Cell Phone Towers and Childhood Cancer

Researchers find no link between cell phone towers and children's cancer risk.
The AP (6/23, Cheng) reports that "children whose mothers lived close to a mobile phone tower while pregnant did not appear to be at any higher risk of cancer than children whose mothers lived farther away," according to a study published in the British Medical Journal. Investigators "analyzed 1,397 cancer cases in children up to age four from 1999 to 2001 in the United Kingdom. Using a national birth registry, they identified 5,588 similar children without cancer."
The Los Angeles Times (6/22, Kaplan) "Booster Shots" blog reported that "the team also gathered detailed data about all 81,781 cellphone towers that were operational in the country during that time, including each tower's location, height, output power, and how many antennas it had." The researchers found that, "in virtually every permutation of their calculations, there was no correlation between the cellphone towers and the cancer cases."
Bloomberg News (6/23, Hallam) reports that "the study is the largest of its kind, and the findings should put any reports of cancer clusters around mobile-phone towers into context, the researchers wrote."
The Washington Post (6/22, Stein) "The Checkup" blog reported that, "in an editorial accompanying the study, John Bithell of the University of Oxford said that while the study had some shortcoming, the findings should be reassuring to people living near cell phone towers."