TIME本周最新搶讀 Mobile Alert

這篇報導探討手機與癌症之間的關聯，列舉許多數據與訪談資料。
其實這篇報導是上個月初的TIME專題，當時台灣各平面電視媒體都曾大幅報導，可惜台灣的媒體都只搶快，沒有人願意好好整理完整的資訊。我記得我所看見的電視新聞報導，都是一面倒地強調手機會致癌，國際新聞報完了，國內記者又去訪談國內專家，大家信誓旦旦，口徑一致，都說使用手機有如腦袋被煮，著實搶了不少版面。


這是新聞界的悲哀啊。有志投入新聞業的同學，記得要不厭其煩地查證，並且花時間去消化資訊，千萬不可斷章取義。平面媒體報導有比較詳實的內容，報社編譯確實認真許多...



這篇文章的作者引述了許多資料來說明手機與腦癌之間的關係，並且訪問了許多真正的致力於相關研究的權威人士，但是文中的各種立論與說明都十分嚴謹，沒有妄下結論嚇死一群老百姓。行文至結尾處，更提出了中肯的研究方向與建議。這才是新聞人應有的態度。當初台灣各新聞台在報導這則新聞時，我因為之前已經讀過這篇文章，於是對於各新聞台一窩蜂談手機會致癌覺得非常不可思議。也促使我決定將此文章整理(此篇單字多)與同學分享。

各位如果在托福閱讀成績上面想要提升實力，多閱讀學術性文章會非常有幫助。
這篇文章雖然單字多，但用詞遣字非常明快流暢，同學可以先下載好，一天讀一段就好，可是要真的讀懂，不要看一遍敷衍了事。這篇文章跟之前提供的男女人口問題，獅子魚繁殖過量問題，以及經濟學人文章(談政治與經濟)都是能提升單字與閱讀實力的好作品。我也將相關難句幫各位整理好了，只要閱讀吸收即可。這些都是課外補充的資料，同學每天念個三十分鐘一小時都好，絕對會有幫助。這一期課程八周，還會陸續有NPR的文章，請大家多多利用。

Thursday, Jun. 02, 2011

Mobile Alert

By Bryan Walsh

What gives cancer its awful power is its mystery. For thousands of years, there was virtually實際上 差不多 no mention of the disease in the nascent初期的 medical literature because we could not see it, could not recognize our cells rebelling against us. Even though doctors began to understand the nature of certain cancers — and then began reducing death rates through better screening, drugs and surgery — the essential enigma謎團 of the disease has never been resolved. Nowhere is that more the case than with brain tumors, which remain as deadly as they are rare. Lung tumors and other cancers can be blamed on lifestyle factors or environmental triggers, but aside from a few statistical quirks突然的轉變, there is little explanation for why a brain tumor strikes one patient and spares another. So if you were that unlucky one, wouldn't you grasp for any reason that the "emperor of maladies" 萬病之王(通常指癌症)— as oncologist腫瘤學家 and author Siddhartha Mukherjee calls cancer — had come for you? (疾病之王是哥倫比亞大學醫學院腫瘤科醫生Siddhartha Mukherjee在他的書中賦予癌症的稱號，此書推出馬上登上暢銷排行榜，有興趣者可以參考延伸閱讀)

That desperation helps explain why the question of a possible connection between cell-phone radiation and brain tumors remains so heated for a handful of scientists and a larger group of activists and victims. For most cancer experts and medical organizations, it's an open-and-shut case一目了然, and cell phones have been exonerated使免被指控. Radiation is considered potentially carcinogenic 會致癌的when it is powerful enough to ionize atoms or molecules使原子與分子都離子化 — adding or removing a charged particle. (上一句的意思是，如果手機的輻射強到能使原子與分子都離子化或是游離化，加入或是去除帶電顆粒，就容易致癌)Nuclear decay核衰變 and X-ray radiation X光輻射 are known ionizers都是已知的致癌元兇 — and known carcinogens — able to rip molecules to shreds都會將身體裡的細胞分裂 and cause genetic damage that leads to cancer. Cell-phone radiation is non-ionizing非離子化輻射(中文解釋=不能改變原子結構但卻能加熱組織和可能對生物作用造成有害影響的輻射。)and thus considered too weak to cause such damage.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC)美國聯邦通訊委員會, the National Cancer Institute,美國國家癌症研究所 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)美國食品及藥物管理局 and countless other bodies have agreed that cell phones are safe to use. On the World Health Organization's (WHO) website for "Electromagnetic Fields電磁場 and Public Health公共衛生: Mobile Phones," you can read the verdict判決 in black and white白紙黑字寫的很清楚: "To date截至目前為止, no adverse health effects have been established for mobile phone use."手機的使用目前沒有研究顯示會造成任何負面的效果

