I don't feel the need to look for cell phone and cancer studies... I'll let time do its thing for that one.

Well, this happens to fall into my specialty.

No one has even proposed a viable mechanism for how weak electromagnetic fields could cause cancer. Radio-frequency photons absorbed by biological matter result in heating, if they're absorbed at all. It's how your microwave cooks food, except you microwave puts out orders of magnitude more power than your tiny-ass phone. One can calculate how much heating would be produced by this radiation, and it's what you expect: an amount you can't feel, just like you don't feel your head getting warmer when your cell phone turns on. In any event, if that level of RF photons caused cancer, disk jockeys would be buried under piles of tumors from working underneath 50,000+ watt broadcast towers.

It's why there isn't a link between cell phones and brain cancer, or any other health risk.

However, I'll admit it is very difficult to find any data on second hand smoke that isn't from agencies that have agenda's one way or the other. There have been lots of studies and it seems like half of them say yes it does, and the other half say no it doesn't.

Sorry, but the ACS/WHO/CDC/AMA/EPA does carry a lot more weight than blogs and Fox News editorialists. I won't apologize for being a source snob there. Blame my training.

The summary of the primary literature Adams cites claims that 67 of 106 articles find a link between secondhand smoke and health risks in humans (cancer, heart disease, etc.), which he misinterprets as "a tie". As a scientist, however, that's a scary percentage to me, because in a double-blind controlled study, it's very possible to miss a link (imperfect data collection (surveys, etc.) skews things towards non-correlation) than for random data to line up and correlate at a 95+% c.l. (Put another way, in a study of that sort, false negatives will always outweigh false positives.) Environmental factors are a damned hard link to prove because you can't control the environment of humans in a scientifically acceptable manner. 67/106 is way past my scary radar.

You're right that an agenda is in play, but consider what it is: Tobacco companies spend a ton of money claiming there is no link-- the profitability of their industry depends on people believing (as they did before the 1960's or so) that their product is a safe drug. They fund a lot of studies, just as they funded studies which "showed" that smoking didn't cause lung cancer.

What's the counter-agenda? Who benefits? Doctors don't, so why is the WHO/etc. involved? Why would they spend money to demonize a non-threat? Why would they take the opposite unanimous stand on cell phones? (All presently agree cell phones are a non-risk.) Personal distaste isn't a sufficent motive to explain a large-scale conspiracy. Where are the dollars?

One thing that is absolutely unquestioned is that secondhand smoke can cause cancer in animal studies. It's harder to get data on humans, since we can't cage them and measure their air 24/7, but there's no reason to suspect that we're special there. We know even casual smokers have an increased risk of lung cancer from the smoke exiting the other end of the cigarette. Why would the unfiltered end be safe?

valguarnera@carrionfields.com