/january/glioma.pdf

This paper and its accompanying Press Release make the following claim
without appropriate justification: “Use of a mobile phone, either in the
short or medium term, is not associated with an increased risk of
glioma.”

It is Powerwatch’s view that this is a highly misleading claim, either
through a deliberate and politically motivated attempt to spin the
information towards a set goal, or due to incompetent assessment of the
results in the report.

The study does, indeed, find that result for the gliomas studied – but
the sample used excluded a large majority of the high grade (fast growing)
glioma cases because: “We interviewed 51% of those patients with glioma
who were eligible, mainly because rapid death prevented us from
approaching all of them.”

They continue: “As early death is most likely in patients with high
grade tumours, it is not surprising that participation rates were higher
in those with low grade tumours. A bias in these results would occur only
if mobile phone use was related to severity of tumour, which was not
supported by our analysis, where odds ratios for mobile phone use showed
no increased risk for high or low grade tumours.” It is equally
misleading here to state “which was not supported by our analysis”
when they do not in fact present any analysis for mobile phone usage
differences between the cases with low-grade and high-grade gliomas. Also,
although they admit to not having a representative number of high-grade
gliomas, they do not provide any case numbers for the two groups. Once
again, this can only be due to either an ulterior motive or incompetence,
as the only reasonable conclusion in this respect would be to say “due
to the small number of high grade cases in our study, we cannot assess the
effect of mobile phone usage on high grade gliomas”.

Simplistically, in middle-age adults, about 50% of gliomas are low grade
and 50% are high grade. Most high grade gliomas are fast growing and fatal
within a few years. As they only included 51% of possible cases, and admit
that there was a strong bias (chi2 p=0.001) towards low grade tumours,
then we are left to assume that they had, in fact, very few high grade
glioma cases. In which case, this is further evidence that they have no
scientific justification for commenting on either high grade gliomas or
gliomas as a whole. Without research to suggest otherwise, it is perfectly
plausible to suggest that mobile phone usage may have a large impact on
high grade glioma cases that were in the 49% of cases omitted

It is very disappointing that these well-respected scientists can draw
such badly justified conclusions from their research. Had this study
limited its conclusions to the results found from the available cases, and
commented that no conclusions can be drawn about the cause of
approximately half of all gliomas, the study would have been fine. As it
is, it presents a highly misleading overall picture, and may make it
harder to get funding to look into causes of high grade gliomas, about
which there is still little known. One can only hope that the conclusions
are down to an incompetent misrepresentation as opposed to a more sinister
motivation.

As high grade gliomas seem to be fatal within a short time of diagnosis,
it is clear that a prospective study is now needed that will record
details of cases as they are diagnosed.

Alasdair Philips
Director of Powerwatch
http://www.powerwatch.org.uk

I'm afraid your analysis is rather shallow old boy,

On Sun, 29 Jan 2006 15:00:43 +0000, hairydog wrote:

Quote:
There are only two possible conclusions. Either a cellphone use protects
the user from glioma or the study is flawed. You, the reader, must choose
between these two possibilities. There is no other choice possible.

In spite of these incredible flaws, the study did report a 60% increased
risk of glioma for regular cellphone use of 10 years or more on the same
side of the head as the location of the tumor. Another study has found
similar results, though with much higher risk of glioma.[2]

[2] Hardell et al., Environmental Research 12 July 2005 reported for wireless
phone use on the same side of the head, the risk of high-grade astrocytoma
was 4.2, 3.2 and 4.0 for analog and digital cellphone and cordless phone
use, respectively. The Hepworth et al. paper did not reference this study,
even though it was published some 4 months prior to acceptance of the
Hepworth paper.

Quote:
(Hepworth et al., BMJ 19 January 2006)

In years past, this paper would never have been published because such a low
participation rate of cases and controls would have, by itself, been a cause
for rejection. With only 51% of glioma victims (30% had died by the time they
were contacted) and 45% of the controls (29% refused to participate)
participating, combined with more affluent controls than cases, there is
little reason to believe any of the reported results.[1]
The study would seem to suggest that using a cellphone would protect the
cellphone use from the risk of glioma. If there is no risk of glioma from
cellphone use, then there would be about the same number of odds ratios greater
than one (increased risk) as there would be odds ratios less than one
reduced risk). Overall this study reports 34 odds ratios greater than one to
8 odds ratios less than one. This is equivalent to saying if I flip a coin
42 times, what is the chance that I will get 34 heads and 8 tails. Such a
probability can be calculated. The probability that cellphone use protects the
user from glioma is 99.997%.

[1] Affluent participating controls are more likely to use cellphone than the
non-participating controls. Such a “selection bias” would result in an
underestimation of the risk of glioma from cellphone use. The sheer proportion
of non-participating controls makes such selection bias highly probable.

If anyone is misleading you are.