Posts Tagged ‘radiation’
|Disconnect: The latest warning on cell phone radiation and health
Sunday, October 10th, 2010
Thomas Rogers at Salon.com has a review of Devra Davis’ new book, “Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry Has Done to Hide It, and How to Protect Your Family“.
The apparent bottom line for cell phone safety:
- Use texting instead of voice calling.
- Use an earpiece if you must voice call.
- Keep your cell phone at least an inch away from your body at all times while it’s on.
The full article is worth reading. Below are a few excerpts of the review and Rogers’ interview with Davis:
In “Disconnect,” Devra Davis, a scientist and National Book Award finalist for “When Smoke Ran Like Water,” looks at the connection between cellphones and health problems, with some disturbing results. Recent studies have tied cellphone use to rises in brain damage, cheek cancer and malfunctioning sperm. She reveals the unsettling fact that many new cellphones now come with the small-print warning that they are to be kept at least one-inch from the ear (presumably for safety reasons) and many insurance companies refuse to insure cellphone companies against health-related claims. Most troubling of all, science has shown that children and teenagers are particularly susceptible to cellphone radiation, raising questions about its effects on coming generations.
What to you is the most compelling evidence that links cellphones to brain cancer?
The brain cancer connection is in fact a very complicated one. Cancer can take a long time to develop. After the Hiroshima bomb fell, there was no increase in brain cancer for 10 years, even 20 years afterward. Forty years later, there was a significant increase in brain cancer in people who survived the bombing. Now, for studies of people who have been heavy cellphone users (defined as someone who has made a half-hour call a day for 10 years), there is a 50 percent increase in brain cancer overall. And among the heaviest users there’s a two- to fourfold increased risk.
We’ve only really been using cellphones for 10 years. Isn’t it a bit early to be drawing these kinds of conclusions?
Well, that’s actually not true. Heavy use of cellphones in the United States is a very recent phenomenon for the general population. In the year 2000, fewer than half of us regularly used cellphones. Now almost all of us do. If there’s a 10-year latency, we still have to wait another five years in the United States to see any general population impacts.
You have to look at all of the evidence and not simply wait for proof of human harm or sick people or dead people. If the debate becomes, “Do we have sufficient proof of human harm?” that means we’re waiting another 20 years. That means we will potentially have an epidemic before we act to prevent harm. Now, some people could be very cynical and say, look, brain cancer is relatively rare so even if it doubles or quadruples it’s still rare. But it’s also, at this point, mostly incurable.
Why are young people so much more at risk?
Their brains are not fully protected with myelin. Myelin is a kind of fatty sheath that goes around neurons [brain cells] and helps to enhance judgment and a whole bunch of other things, like impulse control. Their skulls are also thinner, and a thinner skull admits more radiation. We now know that the young brain doesn’t mature until the mid-20s, later in boys than girls. We need to be much more vigilant about protecting the young brain because it is more vulnerable. We know that from work that’s been done on lead and a number of other agents.
If this research is really as convincing as it seems to be, then why hasn’t it created a widespread uproar?
Well, it has in France. Bills passed both houses of the French national government this spring that ban the marketing and creation of phones uniquely for children. It’s also had an impact in Israel, a country that is very sophisticated in its use of radar and microwaves, and Finland, both of which have issued warnings.
But think about the fine print warning that comes with BlackBerry Torch. It says, If you keep the phone in your pocket, it can exceed the FCC exposure guidelines. What’s that supposed to tell you? It sounds like that phone cannot safely be put in your pocket — well, where do they expect people to keep them?
….The book also describes the aggressive push-back by people affiliated with the cellphone industry against scientists whose findings point to safety concerns — including, in one case, a campaign to discredit someone’s findings by accusing them of manufacturing evidence. It’s pretty explosive stuff.
I think it might have started out as nothing more than companies wanting to make profits, and wanting to keep their products in a positive light. Companies are allowed to make profits; I’m not opposed to that. And I imagine people genuinely thought these kinds of dangers from radiation weren’t possible, because the physics paradigm [at the time] said it wasn’t. But it has since been morphed into something worse. Now even the insurance industry is listening to scientists. Many companies are no longer providing coverage for health damage from cellphones.
