World Health Organization: Mobile phone cancer risk 'possible' In a move that's sure to fan the flames of the ongoing debate about the safety of mobile phones, a panel of World Health Organization (WHO) experts has classified those ubiquitous handsets as "possibly carcinogenic to humans". The group of 31 scientists from 14 countries, meeting in Lyon, France, under the auspices of the …
I have been in the carrier's side as in the RF (Radio Frequency) management including power regulations for 15 years. "Radiation" and "Microwave" are still terms being used by these studies. First of all, technically, energy transmission is radiation, but for the rest of non-technical folks, radiation has been always thought like nuclear plants. Your TV, microwave oven and dryers are producing much more power when you are at the same distance as your cell phone these days. That's why mom says don't stand in front of the TV too close. And I won't stand behind a microwave oven when it's running.
Antenna from a tower or roof top sites are a different story. But the FCC has pretty good rules and regulations for that, given the carriers follow the rules. You, as a landlord or people living close to those antennas can always request a maximum power exposure study from the carriers and check it yourself.
By the way, the spectrum used is not called "microwave." I am very tired of hearing this from folks equating anything in the air that is energized "microwave." Come on. So far, the only cause of damage that I can see myself is the heat generated by the phone and battery. But that's the same thing for us not to touch the hot stove, the hot iron, the hot toaster or even stay out in the sun for "too long" without sunscreen.
Let's be sensible. Continue with studies, but let's not be too alarmed and conclude without evidence. And let's not complaint about phone service (especially at home) when no one wants antennas in their neighborhood. Physics hasn't had a significant breakthroughs for over 50 years on transmission theory.
By the way, did they follow and study a bunch of RF Engineers instead? They will be a good studying group!
...are the best counter argument to cell phone hysteria I've ever heard. Your typical household microwave oven (here in the States, with our rather wimpy 120v nominal power supply) operates somewhere between 800 and 1300 watts. Compare that to a mobile phone, which will use ~3.6 watts maximum in analogue mode, and just a bit more than half that in GSM - considerably less if close to a tower. Even a very slight leak in the shielding of a microwave oven will result in radically more power broadcast into the environment than your phone will. Does this happen? It's an easy thing to test; take your 2.4ghz wifi device into the same room as your microwave and try using it while you use your microwave. After learning this, I did some demos with a number of friends. In my experience, about one in five will reduce your wifi to a crawl. If you can reliably interfere with your wifi just by reheating your leftovers, your microwave leaks. (If your wifi drops altogether, /I/ would suggest getting a new microwave, but I also recognize that that is probably still falling under the "better safe than sorry" category. I also only saw this once, on a 24 year old microwave.)
Interestingly enough, the only person worried about their microwave was the one with the ancient behemoth that totally killed anything in the 2.4ghz spectrum. Everyone else took it as a curiosity, nothing more. Which leaves me wondering - if people don't care about non-ionizing radiation in their kitchen (which is fair enough, /I/ don't), then why on earth are they worried about their phones?
-d
I actually did the opposite: with a (new) microwave, and a strong wifi signal, I put the netbook inside the microwave to see what happened. (Obviously I didn't turn on the microwave!). With the door ajar, wifi gets in easily; with the door closed, the Faraday cage really does work - no signal at all!
Is your head normally resting on a microwave oven door while it's running? Rather you than me ....
The power law for EM radiation is inverse-square. A 1W source 3cm distant (phone on ear) equals a 100W source 30cm distant or a 10kW source 3m distant. Microwave in kitchen typically 1m or more from your head would have to be pretty darned leaky to match a phone running at full power in a one-bar signal area.
In fact were that a fair comparison, phones would be provably lethal. The frequency also makes a big difference. Oven microwaves are tuned to be strongly absorbed by water, to maximise heating efficiency. Phone microwaves are not, so most of the radiation goes through your head rather than being absorbed by it.
*sigh*
Do you really think I'm aware of spectrum frequencies and not the inverse square law? And no, I /don't/ tend to lean my head on the microwave - but I've seen plenty of people stand about 6 inches from their microwave oven while waiting for their popcorn to finish. Besides, you apparently weren't paying attention to my post - did I say that I sat a laptop ON the microwave while it was running? No, it was tested in the same room - usually 2-5 meters from the microwave oven.
Now, 802.11 is not exactly the most powerful signal in the world - I'm really, really, REALLY not concerned about what I found. But I stand by my (admittedly unscientific) conclusion - if you were to spend equal time using both, your microwave oven is as, if not more, likely to kill you as your cell phone. Of course, that BLT sandwich I had yesterday is probably even worse, and you aren't going to see me giving those up either.
