CELLPHONES: HOW BAD ARE THEY?		INVESTIGATE: JUNE 00
	It seems that every time you turn on the news these days, there’s something new to die from. Now Britain is warning children that cellphones may be dangerous for their health. IAN WISHART dials up the latest research In 1992, years before the good ship Tuku Morgan was to run aground on $89 rocks at "Undiegate", a television reporter of the same name bought a cellphone. Not just any cellphone, either. Only one other TV3 journalist had their own cellphone at this stage, and Tuku had just discovered the hard way why that was. He paid somewhere in the region of $3,000 for his state of the art Motorola ‘flip top’ phone. I had only paid a thousand for mine, which I guess was proof that Tuku had deeper pockets in his boxers than I had. The point of this little sidebar? Back in 1992, mobile technology had been available in New Zealand - and pretty much everywhere else - for onlyfive years. It was expensive and, by today’s standards, archaic. To say that mobile phones are now ubiquitous would be an understatement of epic proportions: from the days of those first "brick" phones of 1987 to the tiny Startacs and Ericssons of the current millennium, not only has the technology reinvented itself many times over but, like the Love Bug virus, it has infected nearly every home in New Zealand. Today, around half the adult population have mobile phones. You can now get the latest models free, if you connect to a fixed term rental. So why is it, after 13 years of cellphone use in New Zealand, that we haven’t seen hospital wards filling up with brain tumour victims, if the things are so dangerous? According to researchers, the answer is more complex than the question. For a start, mass popular use of cellphones did not kick in until price barriers dropped away: in New Zealand alone, the number of mobile phone customers has grown from 300,000 six years ago to around a million connections today. In the case of smoking, doctors do not expect to see lung cancer develop in six or even ten years - but further down the track. Likewise, the links between cellphones and brain tumours in humans may not become statistically evident for at least another decade. "The risk is extremely high," NZ biophysicist Neil Cherry told American interviewer Linda Howe. "I have established that there are 66 epidemiological studies showing that electromagnetic radiation across the spectrum increases brain tumours in human populations. "Two of those studies are for particular brain tumours from cellphones. I am expecting because these cellphone exposures of the head are far higher than even the highest military exposures for which we find very large increases in cancer - that cellphone users will be showing these symptoms. "But the latency of cancer is decades. And so we need a large population for about two to three decades using these cellphones for a large increase in brain tumours to be observed." So where does that leave all of us who use mobiles on a daily basis? Well. it leaves us as victims of a raging scientific war between those who claim cellphone radiation is fatal, and those who say "rubbish". Before examining the pro’s and con’s, it is probably important to understand why cellphones may ultimately kill you. The human body has, for two million or so years, generated its own electrical energy. Millions of neurones and cells spend each day transmitting tiny pulses of electricity surging through our nervous systems, important cellular messages (no pun intended) that instruct our bodies to breathe, move or think. In the same way that a nuclear explosion sends out an electromagnetic pulse through the air capable of knocking out car engines and all electrical appliances, some scientists wonder if cellphone radiation can alter the electrical messages in our own body cells, causing irreparable damage. In New Zealand, our own Government-run National Radiation Laboratory has so far given mobile phones the all-clear, and in Britain similar reassurances have come from the National Radiological Protection Board, which says "There is no firm evidence of any serious health effects from mobile phones." But the same organisation was also responsible for monitoring the safety of Britain’s Sellafield nuclear power plant, and has for years given it clean reports. Yet ultimately Sellafield’s safety record turns out to have been so dismal that it may have to be mothballed. Little wonder, then, that ordinary phone users are becoming more than a tad concerned at the way events are developing. One of the problems making it difficult to diagnose the impact of cellphones is that there are so many other factors in our environment these days that may be killing us. When you rise out of bed each morning, the radiation from your cellphone may be the least of your worries: as a regular user of an electric blanket you may be exposing yourself to an increased cancer risk. As a person who watches TV there is the radiation emitted by the TV set itself, and if you’re someone who doesn’t watch TV the news is equally bad - everyone of us is being bombarded with VHF and UHF TV signals thrown out from giant antennae like Waiatarua, Kaukau or Sugar Loaf. The transmissions from TV masts can be hundreds of times more powerful than cellphone towers, and yet everytime the TV news covers a cellphone tower protest, they fail to mention this very salient point. Unlike cellsites, which are extremely low powered and only effectively cover their local neighbourhood, television transmissions must be received over a huge area, and received with the same clarity by viewers 80 kilometres away as those one kilometre away. Those signals are pumping through our bodies, day and night. At their source - the transmission towers - they are strong enough to microwave you from the inside out if you get too close. A family living next door to a cellphone tower will be