Cellphones give you brain cancer and a bacon sandwich a day puts up heart disease by a half.
It makes the choice pretty simple: bacon is tastier than ceaseless phone chat and myocardial infarction a lot less painful than a brain tumour.
That said, it would be foolish to rule out the possibility that you’ve eaten a bacon sandwich while on the phone — in which case it’s not a choice but a double whammy. Both of these appeared as headlines in the right-wing London tabloid the Daily Mail.
On the cellphone and brain cancer risk, its report was a marked contrast to those of the broadsheets, who agreed that the study on which the story was based had found no statistically significant raised risk.
The author of the study, Professor Anthony Swerdlow, of the United Kingdom’s Institute of Cancer Research, clarified the findings for me (as he had already, in a press conference — the misreporting here isn’t accidental): there were 10 usage groups, ranging from very low to very high.
In the very highest group, those reporting using their phone for 12 or more hours a day, there was a raised chance of both glioma and meningioma. But that level of use is in itself improbable, and you have to take into account the possibility that, as this sample is of people with brain tumours, they were confused or misremembering. (‘They’d have to have been millionaires,” Swerdlow commented; I personally think their wealth of time is more remarkable.)
Furthermore, there is a dose response missing: ‘Real things tend to give progressively larger risks with larger doses. Biases tend not to, because the most extreme ones tend to be errors,” Swerdlow said, adding: ‘The study isn’t useless or pointless but it needs careful interpretation.”
Finally, biological literature can find no mechanism by which radio waves can cause cancer at all. Cellphones don’t disrupt DNA, which is the way ionising radiation causes cancer — that much was already well known.
This makes me wonder whether the study was worth doing at all, but Swerdlow is very clear on this: ‘There is public concern, and it’s part of the function of scientists to answer the questions that people are concerned about.”
My view is that cancers are so diffuse now — in cause, in treatment, in aggressiveness, in fatality, in the people they attack — that we’re not really talking about a disease at all, we’re using it as an umbrella term for death.
The two elemental truths are that nobody wants to be ill and yet nobody wants to live forever. This presents a chasm of realistic expectation: how do you eradicate disease while preserving mortality? What, exactly, do you want to die in your sleep of?
There is also the ticklish conflict between what you want for yourself today and tomorrow, and what you imagine you’ll want when you’re 80. If we were to talk openly about death, the onus would be on everybody to charge on to this fraught, conflicted territory; if we only talk about cancer, we can leave it to doctors. That doesn’t, however, tell the whole story about our love affair with scare stories.
To move on to bacon, the Harvard School of Public Health has just produced a study showing the risk of heart disease goes up by 42% with every 56g serving of processed meat. It sounds extraordinarily high, but on closer inspection isn’t.
Compare it to smoking, which raises the risk of cancer by 20 times, that is, 2 000%. A 42% rise is small, in epidemiological terms, and could have been thrown up by a bias (maybe angry men eat more bacon than placid women?). But there isn’t a bias in the world that could produce a 2 000% increase.
The newspaper, in reporting this story (in fairness, it was, again, only the Daily Mail), takes the role of the Friend Who Exaggerates. They expect you to enjoy the drama of their tale, adjusting it down to reality afterwards. And they’re right, to a point.
Medical melodrama, in the media, is emphatically not taken as a guide; none of us is getting any healthier. Well, smoking has diminished, by dint of the fact that it is manifestly dangerous and there aren’t many places you can do it.
But drinking, eating meat and not doing enough exercise — all the core modules of carcinogenic (or, generally, illness-generating) behaviour — steadily rise. We look at scare stories not as a blueprint for a better life but for thrill-tainment.
We’re looking for the fright elements of the horror genre, the masochistic guilt of the religious experience and enough cod statistics to feel, fleetingly, as though we’re being educated.
My beef with the Mail and its illexplained stats and misleading headlines is not about the spread of the panic itself, which serves a cultural purpose and is enjoyable, but that it doesn’t do it very well.
When the author of a study says there is most likely no connection between cellphone use and brain cancer, the headline to print is not ‘more muddle over mobiles as study suggests raised brain cancer risk”.
Poor statistical analysis is like bad computer-generated imagery: it breaks the spell, drags you back to a world where robots don’t exist and the causes of cancer are quite incremental and quotidian. Health journalism (and it’s not just the Mail) needs more scientific credibility, even to function as entertainment. —