A new study concludes that cell phones do not cause cancer. Or it doesn’t conclude anything, or maybe it concludes that they do.

No need to go far to collect these varying points of view. The AP story puts them all forward–and in just a few taut paragraphs. In typical style, the AP compresses the news. Unfortunately these lean, muscular paragraphs are so confusing as to be almost unintelligible.

AP writer Frank Jordans must have known he was on shaky ground, because he ledes with this brilliant insight:

GENEVA – If there’s one lifestyle tool that’s ubiquitous, from American cities to remote villages of the developing world, it’s the mobile phone.

Didn’t know that, did ya?

We get to the news in graf three where Jordans tells us that the study “suggests frequent cell phone use may increase the chances of developing rare but deadly form of brain cancer.” There you have it: Cell phones might cause cancer.

But, no. In the next graf, we have this: “Even the study’s authors say there is no way yet to tell how big the risk is, if there is one.” Reassuring. Maybe no risk at all!

And now in the next graf, we get this: “Experts were nearly unanimous in saying the results of the study are inconclusive.”

Sadly, the story continues that way, alternately disturbing and reassuring. It’s of no use whatever to the reader, who gets no help figuring out whether to be concerned about this story or to use it to wrap up tonight’s fish.

Admittedly, this is a complex story. Nobody wants a study to be inconclusive. But if that’s what it is, that’s what it is. Raising all the things that might be true–or might not–does not clarify the situation.

But Jordans doesn’t stop. Midway though the story, he gives us this zinger: A British official says, ”We can’t establish without any doubt that there is no link.” Arrrggggghhhhhh!

I advise you not to read it; it might be more hazardous for your brain than a cell phone. Or it might not.

Reuters does a far better job, opening with several grafs that clearly say the study was inconclusive. “Experts who studied almost 13,000 cell phone users over 10 years, hoping to find out whether the mobile devices cause brain tumours, said on Sunday their research gave no clear answer,” Kate Kelland writes. She explores what that means, noting that while it found no evidence of a link, it also did not disprove a link. That’s what inconclusive means, and Kelland managed to elaborate on that without confusing things.

I can’t find a story on Scientific American‘s website, where I’d hoped to find a good one. Nor could I find one on Wired‘s site, or that of the New York Times. How could these folks pass this one up? They should know, as well as anyone, that this thing is going to be tricky to report, and that we need the better news outlets, like these, to give us a proper accounting of the research. Besides, this was the largest and longest study of cell-phone use we’ve seen, including data from 13 countries. I’ll listen to any reasonable argument about how it should have been played, but I don’t think it was reasonable to pass. (My apologies if I missed these stories; I used the search engines on the site, and I used Google site-restricted searches to look for them.)

While these folks were apparently MIA, some science reporters did do a nice job.

James Geary, who wrote about cell phones in the March, 2010 issue of Popular Science, had the huge advantage of bringing a lot of background to this story. His online story emphasizes the weaknesses in the study, which, Geary’s sources say, suffers from a poor design. This exemplifies the virtues of beat reporting. Because Geary has been following the issue, he was able to write a far more complete and authoritative story on deadline than were many of his colleagues. And Daniel Cressey at Nature news does a nice explication of the study and also points to the deficiencies in the news coverage.

A further complication with this story is that it was embargoed until today (Monday), but the story leaked out over the weekend. Apparently the British press was feeling frisky. (Ivan Oransky, executive editor of of Reuters Health dissects the broken embargo on his excellent Embargo Watch blog.)

Grist for the mill: The press release from the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

- Paul Raeburn

This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 5:58 pm and is filed under About Journalism, Health & Medicine Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.