there have long been fears that using mobile phones can increase your risk of cancer but a review commissioned by the World Health Organization and led by Australian scientists has found that there is no link between the disease and mobile phones associate professor Ken kedes is from the Australian radiation protection and nuclear safety agency and is the studies's lead author good afternoon to you Ken so how did you determine that mobile phones don't cause cancer um our systematic review looked at uh research that has been done for the last 28 years it included 63 studies so when we combined all these studies together Rie found no association between mobile phone use and a range of cancers further to that uh revie found no association with using a mobile phone for a long time such as longer than 10 years and it also found no association with the amount of mobile phone including number of calls or the time that you spent on the phone okay so the idea that phones could cause cancer uh came because they use high frequency radio waves or radiation which itself is a loaded word uh but even organizations like the wh who said in the past that exposure is a possible carcinogen for cancer so so what's changed um the the classification of radio waves being possibly carcinogenic uh came about due to earlier studies um which had had quite a few problems now since that time there's been a lot more studies that have been a lot more comprehensive and when we look at the older studies and the new studies in combination our systematic review doesn't find uh an association with brain cancer okay so what about mobile phones used by children than Ken their skulls are softer is it the same conclusion no link to head or net cancer yeah that is correct so there was uh a number of studies that looks that looked specifically on children um and we also uh reviewed those studies and similarly we didn't find an association between mobile phone use um and pediatric brain tumors and has there been any appreciable increase in the numbers of had or net cancers since mobile phones uh became mainstream well over the last 30 or so years yeah that that's it's quite interesting that um another study that we did actually back in 2018 in Australia uh what we found was that um although mobile phone used to skyrocketed I mean the first mobile phone came into existence in the in the late 1980s but since that time mobile phone uses scar rocketed um whereas the brand tumor rates both for males and F has remain quite stable so it's quite reassuring to see that the results of our systematic review align with um what other research says about uh the incidence of brain cancer where it doesn't actually see any increases right so you looked to see if there was any connection between radio waves and cancer you found none uh does that go for everything that uses Wireless technology including mobile phone towers yes so we we also did look at exposure from mobile phone towers and broadcast hours including um TV and radio broadcast towers and it was the same result there was no association between um telecommunications towers and any of the brain tumors that we're mentioning Ken carpes thank you so much thanks for having me