Cell phones/cancer connection, by Stewart Fist, The Australian newspaper, Tues 29 April 1997[/B]
A team of scientists funded by Telstra to investigate claimed links between cellular phones and cancer has turned up probably the most significant finding of an adverse health effects yet.
When presented to 'Science' magazine for publication the study was rejected on the grounds that publication "would cause a panic". Three other prominent magazines including 'Nature' also later rejected the report, suggesting that they would not handle such important conclusions without the research being further confirmed.
The study looked at 200 mice, half exposed and half not, to pulsed digital phone radiation. The work was conducted at the Royal Adelaide Hospital by Dr Michael Repacholi, Professor Tony Basten, Dr Alan Harris and statistician Val Gebski,
and it revealed a highly-significant doubling of cancer rates in the exposed group.
The mice were subject to GSM-type pulsed microwaves at a power-density roughly equal to a cell-phone transmitting for two half-hour periods each day; this was pulsed transmission as from a handset, not the steady transmission of a cell-phone tower.
A significant increase in B-cell lymphomas was evident early in the experiment, but the incidence continued to rise over the 18 months.
The implications of the B-cell (rather than the normal T-cell) lymphomas here, is that B-cell effects are implicated in roughly 85 percent of all cancers.
The experiment was conducted as a blind trial, using absolutely identical equipment and conditions for two groups of 100 mice.
The only difference between handling the two groups was that the power to one antenna was never switched on. Over the 18 months, the exposed mice had 2.4-times the tumour rate of the unexposed - but this was later corrected downwards to a more confident 2-times claim to remove other possible influence