Cellphone Brain Damage?

There are more than 90 million cellphone accounts in the US today, and about 200 million wireless-phone users around the world. That's a lot of people with mobile phones pressed to their ears, sending more radio waves into their brains than they would with a regular telephone- or Walkman-style headphones. And since all these cellphones are linked together by small trees of antennas that each have a range of only several miles, that's a lot of antennas saturating our cities and rural areas with radio waves from points quite close to the ground.

So are we frying our brains as we walk, eat, drive, ride bikes and do all the other things we do while talking into our cellphones? Are we being zapped by those transmitters that look like stereo speakers and are found in circular arrays on top of buildings and metal towers (or real live trees) all over the country?

Safety Levels

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sets a limit on how much power can radiate from a cellphone and pass through a gram of body tissue. This "specific absorption rate" (SAR) is set at 1.6 watts per kilogram, which the wireless industry maintains is way below the rate at which any known physiological effects can occur.

But the industry's sweeping reassurances have started to lose their ring, as more and more research results come in from all over the globe. The US wireless industry itself financed a company called Wireless Technology Research LLC (WTR), headed by Dr. George Carlo, to do a six-year, $27 million study. But even with all that industry money behind him, Carlo did not simply let cellphones off the hook. After finding preliminary evidence of health risks, WTR recently called for "additional study."

But critics dismiss Carlo and the WTR as fronts for the wireless industry and accuse them of "tobacco science."

Outside the industry, the rate of research has been picking up, fueled by warnings from studies and reports over the past two decades about the effects of the electromagnetic fields (EMFs) that surround high-voltage power lines and a wide variety of electrically active appliances and industrial equipment. Researchers are looking at both the transmitters and the handheld phones.

Transmitter Tower Radiation

If you live or work within about 100 yards of an array of those speaker-box-sized cellphone antennas, usually located on a tower, you're not only getting maximum-exposure density of EMFs (because the beams are projected out and angled slightly down), you're also getting whole-body exposure, which for nearby residents occurs 24 hours a day. The good news: power levels are about one one-thousandth to one one-millionth that of the cellphone handsets themselves (actual power varies as the user moves closer or further away from the cell antenna).

While there is much evidence that living in these fields is bad for your health, the phones themselves are worse.

Cellular Handset Emissions

Cellphones zap you in several different ways:

The largest doses of radiation come from your cellphone's antenna. This radiation is pulsed like a strobe light at 217 times a second. And this is how cellphones differ from radio headphones, regular telephones or cordless phones: The antennas of cellphones can deliver large amounts of radio-frequency (RF) energy to very small areas of the user's body, creating "hot spots" in the skull.

The handset itself also transfers energy to the head via inductance. A Swiss study found that different models of cellphone handsets diffuse from 20 percent to 80 percent of their energy into the user's head and hands through inductance.

Because the user's head is less than one wavelength away from the handset antenna, it is deemed to be within the "near field" limits, the point at which the electrical and magnetic components of the emission act independently.