Cancer seems to be a big concern for people in this blogosphere, so I think it’s appropriate to do some extra digging to temper some alarmist reactions to cell phones, dogs, and folic acid.

Stemming from the London Independent’s recent expose on cell phones (ps. don’t be fooled by that “Independent” title. Dr. Sir Tony O’Reilly owns more than 200 print titles, more than 130 radio stations, among other interests) and a recent NtH blog post, you might be worried that the right half of your brain is going to swell up like a dead shark and beach itself in front of some poor schmuck’s beach house in the Outer Banks. Well, that’s probably not the case. Let’s look at some statistical data and scientific evidence:

A Swedish study in 2005 followed 905 adults with brain cancer and found that those that had over 2,000 hours of talk time (TT) had a higher rate of cancer on the side of their head where they held their phones. But wait! These people already had the cancer and may have suffered from recall bias. Also, this is a remarkable small sample size.

A British study following brain cancer patients and a Danish study following more than 420,000 cell phone users in Denmark show that there is no association between cell phone use and brain cancer. The critique against these studies is that they are over short periods of time, something the latest study from Dr. Vini Khurana addresses more thoroughly. But the British study didn’t make any outlandish claims about the absoluteness of the cell phone-brain cancer link in it’s published findings.

“The results of our study suggest there is no substantial risk in the first decade after starting use,” said Anthony Swerdlow of the British Institute of Cancer Research but emphasized he could not rule out higher risk over a longer period.

These studies seem to contradict, don’t claim to have solved the issue, and don’t use inflated language to cloud the issue. Hmmmmm, that sounds imminently reasonable. My gosh, that sounds like science! So let’s turn to the alarmism found in the Independent article.

Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded.

Science this is not. Reasonable this is not.

Cell phones have been around since 1984, although not in anywhere near the numbers that we have today. That’s 25 years worth of microwaves pounding on brain cells. And what has happened to brain cancer rates in that period of time? They’ve remained remarkably steady. According to a recent article in the New Republic:

In fact, incidence rates slightly dropped from 6.9 cases per 100,000 people in 1985 to 6.5 in 2004. Actual incidence counts reflect this trend: in 1997, when only 55 million cell phone subscriptions existed in the US, the American Cancer Society reported 17,600 new diagnoses and 13,200 deaths due to brain cancer. In 2006, when the number of cell phones in use had quadrupled to more than 200 million, there were 18,820 new cases and 12,280 deaths attributed to brain cancer.

The numbers don’t seem to bear out Dr. Khurana’s findings, however accurate they may be.

So what should be done? I’m not making any promises, but I wouldn’t give my children cell phones until their brains are nice, plump, and developed. And if I were a home owner and not a wildly successful and well-traveled billionaire man, I’d get a land line for the majority of my phone calls. Also, I’d refrain from my Valley Girl impersonations for awhile.

But the bigger issue here is the way that we search for scapegoats for cancer. A recent article in Slate addresses the issue very nicely. The author urges people to understand that cancer is not the product of artificiality. Cancer is a naturally occurring disease, often caused by natural products, rather than man-made calamities like cell phones and pesticides.

This thinking cleaves to a popular motif: The natural world is less toxic and more healthful than the industrial one. To avoid cancer, you should buy organic produce, drink unpasteurized milk from specialty dairies, eat more fiber to cleanse the colon of carcinogens, and avoid cheap cosmetics. To protect one’s family, in short, become a paranoid consumer of everyday “artificial” products.

Dr. Sanghavi (who does have a book to sell) would prefer to see issues addressed more responsibly by the press, from drugs such as diethylstilbestrol to dietary supplements like folic acid. Alarmism about the carcinogenic effects of man-made chemicals should go out the window, because nearly half of all chemicals are carcinogenic in laboratories. Instead, “a smarter strategy would simply focus on the most preventable exposures causing the most malignancies, without any regard for what’s natural and what’s man-made.”

Here’s some cancers caused by completely natural infections and what we can do about them:

• HPV vaccines in young women would prevent lots of cervical cancers
• Hepatitis B vaccines would prevent lots of liver cancers
• Researching a corkscrew-shaped bacteria called Helicobacter pylori may prevent lots of stomach cancers
• Proper storage of peanuts, grains, and milk, regular food testing, and efforts to reduce aflatoxin (a mold that grows on food) could save thousands and thousands of lives by preventing liver cancer.

And did you know that sunscreen does nothing to prevent deadly melanomas? Honestly, despite the full-page ad in the New York Times touting their anti-cancer benefits, most sunscreens do not block out UV-A radiation, which is the leading cause of melanoma. In fact, the FDA doesn’t even consider it necessary for manufacturers to include that information on the label.

The obsession with man-made toxins not only reflects a small-minded view of cancer’s causes but hints at a worrisome theme in American public health. Our scattershot approach to preventing cancer subscribes to the cult of personal responsibility, albeit with a recent eco-friendly twist: To really help themselves, goes the thinking, people must simply take charge of their health and avoid cancer-causing, artificial products. Somewhat insidiously, we’re starting to believe that cancer mostly is prevented by informing individuals to change their consumption habits—not by proactive, broad-based public-health measures like widespread vaccination or agricultural reform.

In the end, admitting that most cancers have natural causes rightly shifts the focus on cancer prevention away from individual consumers. That’s a good thing, since in the end, you can’t always shop your way to becoming cancer-free.

I think this approach is much more plausible and much more effective than the alternatives. We live in a complicated world, and it’s not easy to assign blame for diseases like cancer to any one source. Human artifice may increase cancer rates, but it can also do remarkable things to limit them.

Now excuse me, I have to take this call.