From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, the World Health Organization released its long-awaited interphone meta-study into the link between cell phones and brain cancer.

Ten years and $24 million later, it couldn't find a link, only the vague suggestion

of a link. Very unsatisfying, not just because it was inconclusive, but because cell phone

technology and usage has radically changed since that data was collected, it's probably

irrelevant. We'll report this as an object lesson and how

hard science can beat a report, but be forewarned, you won't be satisfied either. Dr. Daniel Khrushki

is one of the authors of the Interphone Study. Overall, the study did not show any clear evidence

of an increased risk of either glioma or meningioma.

These are the two main types of brain cancer.

But in the highest user group for cell phones in the interphone study, that's the top 10% of cell phone users.

So use the phone for more than 1,640 hours cumulatively.

We did see a suggestion of an increased risk of glioma an odds ratio of 1.4,

which means a 40% increase relative to the background glioma rate.

Aren't you burying the lead there that there appeared to be from your study,

a 40% increase in risk if you logged beyond a certain number of

hours of cell phone use? That's what the data would suggest at face value, but if you look at all

of the other exposure categories that we had, there was actually no evidence whatsoever of an

increase in risk. I don't understand.

Well, it's just in the highest category of utilization that there was a possible association.

There was some concern that the reporting accuracy in that group may not have been perfect.

And we also have some questions getting at some of the weaknesses of the study with recall bias and selection bias, some of which we can correct for, some of which we cannot.

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