Testing Cell Phone Radiation on Humans

Palm Addict writes "News.com reports that Finland's radiation watchdog is to study the effects of mobile phones on human proteins by direct tests on people's skin. From the article: 'A pilot study, to be conducted next week, will expose a small area of skin on volunteers' arms to cell phone radiation for the duration of a long phone call, or for one hour, research professor Dariusz Leszczynski said on Friday.'"

Radiation levels

[digitaldc]

CNET has another article showing the radiation levels [cnet.com] of certain cell phones.

Within the US models listed, Motorola has the highest with its Motorola V120c, and the lowest goes to the Audiovox PPC66001.
Maybe people will want to check this chart before buying a new cell phone? Maybe not.

effects on proteins on the skin?

[donutz]

I thought the whole concern over radiation from cell phones was that it would cause some kind of internal cancer, notably in your brain (or maybe your hip if that's where you keep your phone?). Is a skin-surface test going to be indicative of the kinds of sub-surface damage we're really concerned about?

At any rate, it will be good to have another study on this subject, to add weight either that the radiation is mostly harmless, or that we need to start wearing a layer of tin foil...

Re:Sounds good, but...

[ptbarnett]

Why not test it on living human cells separated from living humans?

RTFA.

In previous tests, Leszczynski's group found evidence of mobile phone radiation causing cell-level changes such as shrinkage, but he said it was still impossible to say if that had significant health effects.

"Cells function in a different way when they are in the body than in laboratory surroundings. Now we want to confirm whether radiation causes cell level changes in humans as well," he said.

Re:This is silly

[Mr. Underbridge]

Thank God somebody said it. Every time I see one of these studies, I remind myself that they're being performed by the same idiot pre-meds who were struggling through basic physics and chemistry courses. Even that's when they didn't get special dumbed-down "premed" versions of those classes. Somehow, this is not surprising. Not saying all doctors are dumb, just most of them.

Who needs an actual mechanism, as long as I repeat the experiment enough times to get the right confidence level from the stat table!

Re:This reminds me of mobile cooking

[code65536]

That's an urban legend that was posted some time ago either at /. or digg, and plenty of people showed that it was simply not possible. For one, even at maximum output and perfect cooking efficiency, the amount of energy emitted simply won't even come close to being enough.

Re:This is silly

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not how you do good science. You don't go around looking for correlations, then try to come up with some post hoc explanations to fit your data. You start with a theoretical causal relationship. Then you test it, isolating all but the tested causality.

That works great if you "know what you're looking for". For more epidemiological research, you are trying to find "what you don't know". The question is, do you wait for a noticeable increase in some illness before you look into the cause? Plus, how do you "recognize" say a 15% decrease in ability to resolve spatial differences that could be due to some external source (such as "heavy" cell phone usage)? The answer is you don't unless you are proactive in looking for such relationships.

AHHHHHHHHH!

[agentcdog]

OK so I did an experiment using a scintillation counter in my physics lab. When you turn the machine on you got lots of hits (dozens per second) from background radiation. Then I stuck my phone up against it... nothing happened. The radiation from a phone is too weak to register. So if you are even remotely worried by cell phones, you should find yourself a big dirt hole way underground then line it with aluminum foil.
Seriously though, this is a reply that I made the the last rediculous artlice about cell-phone cancer:
*Rolling Eyes* The people who study these things I think just make up dumb studies so that they can get grant money. There are three ways in which EM radiation (what cell phones use) can be dangerous, in order of severity: 1. Radiation that has the resonant frequency of molecular bonds can give a LOT of energy to the molecules that make us up. That's how a microwave oven works. The EM waves have the same frequency as the resonant frequency for water molecules.
2. Radiation can kick off electrons (beta particles) or protons (alpha particles). If an element loses an electron it becomes more volatile. If an element in our DNA loses a proton it can change the DNA. That's why strong radiation can cause cancer.
3. Radiation can generally heat us up.
Cell phone radiation is not even strong enough to kick off an electron unless it is VERY loosely bound. It has no chance of kicking off a proton.
Bottom line: Unless you feel your brain start cooking (the sun is WAY more likely to cook your brain), don't worry.

Re:That makes no sense

[BeanThere]

Just to give you an idea though of the relative weakness of intensity of a cellphone transmission, a cellphone typically transmits at no greater than 2 watts (typically around 1) ... my microwave oven on the other hand is 900 watts. A typical bluetooth headset with 10m range transmits at only 2.5 mW (milli-watts).