As far as the "tuning" goes, microwave ovens primarily work via dipole heating, not molecular resonance of water (despite common belief otherwise). This is why they will heat up fats as well as water. A phone in the same frequency range would, hypothetically, produce the same effect. HOWEVER, despite being much closer to your head, only a very small portion of the energy is directed /at/ your head. In addition, the total amount of energy is quite small (minuscule compared to what many of us have experienced in our lives) and I, for one, just can't be bothered to worry about what is less of a risk than walking 3 blocks down the road to my local grocery store.
-d
Once upon a time before OH&S do-gooder dictators came to power, in the days when we climbed transmitting towers to adjust antennas with the RF still switched on, I'd be up there tweaking away, and yet I've lived to tell the tale.
Atop the transmitting tower with my legs wrapped around the mast, the RF arcs would jump from my knees right through two layers of clothes onto the tower. The magenta-violet arcs would burn round holes clean through my jeans and overalls just like the sun and a magnifying glass burn through paper--only much more quickly. The only side effect was some small holes zapped or burned into one's skin around the vicinity of one's knees, and this only occurred because one's clothes prevented direct contact of one's skin with the tower. (Coming into direct contact with the tower prevents any RF arcing from occurring and at VHF/UHF frequencies one simply can't feel electric shocks even though current is flowing.)
My digital watch LCD screen would go completely black with the RF intensity; the only measuring instrument one could use up there was a moving-coil AVO-8 multimeter, as it used a copper oxide rectifier whose frequency response petered out in the upper audio range, thus it remained unaffected by the high intensity RF field.
The radio frequency field strengths that I and others worked in were in the range of hundreds to thousands of volts per metre. Whilst the frequencies were only about one quarter to third that of mobile/cell phones, the radiation intensity was, nevertheless, 10,000 to 100s of thousands of times stronger than that emitted by a single mobile phone.
We were all aware that frequencies with which we worked were all well within the non-ionizing radiation part of the spectrum by MANY, MANY orders of magnitude. Moreover, we too were well aware of the simple heading effects of RF energy and the safety precautions needed. For example, under certain circumstances, RF heading could be dangerous--being accidentally locked in a resonant cavity/tank circuit room with a 100kW or so of RF energy could easily fry one--even though the heating effect was simple molecular (vibrating) agitation.
One precaution we always observed was to take special precautions with our eyes when working with frequencies of 3GHz and above [i.e.: 10cm wavelength and shorter]. At these frequencies (3GHz is the beginning of the microwave band), the wavelength is effectively relatively short. Here, its 1/4 wavelength--the distance where maximum potential difference occurs (where voltage goes from 0 minimum to maximum across the wavefront)--approaches the length of the eyeball. If exposed to excessive RF field strengths at microwave frequencies, localised heating of the eyeball can occur and cataracts of the eye can form.
Well known and normal work practice was never to stand near or in front of waveguides nor to ever look down them, especially so if the RF power level exceeded 1W or above.
Despite this being decades ago, all the people that I worked with in this high level RF field environment are still alive and well.
Radio Frequency energy in the vicinity of mobile phone wavelengths may produce cancer but it's clear the effect is exceedingly small. Over a period of 80 or so years since the 1930s and especially so from WWII onwards--times in which a few people were first exposed to sufficient RF energy to suffer burns--researchers have been looking for evidence that RF energy causes damage to the human body in ways other than straight penetrative heating. Despite hundreds of research efforts all over the world since the war and that there is some theoretical evidence, especially of possibility of harm to young children, it's very doubtful that we'll see a major change in the usage of cell phones.
Frankly, IMHO, the population's addiction to these devices is so total and complete, that it'd take a scare magnitudes larger than some remote possibility of cancer to have any significant affect on usage. Moreover, I don't see power levels coming down much further either, as the same addiction won't tolerate a lessening of the service area, quality and bandwidth throughput.
Mobile usually has a max power at 1W. Many times, it transmit much lower than that (especially when you are in a good coverage area). Good carrier companies optimize the systems so that each mobile transmit at very minimum power (especially CDMA, WCDMA, LTE, WiMax type of systems) so that the network can hear as many mobile as possible to avoid drop calls and no coverage. So when you are using your phone, generally it's way under 1W. And when you are using older phones, you will probably usually higher power. And the faster the speed (uplink), the higher to power it goes, so if you are constantly able to send a large file from your phone, the phone could get hot.
