CELL PHONE AND HEALTH................... Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize not for his work on relativity, but for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Einstein said that the energy per photon is determined by its frequency. Photoelectrons were emitted only if the light had a frequency above a threshold level. All bond-breaking processes — and cell mutation caused by cancer is one of them — involve a transition with a single photon of sufficient frequency (or energy). A million or billion photons of sub-threshold frequency cannot cause the transition. QUESTION OF FREQUENCY X-rays are well known to cause such mutations. UV rays from the sun, those which are not stopped by the ozone layer, can cause skin cancers in people who do not have enough pigmentation to block them. But visible light cannot cause such mutations: It is sub-threshold. So is any electro-magnetic wave whose frequency is smaller — such as infra-red, microwave, radio waves, and the typical waves (900 MHz) used for cell phones. This means that the cell-phone photons do not have enough energy to cause a mutation in your DNA. Period. Increasing their power will increase the number of photons, but they will all be below the threshold for causing cancer. They do not have enough energy to break a bond and cause a mutation. If you live next to a cell phone transmission tower, the power levels will be higher than if you just used a cell phone, but you can be sure that all the photons are harmless. A sceptic might argue that bond-breaking mutations are not the only way to cause cancer. True. Heat can cause damage to living tissues. And if you give enough photons of sub-threshold frequency you can heat a substance. That is why you feel hot when you go out into the sun. The sub-threshold visible and infra-red photons heat up your body — but they do not cause any damage that can lead to cancer. Hence, you do not feel hot when you stand next to a cell-phone tower. A microwave oven heats up the food inside by bombarding it with microwave photons. The energy inside an oven in one second is equal to that got by using a cell phone continuously for several days. But nobody worries about it because the photons are known to be harmless. Otherwise, microwave ovens would not be so commonly used today. And, the small cell phone just does not have enough energy to cause significant heating, let alone any tissue damage. Because we evolved to live in the sunny plains of Africa, our bodies have another defence against non-ionising radiation, namely a layer of dead cells on the outermost part of our skin. Most radiation does not make it past this layer, which is where it is absorbed to make us feel hot. NATURAL PROTECTION Therefore, you can be sure radiation from the cell phone will not enter the body. In addition, our brains are designed so that they do not overheat, by circulating blood as a coolant. If the bright sun cannot overheat your brain, do you think a small cell phone pressed against your ear can? Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that cell-phone radiation is harmless, organisations such as the WHO want to play it safe and want to base their recommendations on “epidemiological studies”— studies that compare the prevalence of cancer or other health indicators between cell phone users and non-users. This is because of scare-mongers who play on the fears of poorly informed people. There was a similar unscientific claim regarding the hazards posed by electrical power transmission lines in the 80s and 90s. Power lines operate at a very low frequency of 50 Hz (a million times smaller than cell phone frequencies), but have much higher power densities. But epidemiological studies found no link between power lines and overall health, let alone cancer. Such fearmongers make large sums of money by selling filters that block cell-phone radiation. They will give anecdotal evidence that someone who developed brain cancer “was always talking on the cell phone”. This is a well-known logical fallacy, called post hoc, ergo propter hoc — if A follows B then A was caused by B. Epidemiological studies have sought to refute just this. In any case, all of us (cell-phone users) are unwittingly part of the largest epidemiological study ever undertaken in the history of mankind. The total number of cell-phone users in the world is now an unprecedented 80 per cent of the population, up by a factor of 1,000 from 20 years ago. Everyone from a poor farmer in a village in India to a rich businessman in Europe uses one. But there is no correspondingly large increase in the prevalence of those kinds of cancers which could be caused by cell phones (such as brain tumours). Don’t you think the ill effects of cell phones would have shown up by now in the billions of users worldwide? We should worry that our modern, industrialised world is full of carcinogens — from pesticides in the food we eat, to industrial pollutants in our air and water. But cell-phone radiation is not one of them. (The author is with Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.) .........................................THANKS......................................... Post Comment
Posted on: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 04:28:28 +0000
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