getting more radiation dose from their local TV stations than they will from the cellsite. Then there are the radio stations, and telephone microwave links, as well as airport radar and radio signals from ordinary taxi or courier R/T systems. If electromagnetic energy could be colourised so we could see it, we would all walk around in a never ending shimmer of colour so thick we probably couldn’t see more than a few metres ahead of us. And that’s just the electromagnetic issue: there are many other studies linking the growing cancer rate to plastics, polyunsaturated vegetable oils and margarine and the millions of tonnes to pesticides and herbicides that we’ve ingested as part of our food. So how, out of that mix, do you test for one particular culprit like cellphones? For all we know, the radiation from cellphones might not affect us at all. Or it might be responsible for cervical or testicular cancer. Nobody knows. The only place they can start looking is at brain tumours, and specifically tumours closest to where cellphones are normally held. Unlike the tobacco industry, which fought to cover up the addictive and carcinogenic side-effects of its products, the mobile phone manufacturers have learnt from that particular lesson. In the US, the industry contributed some NZ$50 million to research the problem. Initially, the results seemed reassuring. Up until recently most of the world has operated analogue cellular networks, like the original Telecom 025 service. As anyone who ever used an analogue phone could confirm, they generated an enormous amount of heat against the head. So initial research focused on whether the heat was symptomatic of radiation, or whether it was nothing more than ordinary heat generated by an electrical appliance. Researchers could find no link between the hot phones and cancer, although it was acknowledged that some users reported frequent headaches after cellphone use. But then again, the technology was still in its infancy, and now has come the push to digital phones. When GSM was first introduced in Australia, people found out the hard way just what their cellphones were capable of: they affected heart pacemakers, and in one instance a container crane dropped its load because of interference from a digital phone. In New Zealand, cars have been unable to start because of similar interference. The question is: if you’re a ten-call-a-day person now, will you still be alive ten or fifteen years from now? Could someone buying a prepaid phone at the age of 18 be dead by 33? Forget AIDS or Ebola: could cellphones be nature’s secret weapon to keep rampaging human population growth in check? "The bloody things are so integral to business and social life today," complains 36 year old Auckland businessman David Wilson, an eight year cellphone veteran. "You pick them up, knowing you could be frying your brain, but figuring ‘what the hell - I’m going to die of something’." And it might not even be cancer - one study of almost 600 suicides in England found suicide rates in areas of high electromagnetic field strength were 40 percent higher than average. Other studies of EMF radiation have found birth defects from prolonged exposure, while a Canadian study of 56 high-voltage workers found that prior to their employment the men had fathered girl and boy children in equal measure - after working in the EMF environment the number of male children conceived was almost six times the number of females. But getting back to that US research funded by the cellular phone makers. Last year brought an unexpected development: Dr George Carlo - the man hired by the cellphone industry to investigate the claims and who for six years had poured cold water on the issue - suddenlyhad a change of heart. "The Government and industry needs to take the next steps quickly - because now we have findings that say there could be a problem," Carlo told reporters. The "problem" was evidence linking cellphones to what had been a rare type of brain tumour, a neurocytoma. It may be nothing, warns Carlo - merely a discrepancy - or it could be the first sign after 13 years of mobile phone use that in the same way that the previously rare Karposi’s sarcoma heralded the arrival of AIDS, we may be on the edge of a brain tumour explosion. Adding fuel to the fire, only a few weeks ago America’s National Brain Tumour Foundation issued a news release stating: "What is certain is that there is a boom in people using cellphones, as well as an increase in brain tumour incidence." The NBTF points out that not enough is yet known about brain tumours or their causes, although some risk factors have been identified. "Risk factors include heavy exposure to ionizing radiation, such as X-rays, electromagnetic fields, pesticides, and a family history of brain tumours. In animal studies, nitrite compounds found in cured meats [bacon, ham etc] caused tumours. "A few studies found that radio frequencies, such as the type found in cellphones, increase the division of already damaged cells." All of which adds to the confusion and concern of ordinary New Zealanders who, short of throwing in the towel and going to live on an organic farm, now face an uncertain future while scientists grapple with the perils of cellphones, TV sets, electric blankets and microwave ovens. In the meantime, insurance underwriters for Lloyds in Britain are beginning to refuse liability coverage to mobile phone companies, on the basis that they don’t want to be bankrupted ten years from now. "There are people in the insurance market who close their eyes to the issue because they say there is no scientific proof of a problem," underwriter John Fenn told The Observer. "If you go back to asbestos, it ‘wasn’t a problem’ at one time, either." COPYRIGHT 2000, HATM Magazines Ltd, All Rights Reserved		BUY THIS ISSUE COMMENT & DISCUSSION BOARDS Newstalk Intelligent Design Healthtalk Parenttalk