WARNING: Your Cell Phone's Radiation May Be (VERY) Hazardous to Your Health
New video and research from CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
Why do I consider this important? Because I know 2 young people (late 30s) who were heavy users of early cell phones, who both suffered rare brain tumors right behind the ear each used for conversations. This is real and the research is starting to prove it. In the interest of full disclosure: My father is a Professor of radiology at the Indiana University School of Medicine, and a practicing radiologist and oncologist, and a friend is a surgeon who specializes in acoustic neuromas, exactly the type of rare brain tumor that has been on the rise since the mass adoption of cell phones. I've had more discussions on this topic than I care to admit.
Advice:
- Do NOT carry your cellphone on your person -- instead store it in your purse, backpack, or anywhere else greater than 18 inches from your body. The EMRs are emitted even when the phone is not in use.
- Switch ears regularly when talking.
- Use the speakerphone option whenever possible.
- Better still, use a headset.
- Choose a phone model with the lowest frequency EMR's you can find.
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By Christopher Ketcham
Ever worry that that gadget you spend hours holding next to your head might be damaging your brain? Well, the evidence is starting to pour in, and it's not pretty. So why isn't anyone in America doing anything about it?
Earlier this winter, I met an investment banker who was diagnosed with a brain tumor five years ago. He's a managing director at a top Wall Street firm, and I was put in touch with him through a colleague who knew I was writing a story about the potential dangers of cell-phone radiation. He agreed to talk with me only if his name wasn't used, so I'll call him Jim. He explained that the tumor was located just behind his right ear and was not immediately fatal—the five-year survival rate is about 70 percent. He was 35 years old at the time of his diagnosis and immediately suspected it was the result of his intense cell-phone usage. "Not for nothing," he said, "but in investment banking we've been using cell phones since 1992, back when they were the Gordon-Gekko-on-the-beach kind of phone." When Jim asked his neurosurgeon, who was on the staff of a major medical center in Manhattan, about the possibility of a cell-phone-induced tumor, the doctor responded that in fact he was seeing more and more of such cases—young, relatively healthy businessmen who had long used their phones obsessively. He said he believed the industry had discredited studies showing there is a risk from cell phones. "I got a sense that he was pissed off," Jim told me. A handful of Jim's colleagues had already died from brain cancer; the more reports he encountered of young finance guys developing tumors, the more certain he felt that it wasn't a coincidence. "I knew four or five people just at my firm who got tumors," Jim says. "Each time, people ask the question. I hear it in the hallways."
It's hard to talk about the dangers of cell-phone radiation without sounding like a conspiracy theorist. This is especially true in the United States, where non-industry-funded studies are rare, where legislation protecting the wireless industry from legal challenges has long been in place, and where our lives have been so thoroughly integrated with wireless technology that to suggest it might be a problem—maybe, eventually, a very big public-health problem—is like saying our shoes might be killing us.
Except our shoes don't send microwaves directly into our brains. And cell phones do—a fact that has increasingly alarmed the rest of the world. Consider, for instance, the following headlines that have appeared in highly reputable international newspapers and journals over the past few years. From summer 2006, in the Hamburg Morgenpost: are we telephoning ourselves to death? That fall, in the Danish journal Dagens Medicin: mobile phones affect the brain's metabolism. December 2007, from Agence France-Presse: israeli study says regular mobile use increases tumour risk. January 2008, in London's Independent: mobile phone radiation wrecks your sleep. September 2008, in Australia's The Age: scientists warn of mobile phone cancer risk.
Though the scientific debate is heated and far from resolved, there are multiple reports, mostly out of Europe's premier research institutions, of cell-phone and PDA use being linked to "brain aging," brain damage, early-onset Alzheimer's, senility, DNA damage, and even sperm die-offs (many men, after all, keep their cell phones in their pants pockets or attached at the hip). In September 2007, the European Union's environmental watchdog, the European Environment Agency, warned that cell-phone technology "could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking, and lead in petrol."
