There has never been clear evidence that mobile phone radiation can cause any form of biological effect. In fact there are no known processes whereby mobile phone radiation could impact anyone's health.

This does not mean there are no correlations that link mobile phone radiation with biological processes. Last Friday I appeared on the BBC Radio 4 maths show More or Less and wrote in the Guardian about the strong correlation between the number of mobile phone masts and the number of births in the same area. I immediately explained that this was only a correlation based on the fact that both transmitter tower numbers and births are dependent on population size, and so the figures change in unison as a population changes.

My article was actually explaining how I was using this as an example of correlation where there is no causality, and I had put it out as a press release to see whether media outlets would jump to the incorrect conclusion that mobile phone radiation causes pregnancies.

As it turned out, I did not need to look to other media outlets for evidence that people are willing to jump to a specious correlation-based conclusion; I merely needed to scroll down to the comments beneath my article. There were the expected people who clearly did not actually read what I wrote before seeing the headline and getting excited about this apparent scare story, but there were also seemingly endless comments from people who understood my correlation-causality project but could not help putting forward a possible causal link anyway. It is such a hard-wired instinct to assume there must be causality at play.

It is reassuring but unentertaining that no mainstream media outlets took the bait without fact-checking the press release, which does gives me some hope. We did, however, give them every chance: the press release did not have a university affiliation, it was only sent to generic news desks instead of specific journalists and we let our correlation ploy out of the bag as soon as anyone phoned to check the story.

What concerns me is that more insidious cases of correlation results do still get widely picked up and reported as causal. In early December 2010 there was a story about mobile phone use during pregnancy being linked to later misbehaviour in the child. With all the possible confounding factors across schooling, parenting, environment and genes there is a quagmire of correlation from which it is almost impossible to extract a thread of causality. This slight correlation was reported widely with headlines such as: "Warning for mums-to-be: Using phone while pregnant can lead to behavioural problems in children". This causal link should be at the very end of a long list of possible explanations for the correlation.

Places like the Science Media Centre work with the countless journalists who try hard to ensure health reporting is accurate, but these scare stories still consistently crop up. The good news is that the more information about correlation and statistics people have, the better equipped they will be to overcome the natural desire to leap to causality conclusions. Or maybe that's just a coincidence.