We said earlier that when we began to smoke tobacco we waited 50 years to find out that it had some detrimental health effects. It was the same, for example, for the Hiroshima nuclear bomb. People got more cancer. We waited several tens of years after that ionizing radiation exposure.
Therefore, it is very problematic to say what we should do if later it appears that this was an unnecessary step. Should we protect ourselves when we are uncertain, or should we wait for the next 40 or 50 years for some sort of more definitive evidence and answer? But then we are facing another problem. What if indeed those epidemiological studies indicating that if somebody is using cellphone avidly....? “Avid” use was considered then to be using a cellphone for 10 years every day for half an hour per day. It was a long time ago—10 or 15 years ago—when cellphones and using them were expensive. People were not using them so much. Nowadays, with free minutes from the operators, people are using cellphones much more than before.
Already in 2011 we had those two sets of studies, the INTERPHONE one and the studies from Sweden. They were considered by these 30 scientists and 26 of them voted that there was enough scientific evidence to say that this is a possible human carcinogen. So we had two studies, and then, in 2014, last year, another study was published. It was the same type of study, from France, done in a different population, and arriving at exactly the same result: if a person is using a cellphone for 10 years or more avidly, half an hour per day or more, the risk of getting brain cancer increases. Many people say this, as was mentioned just now about what glioma scientists are thinking in regard to the connection between cellphone radiation and gliomas. It is not exactly so, because they say that right now they don't have the evidence.
But we have to remember two things. First of all, cellphones have been in common avid use for not very many years, maybe for 10 or 15 years. They have been in use longer in Scandinavia, but at the beginning people were using those cellphones very little, because it was very expensive. In avid use, those cellphones last maybe 10 years, and we know that the glioma takes several tens of years to develop, 40 or 50 years. Therefore, when we expose ourselves for 10 years but glioma development takes 40 or 50 years, there is not the time for this exposure to affect this tumour that is happening later. There is simply no time for development.
We have to balance those two issues: one, a potentially serious outcome like glioma, and then, exposure to cellphone radiation, meaning not forbidding people to use it, but developing this technology better and limiting unnecessary exposure. What is better? Limiting unnecessary exposure and being sort of at peace with this, in that in 40 or 50 years we will not have a bump of gliomas? Or is it that we use cellphones widely, as we are using them right now, and rely on this point that within the first 10 years of avid use nothing was happening?
This is something like saying that within the first hour after midnight there was no daylight, so apparently there is no daylight, because it would be coming only eight or nine hours later. This is the sort of issue to consider.
I think that not only should we look into the population of normal healthy people, but we should also think about those populations you were asking about, people who might be compromised or weakened, such as children and pregnant people, those with threatened immune systems.
We are all different and we all may respond differently to this exposure because of our genetic predispositions and because of our environment. It is no wonder that there may be some people who would be more sensitive. Those who are more sensitive may be, of course, those developing organisms like young children, or developing organisms in the womb of mothers, or a person who does not otherwise have very good health or immune system and is not capable of combatting radiation exposure or the effects of radiation exposure.