RF does burn skins, but only if you touch it at high power like a waveguide (e.g. cables at the cell site) which usually can carry 30 or 40W of powers through the coax.
Well it's possible I could get eaten by a pack of hungry dogs but I still wont put it on my list of "shit I'm worried about" though like anything I'm sure if you strap it to your head and talk on it for six hours a day it may very well f--- you up. Just like if you drink too much water your brains breaks, if you cross the road at rush hour with your eyes closed you'll get hit by a car and if you eat a diet of nothing but junk food you're probably not going to live a full and healthy life.
Non-ionising doesn't mean safe, I used to program a non-ionising source of radiation that was used to slice through steel plate to make ships.
Mind you, the control group is going to be tricky if LF fields and coffee also cause cancer. We need to find some people who have been heavy users of mobiles for 25years who didn't drink coffee or work near CRTs !
Non-ionizing just means that the molecules are not changing their structure. At least not at that frequency or energy (power) level... But that's the same thing as a fire, hot stove or hot iron... Of course we don't touch those things. Look, nothing is 100% certain, but we, as a scientific community live on statistics and give & take. I love ketchup, but I know what's in this crap. Same concept like everything else. Choose wisely just for you, and just do it without wining about it. I am just tired of anyone complaining about Microsoft or Apple, or their cell service at their home, when they are NOT even interested in knowing how business/consumers and stuff work in general.
I presume you mean cutting metal using something like a 10kW laser focused on a 1sqmm?
I'd imagine that is somewhat higher power density (~10GW/m^2) than any base station where the power density can barely reach 1W/m^2. Its probably a higher power density than the highest power broadcast/military/radar antenna anywhere too.
Actually lasers have a different ICNIRP guidlines as they aren't RF - you can even see the bright ones way outside the visible spectrum, once with the left eye and once with the right.
So non-ionizing radiation like any heating process is fine as long as you don't get too much of it. Its funny how people think nothing about sitting in front of a 3kW electric fire (3kW/m^2) or lying in the sun 1kW/m^2 (and that is ionizing radiation!!) yet worry about RF power equivalent to a fridge lightbulb on a pole 200m away.
But this is about phones - if they were so harmless we'd all be alive.
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I don't normally appear discourteous but please get a grip.
If this was the case then victims should start dropping like flies right about now.
And all the RF engineers would be like Marie Curie and their tools exhibited behind graphite glass.
Although, if some nutter uses the analogy to force a ban of mobiles in public places for fear of second-hand radiation, I'd love them. Start with schools then public transport and close off with eateries. And given the PC times we live in, force the provision of purpose-built anechoic, antenna totting, faraday cages for the terminally addicted.
God, that must have been some strong milk I had this morning....
Is it the mention of lawsuits? The mention of tobacco? Or is it the Snow White issue; it is isn't it, you people are still taking the blame for Snow White.
Look, I realize that sitting there up in the windows and watching Snow White and all seven of those height challenged little sawed of SOBs could make you guilty.
Get over it.
Snow White is still in a coma.
Someone has destroyed the negatives and so.
Her prints will never come.
(Covering my head on this post, where is a good -not the face; not the face icon when you need it?}
it seems that WHO standards are getting lower everyday.
And because of this, several supposedly serious, media are reporting about "Cellphones ‘possibly carcinogenic,’ WHO says" (Washington Post); "Cellphones May Cause Cancer, Advisory Panel Says" (NY Times).
Of course, that kind of headline brings more sales that the fact, which appears deep inside some articles:
“The conclusion means that there could be some risk, and therefore we
need to keep a close watch for a link between cellphones and cancer
risk,” said Jonathan Samet, who chaired the panel.
Which is another way to say "we are not sure of anything, so please give us more money".
Anyway, if this lead to less ***holes screaming in their phones in trains or the street, it would not be so bad.
R
R
Yes, cellphones may cause cancer. I'd be happy to say they can cause cancer.
Coffee *does* cause cancer
Peanuts *do* cause cancer
Petrol *does* cause cancer
All these risks are acceptably small. You don't swim in petrol, you sometimes catch a faint whiff of it while filling your car. If you drink seriously carcinogenic amounts of coffee, the stimulant effects will be by far the greater hazard (heart attack or short-term caffeine toxicity). The levels of aflatoxin in peanuts are low, provided they've been grown and stored to acceptable standards. And so on.
