How many dedicated smokers do you know? And how many of these smokers that you know know there is a high percentage that indulging in this habit could give them lung cancer and/or heart disease? And how many of these smokers that you know acknowledge this knowledge but simply shrug their shoulders and continue to light up? (Sometimes I want to offer to shoot these smokers – if you have a death wish, I reason, why not just get it over with?)
We cell phone users may soon engage in the same death-defying damn-the-consequences behavior.
For nearly as long as cell phones have been around there have been periodic scientific reports about the potential harmful effects from the radiation they emit. Cell phone radiation could cause brain cancer. It can disturb your sleep. It can lower a man's sperm count. It's even causing a drop in honeybee populations.
But none of these scientific researches has turned up anything much beyond anecdotal results and the Platonic logic of "cell phones emit radiation, radiation is bad for you, ergo, cell phones are bad for you."
As CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta points out in one of the more informed and reasonable reports on the link between cell phone use and brain cancer, this is because cell phones have only been around 25 years, and no one has been able to do a controlled study over the several decades it would take to prove a definitive cause-and-effect.
In other words, they know something is happening here but they don't what is, do you, Dr. Gupta.
Radiation treatment
The problem is low levels of radio frequency (RF) radiation. All electronic devices emit some kind of radiation to varying degrees, but we usually maintain a degree of distance from most radio devices, diffusing any potentially harmful effects.
But we have an up close and personal relationship with cell phones, exacerbating the radiation problem. It's essentially the difference between taking a brief walk in the sun fully clothed and laying on a beach nearly naked for hours on end. The former is good for you. The latter leaves you with skin akin to fine Corinthian leather and melanoma.
You may have noticed all cell phones list something called SAR – specific absorption rate. Ostensibly, SAR indicates how much of this RF radiation emitted from a cell phone is absorbed into your body.
But SAR is nearly worthless as a consumer safety guide. Even the FCC, which requires the manufacturers to simply ensure phones don't exceed a harmful level, admits SAR specs are at best misleading.
According to the agency's Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) For Cell Phones: What It Means For You guide:
a single SAR value does not provide sufficient information about the amount of RF exposure under typical usage conditions to reliably compare individual cell phone models.
Oh goody. Thanks.
But folks are grasping at anything to try figure out a solution to the cell phone radiation problem, a concern politicians are anxious to uselessly (as usual) and cynically exploit like Governor Mel Brooks does in Blazing Saddles. San Francisco, for instance, last year passed an ordinance requiring phone retailers to list SAR specs on phone signage.
So, you now know Phone A has a SAR of 1.12 and Phone B has a SAR of 1.04. Isn't that helpful?
What can I do?
If all this talk about cell phones being harmful to you does worry you, I don't know if there's a lot you can do short of sticking your cellie permanently in a drawer and searching for a pay phone, or encasing it in lead.
A lot of folks hoping to capitalize on your cell phone fears shill SAR radiation shields and air tube earphones, but no reliable, objective testing has proven any of these are effective.
As Dr. Gupta points out, using a wired headset is probably the easiest anti-radiation precaution. This piece from CNET offers some good – if rudimentary and arguably equally useless (how, exactly, do you carry a cell phone yet keep it an inch away from your body at the same time?) – advice on how to minimize your exposure to cell phone radiation, along with a list of the SARs of all phones (unfortunately, not searchable by make and model).
If/when a link between cell use and brain cancer is ultimately established and confirmed, I'm not sure what the government can do. They're not even willing to make proven-to-kill cigarettes illegal, and cigarettes aren't exactly essential.
Perhaps like cigarettes, the government will require warnings on cell phones. Perhaps some technological solution can be found and then dictated by the government. Perhaps I'll flap my arms and fly to the moon.
So it'll kill me. Eventually. And…?
Speaking of cancer sticks, in many ways, the whole scientific research cell phone-causes-brain cancer kerfuffle resembles the rumblings about the connections between cigarette smoking and lung disease. The first connections were made in the 1930s, but it took more than 30 years for the scientific community to make the ultimate determination and for governments to take action.
Turns out, where there was scientific suspicion smoke, there was lung disease. I unhappily suspect we will reach the same eventual conclusion where cell phone use is concerned.
Why did it take so long for us to accept the connection?
In his November 2001 article "Short History of Lung Cancer" in the Toxicological Journal, researcher Hanspeter Witschi of the University of California Davis noted:
…it took a long time until the truth was fully accepted. Smokers, including many physicians, who enjoyed cigarettes could or would not want to imagine or refused to believe that the habit (addiction would be more appropriate) was detrimental to their health.
Replace the words "smokers" and "cigarettes" with "cell phone users" and "cell phones" and this human behavioral observation would still be accurate.
I myself often espouse a cynical view of maintaining one's health in our modern technological society. It just seems everything is bad for you and that life is ultimately a fatal disease. As a friend of mine once observed, I could do everything right and live an extra week – my luck, it'll rain.
So, yes, cell phones might kill you. But they've become too important to our daily lives to give them up. So based on our past behavior toward things we want that we know are harmful to us, even if that conditional turned into a definite we'd fatalistically shrug our shoulders and take the next call.