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Drowning in a Sea of Microwaves
luciensims writes "The Independent is running an article on another study of the long-term effects of mobile phones. Given how widespread mobile phone use has become, will we even have an adequate control group 50 years from now to gauge what the effects have been?"
Nerve cell damage in mammalian brain after exposure to microwaves from GSM mobile phones.
Salford LG, Brun AE, Eberhardt JL, Malmgren L, Persson BR.
Environ Health Perspect. 2003 Jun;111(7):881-3; discussion A408.
Department of Neurosurgery, Lund University, The Rausing Laboratory and Lund University Hospital, Lund, Sweden. Leif.Salford@neurokir.lu.se
The possible risks of radio-frequency electromagnetic fields for the human body is a growing concern for our society. We have previously shown that weak pulsed microwaves give rise to a significant leakage of albumin through the blood-brain barrier. In this study we investigated whether a pathologic leakage across the blood-brain barrier might be combined with damage to the neurons. Three groups each of eight rats were exposed for 2 hr to Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) mobile phone electromagnetic fields of different strengths. We found highly significant (p 0.002) evidence for neuronal damage in the cortex, hippocampus, and basal ganglia in the brains of exposed rats.
PMID: 12782486 [PubMed - in process]
From PubMed
The more important question to answer is "how many have died or been injured while using a cell phone." The number of cancers will pale in comparision. Well Harvard studied it and came up with a new point of view that there is a risk to benefit to be considered that precludes all of the above.
To myself it it is all about improving the quality of life and the cell phone does not improve my life.
I can not quote sources, *but i seem to remember* that the Amish and Menonites (sp), were quite into cell phones.
They actually fit into the whole idealogy of technology that these two groups have, in that technology should be the slave of community. In this mode of thought it is a distinct advantage that cell phones are able to be turned off, they do not needlessly interupt personal life, as a 'normal' telephone does, and such like.
Okay, heres that source I was talking about
The best is the enemy of the good
Hasn't anyone taught you about the Inverse Square Law? When you double the distance between a radiation source and its target, the power over the same target area is reduced to 1/4 what it was. So, if you are 100 times farther away from the cell phone as the idiot using it, you receive 1/10,000 the signal dosage.
If there's enough power at that distance to fry your brain, the obnoxious twit using it will be dead in a couple days of an overdose. But, since he won't be dead in 2 days, or even a month, from the radio signal in his phone, you won't be dead either.
Get a sense of proportionality, dude!
As you will surely know the electro-magnetic waves used for cell phone communication are just the same a radioactive waves used in nuclear power plants
Firstly, wrong. Only gamma rays are electromagnetic. Alpha and beta rays are highly energetic helium nuclei and electrons, respectively.
Secondly, visible light is electromagnetic rays. Think about how much of that you absorb in an average day. Augghhhh, the light!! The horrible light! Won't someone think of the children?
Thank you for the troll. Please move along.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I believe one of the reasons it is banned in aircrafts is you can hit so many base stations from air and create havoc on the infrastructure. Telecommunication companies don't like you messing with their hardware. Most of the cell phones are pretty low powered devices, max. 5W to my knowledge. 5W is nothing compared to what other in-flight equipment radiate. A 144-146MHz (in US 144-148MHz) amateur radio handheld can hit over 100 miles with 1W. As long as your receiver is sensitive enough and you are line-of-sight with the transmitter, you will hear it. It is common to bounce radio signals off the moon and receive them back (called EME - Earth moon Earth) and there are guys who do this with 5W hand held transmitters (and lots of pre-amps on the receiver side and huge antennas but I hope you get my point). In many countries (including UK), using amateur radio transmitters on aircrafts is banned. Not because it is dangerous - it isn't. It is because you can create havoc with the repeaters. This morning there was a nice lift and I could hear french stations calling on 145.5. Unfortunately I had a low power radio in the car so I couldn't get them hear me. I live in Cambridge, UK. France is quite a distance away.
It's not a phobia of technology, it's independance from technology. The majority of Amish agree that technology has benefits, but for their daily life and work it is better to not use it unless they can build it/understand it themselves.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.