Comprehensive US cell phone safety study inches toward publication

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Is using a cell phone safe? While it's ostensibly a question requiring a simple yes or no, the answers have turned out to be more of a Rorschach test: people see what they want to in them. The vast majority of cell phone safety research indicates there's no problem with regular exposure to the radio-frequency radiation that cell phones use to communicate with towers. But enough studies have shown various health effects that fears of health risks have persisted-even though different studies often identify unrelated risks.

The US government's National Toxicology Program designed what could have been a definitive study, using long-term exposure of large rodent populations. But even that has caused more problems than it has solved, as the NTP decided to release incomplete results from the study that seemed to find some links to cancer, but the work had problems with weak statistical significance and unexplained deaths in the control animals.

Today, a draft of a more complete version of the NTP study was released, and it's even more of a mess. An original risk disappeared into the statistical noise, a new one emerged, and the strange death of control animals remains unexplained.

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