Life is carcinogenic, and if cancer doesn't get you, something else will, even surer than the tax-man. Eventually.
I used to be extremely pro science once but I'm now beginning to have second thoughts.
___
BTW: Can you even imagine the mealymouthed, two-bob-each-way, tree-hugging, do-gooder, must-lick-arse-or-I'll-not-get-a-grant scientists of today ever having the wherewithal or gumption to invent that bang?
Not bloody likely! General Groves'd have probably shot 'em on sight for treason.
Where are you Oppenheimer? All is forgiven. Edward Ratbag-Nuke-'Em-All Teller; William Personality-Devoid-Eugenicist Shockley, etc. urgently resurrect yourselves, we need you all to kick arse real hard.
Please come back and defend science before we crash-land into another dark age.
The WHO should put more study out about smoking instead... It smells, it causes cancer, it makes people more poor (expensive to buy, higher health insurance cost and have to pay for doc visits more for related health problems), it harms 2nd hand smokers, it burns something for no good reason sending fumes in the air, it doesn't really look or feel cool in my book, humm... Why are and WHO are we talking about cell phones again?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/pirate_32.png
Umm, I'm fairly sure that they don't need to do that in terms of carcinogenicity.
I smoke, got hooked at about 16 years of age. I know it's bad, you know it's bad. It's legal though, and gets me through the day sometimes. Wish I'd never started though, which I wouldn't have done if it was illegal.
Call me pathetic for no willpower if you like, but the fact is: though generally frowned upon, people smoke. For various reasons.
I loathe a nanny state, but I do think the current situation is hypocritical.
My view would be to increase the smoking age by one year, every year. Let the existing addicts live their lives and not trap any others.
Sorry, I am not saying that we should outlaw smoking. But I am just saying that there are much worse thing in life than supporting a claim of cell phones causing cancer without nearly as much evidence as cancer caused by smoking. I don't think either should be outlawed. Neither should we outlaw eating corn syrup. It should be a choice.
All these tests, studies, decades of research and the most damming evidence? "suggestions of an increased risk of glioma at the highest exposure levels, but biases and error prevent a causal interpretation"
Is that it? If I may be permitted to provide a translation. "If there is a risk it is so utterly small that after 10 years of study we cannot even measure it"
The biggest study so far published tracked 420,000 cell phone users over the course of 21 years. Their results: the RF energy produced by the phones did not correlate to an increased incidence of the disease" http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?no_d2=1&sid=06/12/07/223218.
If a 21 year study of 1/2 million users was not able to find a correlation, and a 10 year study can only find a 'suggestion' the actual risk is so utterly small that worrying about it will probably kill me sooner.
The only outstanding unknown left for me is just what will it take for these WHO experts to just say "No risk. No headlines. No Mobile Phone Death Rays headlines. Sorry." 10 million? 20 million? (Dollars not study size, obviously).
Hopefully this move will encourage further studies. Just because multiple scientific organisations haven't proved there is a definite and serious link between mobile phone handsets or base stations, it doesn't mean there isn't one.
Low levels of EM radiation on these frequencies may not show much effect on human tissue in short running tests, but the reality of decades of exposure across a wider sample of, say, 1000 people might reveal a completely different story.
I use my mobile lightly for short calls, preferring landlines where possible. And I don't like my ears and head heating up with mobiles, it's very uncomfortable physically and mentally. But that's just my view.
So, if I correctly understand this, then all those people who subject me to the inanities of their daily lives, and their banal babble with their friends, their families, and work colleagues, by making me an unwilling and, frankly resentful third party to their side of a cell phone conversation in every sort of public place,... do you mean to tell me that they are all going to suffer a gruesome end because of it?
If this isn't divine justice, then I don't know what is.
How about you do things in moderation? You natter on your mobile for 17 hours a day I'm pretty sure you get more than a lump in the brain, you'll probably get dodgy arm joints and a tired muscles too!
I stand around for 17 hours a day with jelly down my pants, that would probably lead to some form of testicular cancer if not then at least a nasty damp rash around my bits! You do anything too much there's going to be consequences, eat too much you get fat, get cancer. You drink too much, you get fat, drunk and cancer. You w**k too much, you get tired arms, hairy palms, bad eye-sight and cancer ( probably! ).
Use your phone when you need to and don't sleep with it next to your head when you go to bed, you'll probably be alright.
