On the danger of cell phones

Counterpunch: Russell Mokhiber, Cell Phones and Brain Cancer: the Risk is Real

Disconnect - book trailer

Cspan program

Time
Salon

Are cell phones dangerous?

I posted something last year about the possible danger of cell phones. Here's an article from GQ: Warning: Your Cell Phone May Be Hazardous to Your Health, by Christopher Ketcham. (via Rod Dreher)

I drove down to Annapolis, Maryland, recently to visit with Allan Frey. He was preparing to set out on his forty-foot sailboat for a month at sea, so we talked at a restaurant near the marina. After retiring from full-time research in 1985, Frey, now 75, took up the philosophy of science as an avocation, looking at the question of how science progresses, how it fails to progress, how new ideas are birthed or aborted, how a shift in paradigm is a rare thing. The failure to look squarely at the dangers of microwave radiation is a case study in frozen paradigms, he said, a worldview that can't keep pace with reality.

To illustrate what he meant, Frey held up a glass of water. "We're all just big teacups, bags of water that you can heat up—that's the paradigm," he said. It's the engineer's paradigm, the mind-set of people who had no training in the complexity of living systems. The branches of the military, the major defense contractors, the manufacturers of microwave ovens, the telecom companies, were happy to embrace the engineer's paradigm. The thinking was simple and easy to understand, and most important, it indemnified their operations from liability.

"It's a very primitive mind-set," said Frey. "Plato said we don't see the reality; we see shadows on the cave walls. We've got a lot of people who are seeing shadows and saying this is the reality." He nodded at his water glass. "We now know a human being isn't a bag of water. A human being is a complex organization of electrical fields. Electroencephalograms and electrocardiograms, for example, measure these fields. Every cell has an electrical field across the cell membrane, which is a regulatory interface and controls what goes into and out of the cell. All nerve signals are electric. And between the nucleus and the membrane there is an electrical field, you can measure voltages of individual cells! Electricity drives biology. We evolved in a particular electromagnetic environment"—the magnetic fields from the earth's iron core, the terrestrial magnetism from lodestones, visible light, ultraviolet frequencies, lightning—"and if we change that environment as we have, we either adapt or we have trouble."

Ah, the dangers of reductionism... although Frey himself risks another error of reductionism. The human body does have electrical fields, but that is not all there is to the human body. He probably doesn't mean this, though.

Allan Frey, Human auditory system response to Modulated electromagnetic energy.

wiki

Scientists Believe Your Cell Phone Is a Death Trap (via Stephen Hand)

I'm ditching mine as soon as I'm back in CA

Or I should say I'm returning the one I'm borrowing, that is. I thought my head felt funny when I started using the blasted thing! But in all seriousness: what are the health hazards of using the cell phone? And is it worth the risk? I don't think it is.

Just 10 minutes of cellphone chat may trigger cancer

By ANI
Thursday August 30, 12:04 PM

London, Aug. 30 (ANI): Just 10 minutes of chatting on cellular phones is enough to trigger such chemical changes in the brain that can increase the risk of cancer, warn scientists.

A study by the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel has shown that even low levels of radiation from handsets interfere with the process of cell division, which encourages the growth of tumours.

Although the researchers have yet not found any evidence that signals from cell phones are harmful, their findings suggest they may be.

Several studies have been conducted to find an association between mobile use and brain tumours, but they neither found any such link nor any dramatic rise in cancer rates.

Ever since the inception of mobile phones, the official advice has been that the device are safe. The guidance is based on the assumption that the phones emit too little radiation to heat the brain dangerously.

The new study, however, suggests that "nonthermal" radiation can pose a risk.

In lab tests, the researchers exposed human and rat cells to low-level radiation at 875 megahertz, a similar frequency to the one used in many mobile phones.

Despite being weaker than emissions from a typical handset, the radiation began to switch on a chemical signal inside the cells within ten minutes, say the researchers. The chemical signals detected were involved in the division of cells, they add.

The researchers also claimed to have found a separate way in which mobile phones can damage health.

"The significance lies in showing cells do react to cellphone radiation in a non-thermal way," the Daily Mail quoted Dr Rony Seger, a co-author of the study published in the Biochemical Journal, as telling New Scientist magazine. (ANI)

via The Western Confucian