World’s Largest Mobile Phone Health Study Kicks Off

by Elias Shams
The Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research (MTHR) Program has announced it will start what is set to be the largest study undertaken into the long term health effects caused by mobile phones on their users.

Given Cancers usually take around a decade to develop and the year 1995 was the time when the usage of mobile phones started picking up, it is about time to conduct such a research study. It’s 5 years overdue, but better than not doing it at all.

The study, known as COSMOS (Cohort Study of Mobile Phone Use and Health) will involve monitoring the health of 250,000 mobile phone users over a period of up to 30 years, and will take place in five different European countries. Not sure why the U.S. is excluded.

Principal investigator professor Paul Elliott of the School of Public Health at London’s Imperial College said at a press conference that research to date had mainly focused on use in the short term – less than 10 years – and that it was now time to take on more extensive studies.

Backing up Elliott, fellow professor Lawrie Challis from MTHR explained, “many cancers take 10, 15 years for the symptoms to appear. So we’ve got to address the question: could there be something out there that we need to look at?”

The COSMOS study is recruiting participants aged 18-69 in Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Britain, noting it will use data from the participants’ health records, phone bills and questionnaires.

Racking up quite a large phone bill, the study is predicted to cost $5 million for the UK component alone, with funding provided by both the British government and the mobile phone industry to ensure the independence of the research and any coloring of the results by third parties.

In Britain the COSMOS study is planning to invite 2.4 million mobile users from Orange, O2, T-Mobile and Vodafone, with hopes that around 100,000 people will take up the invitation to participate.

The study will also look at how users carry their phones, whether it’s in their front pocket, their shirt pocket, their backpack/handbag and if they use hands free kits, Bluetooth headsets etc.