I still have a nagging feeling that quite a lot of cancers is just from pure stress of modern living. We're told morning, noon and night that this, that and the other will kill us, we stress and never wind down. If we all calm down, take things in moderation and try not to get worked-up over the most stupid pointless things, I'm sure we'd all be a lot more healthy, both mentally and physically.
Right it's midweek, down the pub for a pint'n'pasty!
It's like they expect to live forever.
"You can't do THAT, it's dangerous! I would never do THAT, and I have never died. Not even once, so you BETTER listen to me."
That's what you will hear from one of these fascists, right before they jump in their Audi to go drive around town 10 millimeters from the back of a heavy Goods Vehicle while they chain smoke cheap knock-off cigarettes full of mercury and monkey droppings.
Ok, so when companies run risk comparisons to show whether they should follow one course of action or not, they take the number of possible occurances should they make the wrong choice, and the potential cost per case in court. 4 billion people have mobile phones? This is a guestimate. 4 billion * cost per death-law-suit-after-incorrect-info = bankrupt WHO / UN.
So are they going to even chance the fact that they've got it the slightest bit wrong? No, they're going to err on the side of litigation and say that it COULD possibly be the tiniest bit cancerous.
Cancers are caused by mutant strands of DNA. Electromagnetic radiation can't create mutant strands of DNA unless the frequency is at or higher than the blue limit of the visible spectrum, the near-ultraviolet. The frequency of cell phone radiation is about 1 million times too low. Albert Einstein discovered this in 1905 and received the Nobel Prize in physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect in 1921. The wost mobile phone radiation can do is cause a slight localised heating of the brain, which the flow of blood is very efficient at moderating. Go outside on a sunny day without a hat on and your brain will be heated to a much greater extent. Mobile phone radiation can not cause cancer. If it did, where is the correlation between the huge increase in mobile phones and the vast increase in brain cancer? There is none!
The above is hugely over-simplified.
Firstly, it's demonstrably true that heating changes the behaviour of living tissues. Your phone causes a small rise in temperature of tissue in your ear and brain. One of the likely changes is the speeding-up of undesirable biochemical reactions that create oxidative stresses. Such stresses are known to be carcinogenic. And warm-blooded mammalian metabolisms are fine-tuned for a tightly controlled operating temperature.
Secondly, and even more technical, there is a possible mechanism whereby microwave EM radiation may cause free radicals to flip into a different electronic configuration. Such altered radicals might escape being mopped up at the site of a biological reaction that is known to create them, and where nature has put suppression mechanisms in place. After migrating elsewhere in the cell, they go back to theoriginal state by emitting a quantum of microwave radiation, and cause damage. The theory is good; it would be verging on impossible to actually observe it in living issue.
Much better to assume "can", and ask "but does it"? More particularly, "does it to a significantly harmful extent"? I'd say for mobiles, "can" is proven, " does it" is uncertain, "harmful" almost certainly not, with a small lingering doubt in my mind for long calls in a maximum-transmit-power weak signal area.
BTW you're wrong about heating caused by sun on your head. It'll warm your scalp, but not your brain tissue (at least not up to the point you get heatstroke, which is deadly dangerous). Your blood circulation distributes heat from the sun through your entire body, like water-cooling a CPU, and your warm-blooded metabolism actively regulates your core temperature at a nominal 38.4C (+/- about one degree between individuals). Heatstroke is what happens when the regulation fails to cope. You die soon afterwards if someone can't cool you down.
Has anyone done a study of how constant wearing of hands-free earpieces 24x7 and the consequent close exposure to blootuthe frequencies affects one? Other than making one look like a pretentious tw*t that is.
I expect the study we are commenting around was funded in part by World Wide Bluetooth Devices Plc Ltd No-Liability_Attachable Inc (PRC).
More importantly, why is there no Radiation Hazard bezel or Lightning Bolt icon with which I could decorate this important missive?
Hark, I hear the sound of a a point being totally and utterly missed...
You lot probably believe that antidepressants work dont you.... see "the emperors new drugs" by Irving Kirsch for some thought provoking commentary on that.
If you had read the article you would see that they are saying there is 'some evidence'. People who get cancer in the main are predisposed to it any way, through family genetics. The best using a cellphone will do is exacerbate that predisposition. The same with someone who uses carcinogenic chemicals - five will get you the sabacc pot - that of the workers all using that chemical 90% of the people who get some sort of cancer later in life will be genetically predisposed.
And for the love of God, will you stop with the microwave crap. Its utterly irrelevant. A microwave is a large box, about the size of an average human torso. It sits on the side in the kitchen and is used to cook with. It is a large lump of mostly metal. It is not something you carry around with you every day.
