Cell phone radiation - a future pandemic?

Did you know your iPhone comes with a health warning?  What?  A health warning?  Yep, it’s true.  It warns the user to hold the handset at least 10mm away from your body.  It also suggests using hands-free options like headphones or the speaker in order to avoid holding the phone to your head and subjecting it to the harmful radiation emitted by the phone.  Shocking right!  Check for yourself, by going to Settings; click on “General;” click on “About;” click on “Legal;” then click on “RF.”

“Nobody reads that warning,” said Devra Davis, founder of the Environmental Health Trust, an organization dedicated to educating people about controllable environmental health risks.

Up until the 1930’s, asbestos had been used as a building material, due to it’s heat resistance, sound absorption and tensile strength.  Oh and it was cheap!  To date more than 100,000 in the USA alone have died of asbestos related illnesses.

Back in the 1950’s, the tobacco industry worked to conceal the harmful effects of smoking from the public.  The World Health Organisation now estimates it to have caused 100 million deaths over the course of the 20th century.

Many experts including Devra Davies believe that cell phones makers, like cigarette makers before them, are hiding the dangers of their products and that they could in fact be the next global health pandemic.

“This is worse than cigarettes,” Davis said, “because cigarettes had no value to society. But phones are valuable.”

And they are highly profitable, which may be why the industry is reluctant to admit the phones do pose risks, or to highlight the simple precautions that can reduce those risks.

Cellphones emit low levels of electromagnetic radiation. The risks from carrying them too close to the body, or holding them up to the head for prolonged periods of time, range from reduced male fertility to brain cancer.

Although the USA is reticent to explore this issue, researchers in Isreal have found that one in five cases of a rare tumor in the cheek in now occurring in children under 20 years of age and is correlated to cell phone use in that demographic.

In March, Israeli scientists reported preliminary findings of a possible link between cellphone radiation and thyroid cancer. Thyroid cancer has been on the rise for more than a decade in Israel, corresponding to Israelis’ increase in the use of cellphones. 

Perhaps because of the research, Israel now has “much more aggressive rules,” Davis said. “You can’t sell a cellphone without a headset. And there are warnings from the Israeli Ministry of Health.”

A new Swedish study published just this month indicates that those who began using cellphones regularly before the age of 20 have more than a fourfold increased risk of ipsilateral glioma, a brain tumor formed on the same side of the head on which a person holds his phone.

The research seems to indicate that the younger one is when he begins to use a cellphone, the greater his potential risk. 

A new publication on the EHT website, written by several eminent epidemiologists, concludes that “new studies released since the time the World Health Organization concluded cellphones were a ‘possible human carcinogen’ in 2011 now indicate the cellphone radiation is a ‘probable human carcinogen,’” according to Davis.