Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2011, days after the WHO’s cancer agency (IARC) classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as “possibly carcinogenic” (Group 2B) on 31 May 2011. Saying the WHO calls phones “harmful to health” overstates that classification.
The World Health Organization says using mobile phones is harmful to health. Oncology experts say the study is wrong. Spain’s Ministry of Health calls for “caution” over a study it considers poorly corroborated. But what does common sense, sometimes the least common of the senses, tell you?
Given that this isn’t the first time scientists have put the economic interests of big corporations ahead of humanity’s own health, I certainly wouldn’t take it lightly, least of all the idea of ruling out that mobile phone use is harmful. Let’s look back at some concrete facts.
People seem to have stopped talking (though that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten) about the rise in cancer patients who had one thing in common: they lived near a “repeater”, a fixed antenna belonging to a mobile phone company. No one managed to prove a link between these new patients and living near an antenna, but there were already quite a few coincidences.
Isolated cases of people who have suffered damage to the optic nerve can’t be linked to mobile phone use either. Yet many studies now claim that exposure to electromagnetic waves, from microwave ovens as well as mobile phones, directly affects the atoms and molecules in the tissues of people with weaker immune systems, especially with continuous use. Is there any exposure more continuous than living next to a repeater?
Experts have advised countless times against sleeping with electrical devices nearby, and against keeping your mobile phone in a pocket near the genitals, since it can damage sperm quality and cause sterility.
Think back to the first mobile phone earpiece. It was sold as a convenient “hands-free” product, when its inventor originally designed it to keep the phone away from our brains so the waves wouldn’t damage them.
So who do we listen to? We can listen to the scientists who do their job and warn about the consequences for our health, or we can listen to scientists who sell themselves to companies so that these dangers never come to light and cost those companies billions in losses.
If magnetic waves can interfere with radio and television, and can damage sperm and even an optic nerve, what might they be capable of doing to our brains?
Once again, business is business, and information reaches us according to the interests of capital. I’m no scientist, but it stands to reason that it is utterly impossible for mobile phones to be harmless. That won’t make me stop using mine, but the least we deserve is honest advice about the effects of this “invention”, without censorship of any kind.
Further reading
Featured image: Ervins Strauhmanis, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
