Fear of phoning.

• Author: Fumento, Michael

I don't mean to scare anyone, but it has recently come to my attention that Michael Landon, Lee Remick, Lyle Alzado, and Audrey Hepburn all used regular, noncellular phones frequently prior to their deaths of cancer.

And it gets worse. It seems that close to 100 percent of all American adults who have died of cancer in the last several decades have regularly used telephones. Moreover, countries with significantly lower numbers of phones per capita also have significantly fewer cases of cancer. Indeed, U.S. per-capita cancers are much higher now than they were 100 years ago, when telephones were rare.

Yes, I jest--though all of the data I just presented are true--and yes, I needed to point out quickly that I was jesting. For the "C-word" throws moderns into such a tizzy that they have great difficulty thinking straight. Witness the havoc wrought when one non-doctor, nonscientist, David Reynard, appeared on Larry King Live and announced that his wife used a cellular phone, his wife contracted and died of cancer, and therefore the phone caused her cancer.

How much different are we from our ancestors who blamed their ills on black cats who crossed their paths? Back then, unexplained ills were blamed on witchcraft; today the blame goes to technology. But the similarities are myriad, including the fear of the unknown or the little understood and the psychological need to blame someone or something else for one's misfortunes.

Consider the situation covered heavily in the New York press in which Long Island women have formed an activist group after discovering that their incidence of breast cancer is slightly above that of the country as a whole. Epidemiologists have explained to them that cancers don't evenly distribute themselves everywhere and that women on Long Island have factors that predispose them to a higher risk. A vociferous group of women on the island doesn't want to hear such explanations.

Their chairwoman said researchers should turn their attention to the environment--be it power lines, herbicides, or anything else man-made--because . women are tired of being told it is because of their educational background [a marker for the risk factor of having children later in life or not at all], their high socio-economic status, their ethnic background, and their age that they are prone to this illness."

Or consider the Massachusetts couple who initially decided that their child's cancer must have been from herbicides sprayed on their lawn...