Cell Phone Hazards: The End of an Era

The era when cell phones safety was taken for granted is as done as a hotdog on an unwatched backyard grill. The science confirming that pulsed digital microwave radiation from cell phones can be harmful has become stronger and clearer. In San Francisco where officials have passed a law giving people the basic right to know about cellphone risks, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) claims that people will become confused by referring to cell phones as two-way microwave radiating devices and insists that the more benign phrase be used to depict this radiation—radiofrequency energy. In their suit to block this new law, the CTIA claims that all phones are equally safe. The effort to spin the science on cell phones has a long industry. In 1994, long before cellphones were ubiquitous, University of Washington scientists Henry Lai and N. J. Singh showed that pulsed microwave radiation unraveled DNA in the brain of lab rats. The industry response to this inconvenient finding was straightforward. Some industry representatives sought to keep this research from seeing the light of day and asked the journal that had accepted their research paper to rescind publication. When this failed, Motorola adopted what it described as a “war-gamed” set of public relations initiatives against the results—mobilizing professional public relations experts to cast doubt on the work. In fact, many studies since then have found that cell phone radiation, whether from older or newer phones, significantly alters brain chemistry and blood flow, weakens the blood brain barrier, releases unusual proteins and causes a host of biological responses. Thus, in 2006, Finnish researchers produced evidence of altered brain energy after cell phone use and in 2002 researchers in Austria presented parallel evidence of other significant changes. Fast forward to 2011. Accusations of scientific fraud were widely publicized and leveled against a 12-laboratory European collaboration after it found further evidence that cell phone radiation induced biological damage. Yet proof that no fraud occurred has not received similar publicity. Exonerated by several internal university reviews, recently that work was further strengthened when yet another investigation found no evidence of fraud. Today, hypotheses linking pulsed microwave radiation from cell phones to various types of biological damage are moving from the rarified world of little known research to the foundation for landmark shifts in public perception and, ultimately, life-saving policies in Israel, France, Finland, and many other nations. In fact, the World Health Organization expert review of the topic in May 2011 advised that cellphone and other forms of wireless radiation should be regarded as a possible human carcinogen. Based on its own review of the matter, the President’s Cancer Panel in 2010, drawing on what it heard from experts in the field about growing rates of rare tumors that could be tied with cell phones, called for both serious research and precautionary actions on cell phones and other wireless devices. Yet the rest of the government has not received that memo. In advising that cellphones should be used cautiously with headsets and speakerphones and that children should limit use altogether, WHO experts are in accord with the authors of the Fifteen Reasons for Concern about Cell Phones and Brain Tumors (see www.radiationresearch.org) and recent reports from neurosurgeons in Australia Charles Teo and Vini Khurauna, in Britain, Kevin O’Neill and in the U.S., Santosh Kesari and Keith Black. Here’s what the FCC website says about Children and Cell phones as of February 1, 2011: “The scientific evidence does not show a danger to any users of cell phones from RF exposure, including children and teenagers.” It is time for a change.