The incidence of melanoma is accelerating since about 2005 in the Nordic countries. A closer look shows that the melanoma incidence in the head region is especially affected. The increase takes place in all countries examined and at the same speed and time.
The question is: What is causing this epidemic?
In this summary we will show the general Nordic trend of both head melanoma and the use of mobile phones. We will analyze the dynamic correlation between the two trend plots and extract the characteristic function that is used for estimating future trends.
Figure 1 shows that we today speek close to 70 000 years in the mobile phones for each year in Sweden.
Figure 1. Mobile phone use time in Sweden for each year.
Figure 2 shows the rather sudden increase in head melanoma incidence in all Nordic countries together.
Figure 2. The incidence of head melanoma is increasing in all Nordic countries.
In case the use of mobile phones has anything to do with the increasing rates of head melanoma, we might foresee a very large increase in the incidence the coming decades. Since we have had different technologies for our mobile phones, there might be different ways to interpret the data shown.
In case it is a question of using mobile phones, no matter what type, this means that there is a quite long latency time before the cases show up. And that implies that we will end up in large numbers of victims during coming years. Figure 3 shows the result of a model study when we count all mobile years spoken since 1982, assuming mobile phones will be allowed until 2020.
Figure 3. The head melanoma incidence may increase drastically if the increase noticed so far is caused by mobiles.
May-be the old NMT-phones working at 450 MHz were not a problem but the new 900 MHz GSM phones from 1993 and onwards, then the picture would look like Figure 4.
Figure 4. If the increase was caused by GSM900 MHz from 1993 onwards, the picture would look like this.
Or, if we think that the main problem is with the high-frequency phones, 1.8 GHz and higher, the picture will look more optimistic. An analysis assuming the melanoma increase is a response to mobile years spoken since 1997, gives the picture shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5. The calculated response to mobile phone speech time after 1997.
Figure 3 can be seen as a worst case scenario while Figure 5 probably is the best scenario from a population health perspective. The first one is based on long latency times before a skin damage turns into melanoma while the computer in Figure 5 has choosen a much shorter latency time to fit data with mobile use time since 1997.
So, what should we expect? Incidence numbers rocketing to 30/100 000 (fig 3) or to only 3 (fig 5)? Probably something in between, say 5.
We will just have to wait and see. Our responsible authorities state that there is no caussation at all and that the increase is entirely due to increasing sun-tanning habits. Because that's what the expertes from the sun-cream industry and from the mobile phone industry tell them...