Despite What Robert F. Kennedy Wants You To Think, Cell Phones Do Not Cause Brain Cancer
Unfortunately, the director of Health and Human Services leads a movement prone to untrue beliefs on medical matters from cell phones to vaccines, pesticides, and genetically modified crops.
Robert F. Kennedy, the secretary of Health and Human Services, still believes that cell phones are causing brain cancer, as revealed in a congressional hearing in January.
But numerous studies going back to the year 2000 all indicate there is no particular reason to fear cell phones as a cause of cancer, and a new paper by Li Zhang and Joshua Muscat of the Department of Public Health Sciences at Pennsylvania State University examines the most up-to-date data from the United States to examine this question as if for the first time.
Most studies on this question so far have been case-control studies. This type of study is subject to biases (information bias and selection bias) because it selects subjects who already have the disease of interest (in this case, brain cancer). Although prospective studies avoid the biases inherent in case-control studies, they are expensive and difficult to carry out, especially for rare diseases such as brain cancer.
But now researchers can take advantage of the exponential increase in exposure to cell phones since their introduction in the mid-1980s. In the space of several decades, humans have gone from having no exposure—zero percent of the population exposed—to nearly universal exposure. This means that we can take advantage of what is referred to as a "natural experiment," the approach that Li and Muscat take in their illuminating new study.
An earlier analysis of this type was carried out by the National Cancer Institute. That study showed no evidence of an association between cell phone use and cancer, but the data only went up to 2012. Possibly cell phones had not been in use long enough for an effect to show up. Li and Muscat extend the period of observation by nine years.
The authors plotted the total number of cell phone subscriptions in the U.S. for the period 1985-2024 and used data on brain cancer and brain tumor incidence from the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program for the years 2000 to 2021 to calculate the annual percentage change (APC) in the incidence of brain cancer and non-malignant tumors of the brain. The SEER database for this period covers 47.9 percent of the U.S. population.
From 1985 to 2021, there was a 1,200-fold increase in the number of cell phone subscriptions in the United States (Figure 1).
Along with this dramatic increase in cell phone use, a slight decline in annual percent change for malignant brain tumors occurred, and no change in temporal lobe tumors appeared from 2000 to 2021 (Figure 2).
There was a slight increase in benign tumors (mainly meningiomas), but this is likely to be due to an increased use of medical imaging during this period discovering tumors that earlier would have gone undetected.
For acoustic neuromas (vestibular schwannomas), malignant pediatric brain tumors, and pediatric temporal lobe tumors, there was no evidence of an increase over the 21-year period.
The authors conclude that "these findings suggest that mobile phone use does not appear to be associated with an increased risk of brain cancer, either malignant or benign."
Notice how restrained their language is. As the authors point out, their results are in agreement with those from previous studies using different methodologies and carried out in different countries, including the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, New Zealand, Europe, and the United States. These studies have generally found no evidence of an association between cell phone use and cancers.
The extensive null evidence from epidemiologic studies needs to be seen in conjunction with what is known from biophysics about the effects of exposure to radiofrequency energy emitted by cell phones. Unlike ionizing radiation, such as X-rays, radiofrequency energy has much longer wavelengths and much lower frequencies that are too weak to break chemical bonds or damage DNA. There is no evidence that these waves can initiate cancer.
Thus, different types of evidence all converge to indicate that cell phone emissions are unlikely to cause cancer.
I have summarized these findings—from the most recent study and from studies going back 25 years—to show how, as more studies are done and attempts are made to improve the quality of the data, we can be more and more certain that these studies are sound and that we are not missing something.
I have gone on at length about cell phones in order to contrast the slow, steady, and disciplined conduct of science with the corrosive disinformation that is being put out on a daily basis by RFK Jr., who leads the largest biomedical agency in the United States and in the world.
As is the case with cell phones, the available scientific evidence indicates that there is no association between vaccines, and specifically the MMR vaccine, and autism. In fact, the evidence for vaccines not causing autism is even stronger than the evidence for cell phones not causing brain cancer. This is because, for vaccines, we have very high-quality data on the exposure of individuals (the type of vaccine, the dose, the date of vaccination). And we have this information on millions of children. This means that we can have very strong confidence that vaccines do not cause autism.
And yet, in the face of this evidence, RFK Jr. insists on propagating this debunked claim, and he is sponsoring a study by a discredited researcher that he hopes will provide the answer he favors. This is an unforgivable waste of money that could be spent on addressing an important health issue. But it is also more than that.
From observing RFK Jr., and those he appeals to, we see that the belief in different bogus claims tends to be correlated. A belief that cell phones are causing cancer or that vaccines cause autism can serve as a sentinel indicator of the susceptibility to other false beliefs, such as those targeting pesticides and genetically engineered crops. It's noteworthy that the prominent anti-biotech advocacy organization U.S. Right-to-Know is anti-vaccine in addition to being fiercely against glyphosate and other pesticides and genetically modified crops.
These, and many others, are zombie risks that never die. It doesn't matter what the specific risk is. The credulity, the failure to take any commonsense evidence or distillations of the scientific evidence into account, the refusal to value the judgment of experts who have spent untold hours examining the issue, or the conclusions reached by institutions such as the National Institutes of Health, the Institute of Medicine, or the American Cancer Society, into account are the same.
RFK Jr. appears to have an implacable drive to do away with vaccines by undermining public confidence, disrupting insurance coverage, and making it too costly for pharmaceutical companies to produce them, as happened in the 1980s. Exposing his lies is literally a matter of protecting the lives of children and adults from the all-too-real infectious diseases that RFK Jr. doesn't believe in.
Editor's note: RFK's various quirks and mistakes are analyzed at length in Reason's July cover story by Elizabeth Nolan Brown on his Make America Healthy Again movement, and will be discussed tonight, Wednesday, June 25, in a Reason Speakeasy event featuring Brown and hosted by Nick Gillespie at the Blue Building, located at 222 East 46th Street in Midtown Manhattan. Doors open at 7 p.m., and Nick's conversation with Brown will begin at 7:30 p.m., followed by audience Q&A and a reception. Tickets include beer, wine, soft drinks, and a selection of healthy and unhealthy appetizers.
