The Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research (MTHR) Program has announced it will kick off what is set to be the largest study undertaken into the long term health effects caused by mobile phones on their users.
The study, known as COSMOS (Cohort Study of Mobile Phone Use and Health) will involve monitoring the health of 250,000 mobile phone users over a period of up to 30 years, and will take place in five different European countries.
Principal investigator professor Paul Elliott of the School of Public Health at London’s Imperial College said at a press conference that research to date had mainly focused on use in the short term – less than 10 years – and that it was now time to take on more extensive studies.
“The COSMOS study will be looking at long-term use, 10, 20 or 30 years. And with long-term monitoring there will be time for diseases to develop,” said the professor optimistically.
Backing up Elliott, fellow professor Lawrie Challis from MTHR explained, “many cancers take 10, 15 years for the symptoms to appear. So we’ve got to address the question: could there be something out there that we need to look at?”
The COSMOS study is recruiting participants aged 18-69 in Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Britain, noting it will use data from the participants’ health records, phone bills and questionnaires.
Racking up quite a large phone bill, the study is predicted to cost
