Last Saturday, Joseph “Beau” Biden lost his life to brain cancer.
The son of Vice President Joe Biden had a glioblastoma multiforme, or GBM. This all-too-common tumor has been linked to cell phone use.
According to The Daily Beast, GBM is an aggressive and often fatal form of cancer. The estimated two-year survival rate is only 17 percent for patients between 40 and 65 years old. Scientists are not sure what the underlying causes of GBM are, but “Some believe that environmental risk factors, such as radiation from cellphone use, may contribute to brain cancer.”
Last fall, Swedish doctors found that people who use cell phones for more than a year had a 70 percent greater risk of brain cancer than those who used the wireless devices for less than a year. The study, published in the International Journal of Oncology, found that people who used mobile phones for more than 25 years had a 300 percent greater risk of developing the dreaded disease than those who used mobile phones for one year or less. The study’s authors concluded that “glioma and also acoustic neuroma are caused by RF-EMF emissions from wireless phones.”
In 2012, the Supreme Court of Italy granted worker’s compensation to Innocente Marcolini, a businessman who developed a tumor after using a cell phone for 12 years. It marked the first time that any court, anywhere in the world, ruled in favor of a link between cell phone radiation and brain tumors. Marcolini was a financial manager at an industrial plant in Brescia, Italy, who used a cell phone for about five hours daily. Around 2002, the then-50-year-old man felt an odd tingling sensation in his chin while he was shaving. He was diagnosed with a nerve tumor. Marcolini’s worker’s compensation claim alleged that the tumor was the result of the wireless phones he was required to use for work. Marcolini’s case was at first rejected, but the Court of Appeals in Brescia reversed the decision in 2009; on October 18, 2012, Italy’s Supreme Court affirmed the Appeals Court’s ruling.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has upgraded cell phone radiation to B2 category, meaning “possibly carcinogenic.”