We need to be more sophisticated as a society in using experimental data where we have it. We have experimental data on sperm counts. We have experimental data on brain cell damage. We have experimental data on biological markers that we know increase the risk of cancer. These are the same debates that went out over passive smoking, over active smoking, over asbestos, over benzene, over vinyl chloride. They said we don’t have enough sick or dead people. The consequence was to continue exposing people. Is there anybody in the world who believes we should have waited as long as we did?
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Photo credit: liber
Tags: cell phone, consumer, radiation
Posted in health, risk analysis, technology | No Comments »
Cell phones and your health
Saturday, February 27th, 2010
Environmental Working Group (EWG) has updated their information on cell phone radiation and potential health risks.
As I alluded to in a previous post, conducting human health risk analyses for things like cell phone radiation exposure is difficult because it’s hard to determine how much exposure is too much, and it takes years to see what health effects might show up.
The research below suggests that links between cell phone radiation and health are now becoming evident.
And with more than 4 billion cell phone users worldwide (2/3 of the human population), we are unintentionally conducting one of the largest epidemiological studies of all time.
Learn more from EWG:
- Risks and research—executive summary
- Risks and research—full report (pdf)
- How much radiation does your cell phone emit?
- How to reduce radiation exposure
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gibbons/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
Tags: cell phone, consumer, radiation
Posted in health, risk analysis, technology | 2 Comments »
Do our daily routines put our health at risk?
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
Every day, we are exposed to synthetic chemicals and radiation from consumer products. If you asked me how risky these products are, my responses might range from “I don’t know” to “I don’t want to know” to “If they’re on the market, let’s hope they’re safe!” Unfortunately, it’s difficult to know if many of the things we use every day really are safe.
Risk analysis is a four-step process by which scientists determine whether chemicals or other agents are unhealthy:
- Step 1: Hazard screening–Does a chemical look or act like other chemicals already known to be harmful or safe?
- Step 2: Exposure characterization–How much are we exposed to and how much accumulates in our bodies?
- Step 3: Effects characterization–How do different doses of an agent lead to different health effects, or what we commonly refer to as “dose-response curves”? This is usually achieved using short-term lab animal tests or epidemiological data that show things like health effects of people working at industry sites or living in contaminated neighborhoods.
- Step 4: Risk characterization–Given that we identify a chemical as being potentially dangerous (Step 1), and can measure our exposure (Step 2) and the effects that this specific exposure has on health (Step 3), what is the likelihood or risk that we will experience ill health as a result of the exposure?
As the EPA will tell you, there is often poor understanding of the long term risks of synthetic chemicals and radiation. Much of this comes from the fact that
- We have not screened many of the chemicals on the market for potential safety. Here’s a quote from the EPA’s website in 1996, which was subsequently removed:
For the majority of the approximately 3,000 high production volume industrial chemicals produced in the United States in 1996, we have little or no publicly available hazard screening data. These chemicals, non-polymers produced in quantities of more than one million pounds per year, are found in the workplace and in thousands of consumer products. Even fewer data are available for the remainder of the some 70,000 chemicals on the EPA’s inventory.
- Rigorous effects characterizations are hard to do. Lab animal tests (rats, mice, etc.) are useful, but they are not a perfect substitute for understanding human health impacts. Moreover, the kinds of long-term data we need rarely exist because that’s the nature of short grant funding cycles. We know very little about the synergistic effects of multiple chemicals interacting in our bodies. Finally, health problems analyzed in epidemiological studies can often be confounded with other lifestyle issues, such as weight, diet, exercise, and smoking.
Thus, we know we are exposed to these things, and we can even measure them in our bodies and in infants, but we don’t know very well how this translates to long term health risk.
To some, this uncertainty might be license to ignore the issue. To others, it necessitates better education about what’s in or emanating from our products so that we can decide for ourselves whether or not to limit exposure.
The Environmental Working Group has compiled several interesting lists of consumer products including specific ingredients that have the potential to be harmful:
- Shopper’s guide to pesticides in food
- Shopper’s guide to cosmetics and health care products
- Shopper’s guide to sunscreens
- Shopper’s guide to cell phone radiation
So go ahead and check out your favorite vegetable, shampoo, cell phone, or toothpaste, and see what comes up.
photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/w610guy/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Tags: chemical, cosmetics, pollutant, radiation
Posted in environmental science, pollutants, risk analysis, shopping guides, toxics | 4 Comments »
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