Another Citation for Cel Phones
by Paul McGoldrick
However many minutes are offered free, people who know me or read my work also understand that I continue to regard the cellular phone as an emergency-only item. The studies that have been made have all been flawed in one way or another and the majority of the work has concentrated on measurements rather than medical histories. Work done by independent consumer groups all suggest that the principal radiation effects are actually into the jaw bone, unless a hands-off earpiece is used when either a node or antinode can occur right in the ear -- depending on the effective antenna length of the cord being used.
Now we are approaching the times when portables have been in use long enough for quantitative data to be added to our information base and the first of such studies is gloomy for the cellular industry. The report focused on analog phones, having been in use longer, but I can see no physical reason why things should be any different for digital phones: RF is still RF, isn't it?
The professor of oncology at Orebro University in Sweden, Lennart Hardell, compared a group of 1617 brain tumor patients with an equal number of people who had no such tumors. The research dates covered the period of 1997 through the year 2000. The data and subsequent questioning of patients and non-patients revealed that people who used cell phones were two-and-a-half times more likely to a have temporal brain tumor on the side of the head they normally held their phone. Tumors of the auditory nerve -- the connection from the ear to the brain -- were more likely to occur in those same people by a factor of three, again on the side of the head where they most often held their phones.
It rather appears, therefore, that some biological effects are taking place that are not necessarily directly linked to radiation; and that is a very sobering thought.
The British government has taken an active role in advising people not to allow the not-fully developed skulls of children to be exposed to cell phone use; The president of the British Association, Sir William Stewart, has consistently called on cell phone operators to desist from targeting children and exhorting them to increase prices of the popular pay-in-advance cards that most children use. He particular decried advertising that children "needed a mobile phone" to return to school.
Certainly my free minutes are not going to be against the skull of my
daughter.