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PARIS (AFP) - The world's biggest study on the safety of mobile phones will be launched in the next few weeks, a French researcher said, amid fresh scientific concern about the devices' potential effect on health.
Elisabeth Cardis, a specialist at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, said 14 countries would take part in the study, which has been in preparation for more than two years.
Work will focus on any potential cancer risk to the brain, saliva gland and auditory nerve, which are placed in close proximity to a mobile phone, said Cardis. She is head of the radiation and cancer unit at IARC, an agency of the World Health Organization (WHO).
"The study will start in the next few weeks," Cardis said in a phone interview. "We are training investigators with the goal of starting work in Europe this summer. We hope to publish our first results late 2003 or early 2004," she said. The research will be a "case study" of at least 16,000 phone users, with a retrospective assessment of nearly 7,000 tumors, she added.
The participating countries are Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand and the United States as well as the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden), which rank among the top users of mobile phones in the world.
Early warnings about the potential risk of mobile phones surfaced in 1998, with research published in the Australian Medical Journal that noted a rise in the incidence of brain tumors but did not identify a cause.
A study commissioned by the British government said last week that "some preliminary scientific evidence" suggested exposure to radio-frequency radiation from mobile phones "may cause subtle effects on biological functions, including the brain." Young children should be discouraged from regular use of mobile phones as a precaution, it said.
Meanwhile, research by another team, due to be published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, placed a question mark over the standards used to determine whether radiation from mobile phones and other microwave equipment is safe. What determines exposure limits is whether any heating of tissues caused by the radiation has a biological effect.
However, experiments using low-intensity radiation, carried out on worms called soil nematodes, suggest that damage to cell proteins, called heat shock, can be produced without tissue heating, the scientists said. "Because of the universality of the heat-shock response, a similar non-thermal induction might also occur in human tissues exposed to microwaves, a possibility that needs investigation," they said.
The research, released by the London-published journal ahead of publication on May 25, was carried out by scientists from the University of Nottingham, the British government laboratory at Porton Down and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Cardis said brain cancer was a rare phenomenon, accounting for roughly one percent of all cancers, but has been on the increase for the last two decades. Most victims are aged more than 55. As brain tumors take a long time to develop, people who have been using phones for at least five to 10 years would be closely studied to see if there is any link, she said
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