Perhaps most worrisome, though, are the preliminary results of the multinational Interphone study sponsored by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, in Lyon, France. (Scientists from thirteen countries took part in the study, the United States conspicuously not among them.) Interphone researchers reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell-phone use, the chance of getting a brain tumor—specifically on the side of the head where you use the phone—goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Interphone researchers in Israel have found that cell phones can cause tumors of the parotid gland (the salivary gland in the cheek), and an independent study in Sweden last year concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. Another Interphone study reported a nearly 300 percent increased risk of acoustic neuroma, a tumor of the acoustic nerve.
As more results of the Interphone study trickled out, I called Louis Slesin, who has a doctorate in environmental policy from MIT and in 1980 founded an investigative newsletter called Microwave News. "No one in this country cared!" Slesin said of the findings. "It wasn't news!" He suggested that much of the comfort of our modern lives depends on not caring, on refusing to recognize the dangers of microwave radiation. "We love our cell phones. The paradigm that there's no danger here is part of a worldview that had to be put into place," he said. "Americans are not asking the questions, maybe because they don't want the answers. So what will it take?"
To understand how radiation from cell phones and wireless transmitters affects the human brain, and to get some sense of why the concerns raised in so many studies outside the U.S. are not being seriously raised here, it's necessary to go back fifty years, long before the advent of the cell phone, to the research of a young neuroscientist named Allan Frey.
Continue reading (there's much, much more)
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Links of interest:
Check out how YOUR phone model ranks in terms of radiation >>
Wikipedia on mobile phone radiation and health >>
How much cell phone radiation are you getting? >>
Wi-Fi radiation is tiny compared to mobile phones >>
Reader Comments (22)
a link i forgot to add to the story...
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what i want to know and i've seen nothing on this subject...do cordless phones where the base is plugged into the wall (a landline) give off similar levels of EMR...?
anyone know?...i've looked before but couldn't find much on this...
Airport Body Scanning Raises Radiation Exposure, Committee Says
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I do not like green eggs and ham (radiation)...
http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/radiofrequencyradiation/fda.html
http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/radiofrequencyradiation/fnradpub.html#recommendations
@ gompers....so let's say a 500 mhz base station...or even 1 ghz...would the cordless phone for such a system have more or less EMRs than an average cell phone...
i try to use my cell phone as little as possible...but i should probably junk the home cordless and get a corded phone...
The other drawback to cordless phones is how easily your conversations can be listened to, and nobody needs a warrant to do so.
Oh boy, this means my mother is killing me. I knew it.
We are a consumer driven society.
"I do not like green eggs and ham (radiation)... "
Funny you should say that, I raise green eggs and ham...
http://www.afn.org/~poultry/breeds/othrck3.htm
It is ironic that in Russia there are limits to RF exposure that do not exist here. The funny part of this is that the manditory conscription is reduced for submariners in Russia, the reason for this is the shielding of the reactors in the subs was reduced to make them faster than ours thereby increasing exposure to the crews. But they take RF very seriously...
http://www.emfacts.com/papers/russia.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7025
I generally carry my cell in my front pants pocket, dangerously close to my favorite organ. Are you saying I may be cooking the family jewels? I was under the impression the phone only presented a risk when transmitting a conversation.
Well, there's one more thing to worry about.
i stopped carrying my cell phone in my pockets a few years back when i first started reading the research...scary proposition...there are more EMRs when the phone is in use, but it's still not safe apparently...
old phones and early cell phones, (the ones talked about here) used radioactive elements to transmit the radio signals. these radioactive materials gave off high energy (dangerous) radiation. new cellphones still give off radio waves, but these forms of radiation are not harmful. technically speaking, light is a form of radiation. you would be in more danger from being on an airplane (and having less ozone protecting you) than using a cellphone for 80 years straight.
i posed a question to your response on the paulson-jester story...
this is the fight club lawyer story i mentioned to you on the phone...
entertaining letter...
I've been looking to buy resale,short sale or foreclosure for 7 months.
When I do buy, a stipulation in the contract will be that I receive the wet ink mortgage , wet ink note & the chain of ownership.
Otherwise they can sell to a different DUMMY.