The cigarettes of the 21st century?

Could the mobile phone be the cigarette of the 21st century? 'Absolutely.'

The view of some new-age nutter? No, the considered opinion of Professor Lawrie Challis, head of the government's committee on mobile phone safety. By this he doesn't mean that Nokias will soon be available in packets of twenty but that he is worried the cancer risk could be far higher than we think.

With mobiles, wi-fi, electrical masts, the fog of electromagnetism in which we live our lives has never been thicker. Just like smoke in the average pre-ban boozer.

The cigarette comparison is a good one. As with cigarettes, there is a reluctance on the part of all of us to face up to the implications — we love our phones just as we loved our fags. For example, earlier this year research by STUK, Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority for Finland, the home of the mobile phone, was press-released under the following headline: No clear connection between mobile phone use and brain cancer.

Yawn. We've seen more exciting headlines in Pig Farming Weekly. Until that is, you read the small print. (And we have The Independent's Geoffrey Lean to thank for doing this.) Tucked away in paragraph three is the sentence: 'The only indication of a potential effect was found among mobile phone users who had used a mobile phone for at least 10 years. They were found to have a slightly increased risk of a tumour on the side of the head on which they held the phone.'

Now, although the study was reasonably large including nearly 5,000 people from five Northern European countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and England), the number of people who had used phones for more than 10 years was quite small — just 222 people — so you could, at a push, argue that the findings are not statistically significant.

You could. But think again. Within a few years, nearly all of us will have been using a mobile for more than ten years. Conduct this particular study again in 2010 and the vast majority will have had a phone for over a decade and if we see the same percentage increase in head tumour risk — estimated by Lean at 40% - then we could be looking at a big problem. (And not just for hat manufacturers.)

No wonder Challis is seeking £3.1 million from the government and industry to follow 200,000 volunteers, long-term mobile users among them, for five years.