Your cellphone might not fry your brain, but...

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 11 June 2008 10:24

Opinion and Analysis

Try this at home: collect cellphones from friends of family members, arrange them in a small circle, have them all making calls, put a few kernels of popping corn in the middle and watch what happens.

If this video on YouTube is to be believed, the electromagnetic energy emitted by four phones is sufficient to heat the kernels to popping point.

If it does not work for you, this does not necessarily mean that the video is a con: the output power of a cellphone is not constant, but changes according to the how much is needed to communicate with the base station: if base stations are further away more power is used. Also, this video appears to have been shot in Japan where DoCoMo's FOMA 3G network is somewhat different from the 2G and 3G networks used elsewhere.

One commentator on the video claimed to have replicated the performance but added: "then I tried it with the new Green Planet Armor product that eliminates electromagnetic radiation and it would not pop corn." Well of course not, but eliminating radiation would also stop the phone working properly!

Meanwhile the mobile industry continues to try and minimise consumers' concerns about the possible harmful effects of cellular radiation Some research has looked at the possible carcinogenic effects of the radiation whilst other research has focused on whether local heating of tissue, graphically demonstrated by the popcorn experiment, could be damaging. The latest scare, reported by the Canberra Times newspaper, is research suggesting a link between prenatal and postnatal exposure to cellphone radiation and behavioural problems in children, published online in Epidemiology.

The authors concluded that: "Greater odds ratios for behavioural problems were observed for children who had possible prenatal or postnatal exposure to cellphone use. After adjustment for potential confounders, they calculated the odds at 1.80 and concluded that "Exposure to cell phones prenatally-and, to a lesser degree, postnatally-was associated with behavioural difficulties such as emotional and hyperactivity problems around the age of school entry. These associations may be noncausal and may be due to unmeasured confounding. If real, they would be of public health concern given the widespread use of this technology.

AMTA sought to downplay the findings quoting Dr Jorn Olsen, professor and chair of Epidemiology at UCLA and a co- author of the paper, saying: "We think [the results are] interesting, but many associations seen in studies of this type occur due to chance," and that parents could comfort themselves that the vast majority of children who had been exposed to cell phones, both in and out of the womb, did not exhibit behavioural problems.

The latest issue of its newsletter tried to focus attention on a damaging side effect of cellphone usage that is widespread and well proven: cyberbullying. It quoted the UK' Times newspaper saying: "An exclusive survey for The Times, conducted by Populus, indicated that almost 70 percent of respondents are very worried about children being bullied through their mobile phones, while only a quarter are very concerned about potential health risks from using mobiles. This is despite warnings from experts such as Sir William Stewart, former chairman of the Health Protection Agency and the National Radiological Protection Board, who recommended in 2005 that 9 to 14-year-olds should make only short, essential calls, use text messaging where possible and buy low-emission models."