Freelancer's wonderful rant

Here's the letter of the month from an American in Bangkok. The Bangkok-based freelancer belatedly managed to touch the editors and got into print.(His original submission presumably was spiked, alas.) But then maybe these editors already have been secretly outsourced to Noida, India: hence the empathy. One wonders....but all freelancers, former or present, should salute S. Tsow, the International Herald Tribune's "despondent writer"

Dear opinion page editors:

I'm waiting to hear from you regarding my unsolicited submission on my experiences as an expatriate American living in Thailand.

In my wilder moments, I have imagined my little screed being circulated among your top editors, possibly even to the publisher, conceivably even to Pope Benedict XVI, President Bush and Ban Ki Moon, the UN secretary general.

I have fantasized about their reactions: universal cries of joy, wonder and amazement at my scintillating insights enshrined in crystalline prose. I have entertained the pleasant delusion that you were waiting till you could nominate me for the Pulitzer Prize before finally informing me that you planned to publish it on your front page, and syndicate it to a dozen other publications, thereby making me world-famous and fantastically rich.

But in my sober moments, a little voice tells me that it is not to be, and that your lack of response is due merely to an oversight.

So go ahead. Crush my ego, destroy my soul. Tell me you're not going to publish it. I am waiting.

S. Tsow, Bangkok

another work-related risk for reporters? brain tumours from the cell phone

What do brain surgeons know about cellphone safety that the rest of us don't? asks Tara Parker-Pope in today's International Herald Tribune. Maybe reporters should text message more instead of being constantly on the mobile! It's possible it may be bad for your brain.

Last week, three prominent neurosurgeons told the CNN interviewer Larry King that they did not hold cellphones next to their ears. "I think the safe practice," said Dr. Keith Black, a surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, "is to use an earpiece so you keep the microwave antenna away from your brain."

Dr. Vini Khurana, an associate professor of neurosurgery at the Australian National University who is an outspoken critic of cellphones, said: "I use it on the speaker-phone mode. I do not hold it to my ear."

And CNN's chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon at Emory University Hospital, said that like Black he used an earpiece.

Along with Senator Edward Kennedy's recent diagnosis of a glioma, a type of tumor that critics have long associated with cellphone use, the doctors' remarks have helped reignite a long-simmering debate about cellphones and cancer.

That supposed link has been largely dismissed by many experts, including the American Cancer Society. The theory that cellphones cause brain tumors "defies credulity," said Dr. Eugene Flamm, chairman of neurosurgery at Montefiore Medical Center.

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, three large epidemiology studies since 2000 have shown no harmful effects. CTIA (the Wireless Association), the leading industry trade group, said in a statement, "The overwhelming majority of studies that have been published in scientific journals around the globe show that wireless phones do not pose a health risk."

The FDA notes, however, that the average period of phone use in the studies it cites was about three years, so the research doesn't answer questions about long-term exposures.

Cellphones emit non-ionizing radiation, waves of energy that are too weak to break chemical bonds or to set off the DNA damage known to cause cancer. There is no known biological mechanism to explain how non-ionizing radiation might lead to cancer.

But researchers who have raised concerns say that just because science can't explain the mechanism doesn't mean one does not exist. Concerns have focused on the heat generated by cellphones and the fact that the radio frequencies are absorbed mostly by the head and neck. In recent studies that suggest a risk, the tumors tend to occur on the same side of the head where the patient typically holds the phone.

Like most research on the subject, the studies are observational, showing only an association between cellphone use and cancer, not a causal relationship. The most important of these studies is called Interphone, a vast research effort in 13 countries, including Canada, Israel and several in Europe.

Some of the research suggests a link between cellphone use and three types of tumors: glioma; cancer of the parotid, a salivary gland near the ear; and acoustic neuroma, a tumor that essentially occurs where the ear meets the brain. All these cancers are rare.

Last year, The American Journal of Epidemiology published data from Israel finding a 58 percent higher risk of parotid gland tumors among heavy cellphone users. Also last year, a Swedish analysis of 16 studies in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine showed a doubling of risk for acoustic neuroma and glioma after 10 years of heavy cellphone use.

Some doctors say the real concern is not older cellphone users, who began using phones as adults, but children who are beginning to use phones today and face a lifetime of exposure.

The fear is that even if the individual risk of using a cellphone is low, with three billion users worldwide, even a minuscule risk would translate into a major public health concern.

When Satchmo made a historic squawk

Reporters, even when covering celebrities, can change the course of history.
This bright little nugget by David Margolick in the International Herald Tribune recounts what transpired when Lubenow, an enterprising cub reporter, persuaded Louis Armstrong to speak out about the segregation problems in Little Rock, Arkansas half a century ago.

"It's getting almost so bad a colored man hasn't got any country," a furious Armstrong told him [the reporter]. Eisenhower, he charged, was "two faced," and had "no guts." For Faubus, he used a double-barreled hyphenated expletive, utterly unfit for print. The two settled on something safer: "uneducated plow boy." The euphemism, Lubenow says, was far more his than Armstrong's.

Armstrong bitterly recounted some of his experiences touring in the Jim Crow South. He then sang the opening bar of "The Star-Spangled Banner," inserting obscenities into the lyrics and prompting Velma Middleton, the vocalist who toured with Armstrong and who had joined them in the room, to hush him up.

Armstrong had been contemplating a good-will tour to the Soviet Union for the State Department. "They ain't so cold but what we couldn't bruise them with happy music," he had said. Now, though, he confessed to having second thoughts. "The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell," he said, offering further choice words about the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. "The people over there ask me what's wrong with my country. What am I supposed to say?"

Lubenow, who came from a small North Dakota farming community, was shocked by what he heard, but he also knew he had a story; he skipped the concert and went back to the paper to write it up. It was too late to get it into his own paper; nor would the Associated Press editor in Minneapolis, dubious that Armstrong could have said such things, put it on the national wire, at least until Lubenow could prove he hadn't made it all up.

So the next morning Lubenow returned to the Dakota Hotel and, as Armstrong shaved, had the Herald photographer take their picture together. Then Lubenow showed Armstrong what he'd written. "Don't take nothing out of that story," Armstrong declared. "That's just what I said, and still say." He then wrote "solid" on the bottom of the yellow copy paper, and signed his name.