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Cellphones don't kill

I FIND few things more frustrating than the absence of critical thought in modern society. Misinformation spreads like a plague in the 21st century, where we have sophisticated communication tools combined with a lazy media. Information is accepted at face value all too easily, sacrificing the truth for a good story. A recent example of this is rampant misreporting of studies into the dangers of the electromagnetic fields used in telecommunications.

It is also a sensitive topic, as it concerns people's health.

Fear of adverse health effects from electromagnetic fields are as old as the discovery of electromagnetism itself. When FM radio was first introduced in the USA and Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, there were fears that this mysterious, invisible force was going to mess with people's brains. Of course, no sane person now fears FM radio signals. Now people are similarly worried about radiation from cellphones and, once again, make claims about its impact on our health without understanding the technology.

One of my favourite radio stations, Talk Radio 702, recently hosted a show about a condition referred to as "electromagnetic hypersensitivity", or EHS. Then, about a week later, M-Net's Carte Blanche apparently aired a similar insert looking at the possible dangers of electromagnetic fields. I listened to 702 in frustration as critical thought was once again sacrificed for sensationalism. Fortunately I was spared the Carte Blanche offering, but am told it was about the same.

Only one side of the debate was represented in the coverage of the topic provided by these media entities. We heard pseudo-scientific, spurious arguments of how electromagnetic radiation is harming us. We didn't hear from real experts, which is inexcusable as our knowledge of radiation and its effects is very advanced.

So if 702 and Carte Blanche had bothered to call a scientist, what would they have said? Is your cellphone going to give you cancer? And is it possible to be hypersensitive to electromagnetic fields?

To unpack the research on this subject, you must have a basic understanding of the forces we are talking about. We must also establish the difference between a real scientific study that uses clinical research and control mechanisms, as opposed to pseudo-scientific studies that merely argue by assertion and correlation and then look for validation from others to make the report sound credible.

Everything we experience as reality consists of electromagnetic energy at varying frequencies, with the exception of gravity. Light, sound and your couch are all the result of electromagnetic fields interacting with each other. So is WiFi and cellular radiation. In the case of FM radio and other telecommunications, we refer to "radio-frequency electromagnetism".

So to say that you have "electromagnetic hypersensitivity" is semantically meaningless. It would require you to have some sort of allergy to everything in existence, except gravity. No credible health organisation would use such an ambiguous label - which should be one of your first clues as to how valid claims of this condition are.

There have been many provocation trials carried out to try and identify electromagnetic hypersensitivity. Over and over, these have found that self-described sufferers of the condition are unable to distinguish between exposure to the radio-frequency electromagnetic fields they claim to be sensitive to and the absence of those fields. For this reason, it is not recognised as a valid condition by medical or scientific communities.

However, this does not mean that people's symptoms are not real. If you are suffering headaches, rashes or other aches and pains you should work with a qualified doctor to try and establish the real causes of the effects you are experiencing.

Of course, there are other forms of electromagnetic radiation that are obviously harmful to us. In identifying these, we refer to "ionising" or "non-ionising" radiation.

Ionising radiation is the bad kind - it is able to interfere with the cells in your body at a DNA level, potentially destroying the bonds between polymers in DNA strands, which in turn could lead to cancer. An example of this is the radiation released by a neutron bomb.

Cellular radiation, however, is non-ionising. It is much too weak to interfere with DNA or cause the kinds of symptoms related to hypersensitivity claims.

If you're going to worry about radiation, you should start with sunlight. It has a far greater measurable effect on your body than the kind of radiation emitted from a cellphone tower.

But sunlight also has positive effects, stimulating the production of vitamin D in our bodies, for example. I make this point because a vital part of understanding clinical studies is realising that it is very difficult to prove that something isn't bad for you.

Everything we interact with has various effects and side-effects - some good, hopefully, and some bad. Anything we test will have some negative effect, even if that effect is very small. For this reason real medicine will always include a list of side-effects that could perhaps be experienced.

When you eat a carrot you consume a variety of compounds, including beta-carotene that is known to have positive health benefits. But beta-carotene has also been linked to increased risks of lung cancer in extreme cases. We know that carrots are "good for us", but it is scientifically incorrect to say that they aren't bad for us too.

So to say "but you can't prove that electromagnetic fields aren't bad for me" is a stupid statement.   We are, after all, deteriorating organisms. Technically speaking, life is "bad" for us.

What we can prove is that the dangers of cellular radiation are negligible in the greater scheme of things. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has previously quoted a 0.002% risk of cellular radiation contributing to cancer. This isn't a conclusive number, however, but it gives you an idea of the tiny scale of things we are dealing with.

What sparked the recent resurgence in public interest in the topic was the reclassification of cellular radiation by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). A press release issued by the WHO that summarised the move was entitled "IARC classifies radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans".

The title is sensationalist and plays on the public's general misunderstanding of what science means by "possible". In science, anything is possible. Real scientists will never claim absolute knowledge of a subject. There is always room for refinement or even for being proven wrong. This is the major difference between real science and pseudo-science - the latter claiming absolute knowledge of a subject while real science is progressive.

If you actually research the IARC classification, you will find that it is shared by coffee and the exhaust fumes of modern cars. It's a very broad category that defines a list of things that have a very small possible contribution to cancer.

Unfortunately I do not have enough space here to go into the set of logical fallacies that allow for the kind of misunderstanding of causality and correlation that have bred this inane fear of radio-frequency electromagnetic fields. You don't need my help with this, however - if society just applies some critical thought to things then columns such as this would be unnecessary to begin with. In fact, I hope you won't take my word for any of this and research the topic further yourself.

 - Fin24

 
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