But those first two words may be key.(這邊的first two word指的是to date，也就是截至目前為止，目前沒有發生的，不代表將來就不會發生) At the end of May, 31 scientists from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)國際癌症研究署(一個隸屬於國際衛生組織的顧問機構) — the WHO body that does what its name says — spent a week reviewing the latest studies on cancer and cell-phone-radiation exposure. And to the surprise of many cancer experts, IARC classified cell-phone-radiation exposure as "possibly carcinogenic to humans." The panel put cell phones in category 2B on the agency's willfully unhelpful scale, below sure carcinogens like cigarette smoke and in the same category as the pesticide DDT and gasoline-engine exhaust. "A review of the human evidence of epidemiological studies 病理學研究shows an increased risk of glioma神經膠質瘤 and malignant惡性的腦部腫瘤 types of brain cancer in association with wireless-phone use," Dr. Jonathan Samet, the chairman of the IARC working group, told reporters the day the study was released.

(長期以來醫界對於手機對健康的影響意見分歧，但是世界衛生組織的顧問組織「國際癌症研究中心（IARC）」在最新舉行的國際會議中指出，使用手機可能致癌，並且提議將手機列為2B級的致癌物質，和殺蟲劑DDT、鉛和引擎廢氣同級。
長久以來，每當有研究機構發表手機可能和某些癌症有關的報告後，就馬上會有另外的機構提出證據不足的反對意見。這次國際癌症研究中心的專家在法國里昂舉行的會議，彙集13個國家的研究報告後，認為手機電磁波應被列為2B級，也就是「可能為致癌因子」的物質。因為在彙集各國研究報告後顯示，使用手機和神經膠質瘤有關，此為一種極惡性的腦瘤，且愈重度使用手機者的風險愈高。專家指出，手機使用10年以上的罹患風險就倍增，若10年內每天平均使用達30分鐘，罹患腦神經膠質瘤的風險增加百分之40。)

For those who had been sounding the alarm on mobiles, the IARC verdict was a moment of vindication為了證明無罪或是某件事情的正確性而辯護. Last year Devra Davis — an award-winning environmental epidemiologist and the author of The Secret History of the War on Cancer — dived into投入 the cell-phone scrum加入研究的戰局 and produced a new book on the subject: Disconnect. She argued that the wireless industry had all but suppressed any evidence that cell phones might be dangerous, controlling research by controlling funding just as the tobacco industry had for decades. "The world is not fair or just on issues that affect a global multitrillion-dollar industry," Davis wrote in an e-mail to TIME. But the IARC results, she suggested, could begin to change all that.

