Health Report: Is your phone damaging your health?
With around 40 million Brits using mobile phones regularly, are we aware of the risks of phone radiation? Jerome Burne reveals why making a call could be costing you your health...
My teenage daughter,
Georgia, like millions of others, is attached to her mobile phone
by a connection that seems deeper than an umbilical cord. In the
mornings it rings with changes to the school run. In the evenings
it is clamped to her ear for conversations about social
arrangements. Later in bed the tell-tale blue light is still
glowing as she chats to her boyfriend.
It's clearly essential to maintain a rich web of friends,
but few parents can have escaped the concerns they have about using
mobile phones. Many are worried about what the exposure to the
radiation produced by this new technology is doing to the brain and
to health in general.
The official line from authorities both in the UK and in the US is
that there is nothing to worry about, and a recent comment from the
American FDA (Food and Drug Administration) says, "The
scientific evidence does not show a danger to users of wireless
phones, including children." Recently our HPA (Health
Protection Agency) announced the level of power mobiles produce is
"much too low for people's exposures to exceed
internationally accepted exposure guidelines."
But you don't have to search very far to find a number of sensible and respected scientists who don't agree with this view at all. Some indeed have gone so far as to suggest that the link between mobile phones and brain cancer could be one of those slow-burn connections taking decades to emerge, like the link between smoking and lung cancer.
Two years ago Swedish researchers evaluated all the studies of people who'd used mobiles for more than ten years and found that users were 20 per cent more likely to develop a benign tumour in the inner ear and 30 per cent more likely to develop a type of brain tumour known as a malignant glioma.
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Comments:
"Hi I have decided not to give my children a mobile phone and have cancelled my own after reading the research evidence which can be accessed from various web sites such as www.wiredchild.org www.wifiinschools.org.uk www.mastsanity.org I also found that Wifi and cordless phones posed even more of a risk and one similar to a phone mast output. All to be avoided if one wants to stay healthy it seems. "
Sarah Purdy - Monday 4th Jan 2010