No link between childhood cancer and mobile phone masts
Living near mobile phone masts while pregnant has no effect on your child’s risk of cancer during the first few years of their life, a new study shows.
What do we know already?
Mobile phone use has rocketed in the past two decades, and people in the UK have embraced the technology wholeheartedly. There are more connected mobile phones in the UK than people.
As with most new technologies, there have been scare stories, with concern about whether exposure to phones or masts could cause health problems. There’s no good evidence that mobile phone use is linked to cancer, and increased use of mobiles hasn’t been mirrored by an equivalent rise in cases of brain cancer. However, concern remains, especially regarding children, and there has been continuing research into the safety of mobile phones.
In a new study, researchers looked at whether living near a mobile phone mast while pregnant affects the chances of your child having cancer in the first few years of their life.
What does the new study say?
It made no difference whether women lived near a mobile phone mast or not during their pregnancy. There was no effect on their child’s risk of developing cancer.
The researchers looked at every case of cancer in children aged 4 and under in Great Britain between 1999 and 2001. Of the 1,926 children who’d developed cancer, the researchers were able to find an address for 1,397. Using information from the four mobile phone operators in the UK, the researchers worked out the level of power from nearby phone masts that each child would have been exposed to.
The researchers than selected 5,588 healthy children, and looked to see if there were any differences in exposure to mobile phone masts between the two groups.
There were no important differences between the two groups. On average, the healthy children tended to live slightly closer to a mobile mast. The average distance between the registered home of a healthy child and a mobile phone mast was 1,073 metres. The average child who’d developed cancer lived 1,131 metres from a mobile mast.
The average power output of nearby masts was 3.00 kilowatts (kW) for healthy children, and 2.89 kW for children who’d developed cancer.
How reliable is the research?
The study was carefully done, and looked at a large number of children across the whole of Great Britain. However, it only looked at children up to the age of 4, so it can’t rule out any long-term effects of living near a mobile phone mast during pregnancy. However, the researchers say that there’s no known biological process by which a mobile phone mast could affect children’s chances of getting cancer.
The researchers only looked at mobile phone masts, and didn’t measure the children’s exposure to other kinds of radio waves. It didn’t measure the mothers’ use of mobile phones, or any use of mobiles by the children.
Where does the study come from?
The researchers were based at Imperial College London. Their study was published by the BMJ (British Medical Journal), which is owned by the British Medical Association.
The study was funded through the UK Mobile Telecommunications Health Research Programme, which is jointly funded by the Department of Health and the mobile phone industry.
What does this mean for me?
The research shows that there’s no need to worry about living near a mobile phone mast during pregnancy. The researchers found that mobile masts had no effect on children’s risk of cancer up to the age of 4.
What should I do now?
There’s no need to do anything. Moving house to get further away from a mobile phone mast would be a stressful and expensive option, and there’s no scientific evidence that it would help your health or your child’s health.
There’s no conclusive evidence linking mobile phone use to health problems. However, there are theoretical concerns about the effects on children, because of their smaller size. In the UK, as a precautionary measure, experts recommend that children’s use of mobile phones should be kept to a minimum.
Elliott P, Toledano MB, Bennett J, et al. Mobile phone base stations and early childhood cancers: case-control study. BMJ. 2010; 340: 3077.