When we see “government study,” we’re often immediately sent into a digression of thought. What would possibly motivate an official to take tax-revenue and give it to a group of government employees to learn about something of this nature. And then, we usually get so frustrated that we turn to the bottle for answers. This being said, more often than not, a study that you could never imagine as needed will generally provide at least one or two interesting results.

The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) exists (in theory) “to promote health and quality of life by preventing and controlling disease, injury, and disability.” For more than 60 years, the CDC has pursued malaria, studied plagues, eliminated polio, fought small pox, and even studied cell-phone usage. Um… studied cell-phone usage? Yeah, that one caught our eye, too.

At first, we were under the belief that maybe the CDC had investigated the rumors of cell-phone brain cancer or something to that degree, but as John Pinnett would say, “Nay Nay.” 

Apparently, the CDC does a tremendous amount of research by just calling people and talking with them on the telephone. As more and more people switch away from traditional POTS (plain old telephone service) members of the CDC began to question whether the people that would choose to become VoIP users or Cell-Phone only homes had different health habits than people who maintained a land-line in their home. Since the CDC telephone surveys avoided all wireless customers, a new study was conducted.

So, from July 2007 through December 2007, the CDC started to collect data. After all, they are still members of the government, and the government loves collecting data. The CDC estimates that 32 million adults in the US are “wireless only,” with another 31 million as “wireless mostly.” (Kind of like in The Princess Bride when Welsey was mostly dead. Not 100% dead, just mostly dead)

Of these 63 million adults, about half are under 30 years of age (and we’d love to give props at this time to the CDC because they realized that this statistic also meant that half are over 30 years of age). What are some of the generalizations learned by the government?

Wireless Only adults are more likely to:

• be uninsured
• exercise
• smoke
• binge drink (drinking more than 5 drinks in one day)
• get HIV tests

Wireless Only users were also less likely to have diabetes or be obese and generally were in better health than landline users. We’re not sure how that relates to the drinking and smoking but are more than willing to experiment and see.