Children ‘not at risk’ from mobile phone masts

Pregnant women and young children are not at risk from early childhood cancers due to living near mobile phone masts.

According to a new study published on the British Medical Journal website today, no association between a mother’s exposure to a mobile phone base station during pregnancy and children going on to develop cancer can be found.

This is the first large study to look at phone masts in the UK and its results may prove controversial to those families living near a mast.

The use of mobile phones has increased dramatically over the last ten years and with this has come high levels of concern about the risks it poses from those living near them.

The study, carried out by researchers at Imperial College London and led by Paul Elliott, Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health Medicine, investigated the risk of childhood cancers including brain tumours and leukaemia.

Identifying 1,397 British children aged between birth and four years and registered with leukaemia or a tumour in the brain or central nervous system between 1999/01, researchers plotted the distance from the nearest mobile phone mast to the child’s birth address and looked at the power density for each base station.

Whilst they could find no association that mobile phone base stations created a cancer risk in young children, the researchers admit their focus was only on early childhood cancers and did not look at long term cancer developments or other health risks the base stations could pose.

From the Childhood Cancer Research Group at the University of Oxford, John Bithell says that patients should be reassured by their doctors that living near a mobile phone mast is not a worry.

He said: “Moving away from a mast, with all its stresses and costs, cannot be justified on health grounds in the light of current evidence.”