WARNING: Your monitor is killing you. (Mobile phone safety)

Member Name: MichaelR

Product:	Mobile phone safety
Date:	07/02/01 (18 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: No real evidence of danger from this part of the EM spectrum

Disadvantages: Media hype and sensationalism.

Right now, your computer monitor is bombarding you with Electromagnetic radiation… even if (and chances are you do) have a monitor with an EPA approved EM Pollution preventer - it is still irradiating you.

Are you worried though? No of course you’re not, because how long have you been using your computer? Has it killed you yet?

Better not go and watch the TV either, no, because that will irradiate you, and be sure to chuck out your Microwave, because that’s the most harmful of the lot!

The truth is, that not only devices that send and/or receive radio waves (such as cellular telephones) but also ALL electronic devices emit some form of electromagnetic radiation. This is why if you have the TV on (any of you who program games consoles will know this!) and have the computer on at the same time, then the signal on the TV will be distorted, and if the TV is too close to your computer monitor, the signal on the monitor will be distorted too.

If these signals can penetrate the casing of electrical devices, and walls (well my mobile gets a decent signal indoors most of the time) then chances are that they can penetrate your skull too. Should you be worried though? No, I don’t think so. It’s only really radiation in the upper part of the spectrum that causes cancers and severe cognitive problems. The level of radiation we are talking about here is very, very low level. GSM networks in this country use phones with signals approaching 900MHz, that’s not a level of radiation that I would really be worried about exposing myself too. It is safely inside the non-ionising level of the spectrum. I probably irradiated myself more back in A Level Physics than I have ever done with a mobile phone.

There is some worry that a high-intensity “burst” of non-ionising radiation could be potentially damaging, and these could possibly be produced when you establish connections to the network on your m
obile (i.e. when you switch on, or when you initiate the sending or receiving of a call) but I’m not sure if there is really much evidence as to the intensity of these bursts. If you’re worried about it, then the best thing that you can do is probably to keep the phone away from your head during these “high risk” moments.

The NRPB (National Radiological Protection Board) recommends that you should not expose yourself to radiation levels in excess of 10 Wkg^-1 (that’s 10 Watts per kilogram) No mobile telephone on the market today produces anything like this level of radiation. You can buy phones that emit only 1/50th of that…

As I said earlier, I do believe that perhaps a concentrated burst of this level of non-ionising radiation could impair your cognitive abilities, at least on a temporary basis… as the potential is there for the radiation to break down chemical bonds within your brain, and also to interfere with synaptic patterns. There is medical evidence to show that this can happen, however all the experiments that I know of have used radiation levels far in excess of that produced by mobile phones. Theses levels aren’t even really in the same part of the spectrum, and so, for me, these experiments really don’t prove much.

If you start to worry about mobile phones though, then you really have to worry about all EM radiation. Death by Radio One…. Scary!

As I said at the start, all electronic devices emit EM radiation, and no one’s really worried about them. I think that this is yet another scare story that has really been blown out of all proportion.

I use mobile phones; I eat beef, and eggs and all the other things with salmonella and E-Coli and all the other stuff that is apparently going to kill me. I’m really not that worried about any of the scares though. Perhaps I will be struck down tomorrow, but chances are I won’t be.

My p
oint is, that if you listened to all the scares, you would never go anywhere, do anything, eat anything, or breathe even. (There’s lots of toxic nastiness in the air don’t forget!)

We all have to take risks in life in order to live even. Whether you want to take the risk of using a mobile phone or not is entirely up to you… but put it this way, the risk is pretty low, and there’s yet to be a verdict of “Death by mobile phone” in any coroner’s court in the land…

Summary: