Let's answer the big question first: nobody has proved that using a mobile phone will give you cancer. Despite the scare produced by the BBC Panorama documentary about mobile phone safety, no researcher has proof that they will hurt you.

This is the case, despite the fact that thousands of research groups around the world are looking for signs that the radiation given off by your mobile phone could cause illness. Some people make claims but none of the science yet stands up to close scrutiny.

These stories are causing headaches, however, for the phone manufacturers and for the companies that provide mobile phone services, including Eircell and Esat Digifone. The scares leave consumers unhappy about using their mobile phones or resolving to cut back on usage, something that neither the manufacturers nor the service providers want.

About one in four people in Ireland use a mobile phone, a remarkably large market built by aggressive marketing campaigns. These invariably show beautiful young people being gorgeously in touch and leading wonderfully busy lives. In reality, surveys have shown that most people use their phones to say they are on the way home or will pick up that pint of milk or the dry cleaning - not particularly compelling reasons to risk illness.

The scares do have a lasting impact, however. A MORI poll conducted this month in Britain showed that 40 per cent of regular mobile phone users were worried about possible health impacts. One in three occasional users also expressed fears about what mobile phones might be doing to them in the long term.

Irish consumers, however, seemed somewhat unmoved by Monday's Panorama revelations. "We run a phone line to deal with public questions on the [safety] issue," said Ms Olivia Dobbs, community relations manager at Eircell. "Since Monday we have got two calls."

The service, she said, deals more with worries about the phone masts than the phones but will take all comers. She is not convinced that the public is greatly concerned. "It would be naive to think it wouldn't have some impact on the public. The level of worry, however, is to buy an [hands free] accessory. I would be worried if we were not keeping abreast of what is going on in the research area," she added.

Esat Digifone also runs a customer-care service and the staff are trained to deal with health and safety inquires, according to a company spokeswoman. And like Eircell, Esat Digifone is a contributor to GSMMOU, the international body set up by GSM companies to monitor safety and to conduct research.

Fighting the scare stories is essential for the continued health of the industry but is also very difficult, according to Mr Norman Sandler, director of global strategy issues at Motorola. "It is very much like shadow boxing," he suggested. "You can see your opponent, the residual effects of dodgy health claims, but you can't land a killer punch.

"If our customers are concerned, then we are concerned, not because there is a risk," he said. The company tries to counter the worry with technical information, expert views and more research.

Overcoming unfounded concern is difficult, however. "It is obviously something that we are constantly monitoring. It may be that our industry on the whole needs to do more," he said.

Motorola had spent millions of dollars to fund both in-house and external research into safety, Mr Sandler said. It also helped fund the research carried out by the US-based Wireless Technology Research which was cited on Panorama.

Ericsson was also concerned about consumer worries, according to the company's vice-president for marketing of mobile phones, Mr Jan Ahrenbring. "We are taking this issue very, very seriously due to the fact that people are asking questions," he said.

The company, he said, had been involved in research on mobile phone safety for 10 years and had invested heavily in this activity. "We do not have our own medical expertise; we are supporting research through the WHO," he said.

A range of innovations faced similar health scares and scepticism when they were introduced, he said, including the microwave and the PC and in its day Edison's light bulb. "I think we just have to live with that."

A Siemens spokesman indicated that the company had received very little feedback following the television documentary. It is involved in the Forschungsgemeinschaft Funk, the research association for radio applications which uses funding from manufacturers and others to conduct research.

There is no doubt that the BBC documentary caused quite a stir. It quoted experts from both Sweden and the US who talked about two new studies which, inevitably, made a tenuous link between mobile phone use and brain cancers. Both were suitably cautious about their findings, which awaited publication, but both also thought there was justification for urgent follow-up research.

The researchers' carefully constructed hedges, assembled using "maybe" and "could show" and "might" were swept away in the resulting media storm. The research in news print took on a more definitive look and consumers were left assuming that mobile phones were fit only for the bin if you hoped for a long life.

By the end of last week, however, more considered technical analysis showed just how little cover those technical hedges actually provided. New Scientist reported that the Swedish study by Dr Lennart Hardell at the Orebro Medical Centre involved 209 people with brain tumours and 425 matched controls. He had found that mobile-phone users were 2.5 times more likely to get tumours than non-users, but the sample that provided this statistic was just 13, far too small to prove anything.

The Wireless Technology Research data, fronted by Dr George Carlo, was conducted using $25 million beaten out of the mobile phone companies by the US government. It looked at 450 people with brain cancer, comparing them with 425 controls. There was no overall link between cancer and usage but Dr Carlo zoomed in on one specific tumour type, neurocytoma, which was found in 30 people. Of these, 40 per cent had used mobile phones compared with 18 per cent of controls, but again the sample is so small that few conclusions can be drawn, except of course for the cry for more research.

The scientists, unfortunately, cannot give any ready comfort to the consumer trying to come to terms with the mobile "threat". So far, the greatest health risk associated with mobile phones is having one thrown at you for allowing yours to ring in the theatre or at the cinema. Who knows, however, what the scientists will find if they look hard enough?