Look at it this way: You can place everything into one of three categories: 1) known to cause cancer; 2) might cause cancer; 3) is not even suspected of causing cancer.
Items in category 1 -- things that science has proved increase the likelihood of cancer -- are too many in number to list here, but include things like foods cooked above 248 degrees (F); some common food colorings; popular children's bath products; red meat and processed meat; dairy products; alcohol; some soft drinks; and others.
So here's my question: Why does Dr. Herberman ignore the hundreds of things known to cause cancer -- items which are used daily by staff and some of which I'll bet are served in the University of Pittsburgh's cafeterias -- and focus on one item from the list of things that might cause cancer?
What is it about mobile phones that inspires a prominent scientist to ignore published scientific research and focus instead on what is essentially a hunch?
The accidental conclusion
I believe the majority of car accidents blamed on mobile phones in fact have nothing to do with mobile phones. Here's why.
Any time there's a car accident that happens while somebody is using a mobile phone, the mobile phone is blamed for the accident. That's just common sense, right? Well, not so fast.
In the United States, roughly 5 per cent of the people driving cars at any given moment are using their mobile phones. Unless using a mobile phone actually prevents car accidents, you would expect that about 5 per cent of the people who get into car accidents happen to be on the phone at the time of the accident. This 5 per cent represents chance, not causation.
In other words, you can expect, statistically speaking, that 5 per cent of all accidents will have a mobile-phone driver just by chance; the mobile phone didn't cause the accident. not as a causation.
There are about 6 million car accidents per year (and about 43,000 car accident fatalities). That means there should be about 300,000 car accidents per year where the driver was talking on the phone, but where that mobile phone use did not *cause* the accident. Yet nearly all of those accidents are blamed on the mobile phone. Sure, some unknown percentage of mobile phone-related accidents are caused by the phone call, but the rest of the accidents involve a driver talking on the mobile phone without that call actually causing the accident. Despite that, close to 100 per cent of these will be blamed on the phone call.