Australian health authorities and experts commented this week on the release of Interphone – the biggest study of its kind undertaken to investigate possible health impacts of mobile phones – which found overall no increased risk of brain cancer from mobile phone use.

AMTA Chief Executive Officer, Chris Althaus, welcomed the release of Interphone, saying that its overall finding of no increased risk of brain cancer from mobile phone use was in line with the weight of scientific evidence, which over the past 20 years has found no established link between mobiles and health effects.

Australia was the first country to comment publicly on Interphone because of its time zone and the media cycle after its embargo was broken by the UK Times on Saturday – three days before its strict embargo release date of Tuesday morning.

Mr Althaus said: “Our industry relies on the expert opinion of international health agencies for an overall assessment of health and safety issues. There is no established evidence that radio frequency exposure within internationally accepted safety limits causes adverse health effects.”

He said no single study could be expected to answer a scientific question. Interphone and other studies should be viewed as part of the total research effort and the World Health Organization’s health risk assessment process, which takes the whole body of science into account.

Following Interphone the WHO released its updated fact sheet. The key facts are:

• Mobile phone use is ubiquitous with an estimated 4.6 billion subscriptions globally.
  
   
• To date, no adverse health effects have been established for mobile phone use.
  
   
• Studies are ongoing to assess potential long-term effects of mobile phone use.
  
   
• There is an increased risk of road traffic injuries when drivers use mobile phones (either handheld or "hands-free") while driving.

In regard to INTERPHONE the WHO’s fact sheet says:

'A retrospective case-control study on adults, INTERPHONE, coordinated by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), was designed to determine whether there are links between use of mobile phones and head and neck cancers in adults. The international pooled analysis of data gathered from 13 participating countries found no increased risk of glioma or meningioma with mobile phone use of more than 10 years. There are some indications of an increased risk of glioma for those who reported the highest 10% of cumulative hours of cell phone use, although there was no consistent trend of increasing risk with greater duration of use. Researchers concluded that biases and errors limit the strength of these conclusions and prevent a causal interpretation.'

World Health Organization Fact sheet N°193 (May 2010) Electromagnetic fields and public health: mobile phones.  

View fact sheet No. 193 here

The Chief Executive Officer of the Cancer Council of Australia, Professor Ian Olver, said findings from the Interphone study, conducted across 13 countries, including Australia, were consistent with other research that had failed to find a link between mobile phones and cancer.

“This supports previous research showing mobile phones don’t damage cell DNA, meaning they can’t cause the type of genetic mutations that develop into cancer,” he said.