A mobile phone is a small device made of plastic or lightweight metal or a mixture of the two. It is constantly on, constantly transmitting and constantly picking up and generating signal traffic. And now for the important part... IT IS RIGHT NEXT TO YOUR SODDING EAR AT THE POINT WHEN ITS CAUSING THE MOST RADIATION. It is a proven fact that running a small electric current across the brain in certain ways can affect intelligence and speed of thought for the better. In the same way, electrical devices implanted in the brain can do the same. It is pretty much a sure thing that a mobile phone will have some effect on the areas of the brain that it is closest to (this in fact has been proven by MRI & CT scans).
Microwave cookers are designed to cook the food inside, using as already mentioned a faraday cage (often otherwise known as a routemaster bus) to make sure all that nice microwave energy stays where it should.
A mobile phone depends on being precisely the opposite - it is the jaywalking slapper to the microwave ovens biblethumpette.
High intensity microwave transmissions, should you get in their path, will poach your eyes and other organs in short order. We can therefore assume that smaller amounts of similar energy have similar but lesser effects. However, we cannot assume that in all people cellphones can cause cancer, because they cant, at least not on their own. Its true that like alot of other things (including of all things smoked fish, yes seriously) they may have carcinogenic effects, but you cant have smoke without fire...
Its most likely that we will find that cellphones have some sort of effect on cancers, which isnt a great thing - but unleaded petrol additives are known to be carcinogenic and I dont see mr average american selling his car on the spot. This is not the important thing. My personal view is that while we will find some evidence for alot of things having carcinogenic effects - it will be the genetic predisposition in a individual that acts as the overbearing reason for a cancer to develop, in the same way as its more likely for someone with heart problems in the family to die of a heart attack.
And I dont know if you have noticed, amongst the wailing and gnashing of dentures, but everyone has death built in - it like the MS BSOD is part of the software. Personally I prefer to live - without worrying about what new thing is going to kill me next week - it has a wonderful calming effect, living in reality...
maybe you should try it...?
Cellphones operate across several orders of magnitude of output power. In a weak-signal area (one bar) they're emitting a thousand or more times more strongly than in a good-signal area.
It would be possible to give every cellphone a user-selectable maximum output power. Setting this lower than maximum would mean there would be larger black-spots where you couldn't use them. You could choose to remove the limiter for a particularly urgent call, and allow the phone to go to maximum for a text (from next to your hand, not your ear, and brief). Trouble is, no manufacturer is going to be the first to implement this functionality, partly because of fear of lawsuits for "knowingly" selling a "dangerous" product, and partly because ones without this function might be seen as safer rather than as less safe.
Let the WHO suggest that all phones should implement a user-selectable power limit, and let all major governments introduce that requirement in law. If there's a small risk at full power, let us choose never to have long meaningless conversations at full power.
In a study of American teenagers over the last 10 years have shown that cellphone use causes obesity, the inability to form sentences that consist of more than "it's like - you know", a decline in maths scores and wearing your trousers half-way down your arse.
Well I'm blaming the cell phones.
In a move that's sure to fan the flames about the qualifications of the World Health Organization to provide valid advisory recommendations for promoting health, today the WHO let a panel of so-called experts classify those ubiquitous handsets as "possibly carcinogenic to humans".?
Oh, never mind. I forgot the author hails from Frisco.
Just so's you know, the pickles mentioned aren't common or garden gherkins or onions. In Japan, people pickle wild edible plants (sansai). High consumption is associated with an increased risk of pancreatic cancer among men. That's probably down to the presence of nasty stuff called ptaquiloside.
The negative effects mobile phones have on health have been argued and proven by many scientists. Yet, the disastrous economical effect that such information would imply made it impossible for any decision body or government to recognize it.
Meanwhile, the 2W radio power generated by the GSM handsets have been reduced to 0.2W in WCDMA handsets which reduces partly the danger. Also, new technology trends such as offloading mobile communications to fixed-line networks through Femtocell and Wifi and Cloud-driven revolutionary architectures (such as Alu's lightradio) will decrease even more the required radioelectrical power.
In my opinion, the health impact of the mobile handsets is unquestionable. It has bad effects on brain, nervous system, eyes and ears. And the challenge here is to let the regulatory bodies, governments and telcos accelerate to consider more green technology trends before the health impact issue drives to a critical worldwide economical crisis.
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