The cell-phone industry disagrees. "The IARC classification does not mean cell phones cause cancer," John Walls, vice president of public affairs公共事務部的副總裁 for the industry group CTIA–the Wireless Association, said in a statement. He noted that the FCC and FDA had largely dismissed去除 any link between cell phones and cancer. And many epidemiologists and radiation researchers were similarly puzzled by使疑惑 IARC's conclusions. The agency admitted that the only links it found between increased cell-phone use and certain kinds of brain tumors were epidemiological流行病學 — meaning that they were based on case-control studies that followed people with cancer, vs. healthy subjects, and asked how often they had used their phones. (上一句的意思是說，根據目前的相關研究顯示，手機致癌的說法目前侷限於病例對照研究法，也就是說，這些確定的案例都是透過一群特殊病患，根據這些人過去的經驗與暴露在危險因子的狀態，與一群健康的人做對照研究)But there's still no clear biological explanation缺乏生物學理論出發的研究解釋 — from animal models or anything else沒有動物範例以及其他佐證 — that explains how cell-phone radiation could cause brain tumors來證明手機的使用會直接導致腦癌. Nor have brain-cancer rates risen in the two decades during which cell phones went from being used by a wealthy few to being used by some 3 billion people around the globe. "To the best of our knowledge, cell-phone radiation does not make use of any of the pathways known to cause cancer," says David Savitz, a Brown University epidemiologist who has studied the environmental causes of cancer. "Everything I've seen points in the opposite direction" of IARC's conclusion. 根據美國布朗大學的流行病學博士說法，過去三十年來沒有任何直接證據顯示，手機的使用會致癌。

IARC itself is equivocal 含糊的 模稜兩可的about its findings. Specifically, the study found "limited" evidence of a relationship between cell-phone use and glioma and acoustic neuroma,聽覺神經瘤 while evidence for other types of cancer was considered inadequate. Limited evidence is slightly more damning than inadequate evidence, but neither is a slam dunk扣籃(扣籃是籃球術語，在美式的英文中，通常slam dunk也可以用來表示非常確定的事情，有絕對把握的事情，放在這段文章中，意思就是證據的受限與不足兩者都不足以將手機定罪). What's more, while DDT and other nasty things are classified as 2B carcinogens, so are seemingly unthreatening products like pickles醃黃瓜 and coffee. Most troubling of all, the majority of epidemiological studies done so far are flawed and out of date多數的病學研究都充滿瑕疵且結果都已經過時了, including the ones on which the IARC based its report. The freshest data the group was able to use comes from 2004這次使用的研究數據竟然是採用2004年版本的. Think about how much cell phones — and cell-phone habits — have changed in that time.

Given all these reasons to doubt IARC's findings, it would have helped if the researchers had released the details of how they came to the unsettling令人感到不安的 conclusion they reached, but the full story won't come out until publication in a journal on July 1. Ultimately, IARC's leaders essentially argued that it was better to be safe than sorry不怕一萬只怕萬一 at a time when nearly the entire planet is exposed to cell-phone radiation.

"So many people around the world are now using mobile phones," Samet said. "And as use patterns grow, we can anticipate more people using phones longer and longer. What we need is ongoing research and tracking of the way people actually use cell phones."

Even the cell-phone manufacturers can agree with that conclusion and voice no opposition to more research. But it's important to keep the studies independent of the industry and other vested interests,手機對人體的影響相關研究應該要獨立出來，不可跟廠商或是有相關利益者掛勾以求中立 which hasn't been the case so far截至目前為止，這樣的作法根本不存在. When companies bankroll research on their own products,當廠商提供資金來研究自己生產的產品 even objective studies can be tainted by 汙染the appearance of bias偏見, increasing neither public safety nor public confidence. Davis suggests that a major interdisciplinary跨界研究 research program on bioelectromagnetics生物電磁學 be undertaken, funded by a small fee on each handset sold.這一句的意思是說，應該由賣出的手機抽取一定比例的費用，去支援電磁波的研究，而非依賴廠商本身出錢進行研究，這樣才能真正公平客觀。 The National Toxicology Program美國國家毒物際化 is already working on what many hope will be the gold standard最高標準 of animal studies — submitting rats and mice to cell-phone radiation at regular intervals for 20 hours a day. Such total-immersion dosing劑量 might help us reach an unambiguous具體的不模糊的 answer.

But chances are just as good that absolute clarity will never happen. What the cell-phone controversy teaches us yet again is that cancer still has its secrets and that it fights to keep them癌病如謎團，想要揭開癌細胞的神秘面紗沒那麼容易. We'll search for causes wherever we can because the alternative — that we simply can't know why these rare and horrible things happen — is too difficult to bear.不過儘管如此，我們還是要致力於相關研究，因為沒有人有能力去承受罹癌的後果。