It's not "woo" to be cautious about cell phones.
Just smart.
Simple safety precautions: use a headset or speaker phone; avoid carrying one against your body (and if you have to, carry it with the keyboard side against your body); don't sleep with it close by.
Here's the story of how a University of Washington biomedical engineering professor found himself up against the cell phone industry. It's also a reminder of why professors need the protections of tenure.
http://www.seattlemag.com/article/nerd-report/nerd-report
Lai admits that he was naive. He came to the UW in 1972 and earned a doctorate in psychology. Two decades later, as a bioengineering researcher, he studied esoteric scientific topics in relative obscurity. He and a fellow researcher, Narendra “N.P.” Singh, were looking at the effects of nonionizing microwave radiation—the same type of radiation emitted by cell phones—on the DNA of rats. They used a level of radiation considered safe by government standards and found that the DNA in the brain cells of the rats was damaged—or broken—by exposure to the radiation. Ironically, cell phones weren’t even on Lai’s mind when he performed the initial studies. Funded initially by the Office of Naval Research, Lai was investigating how radar, which emits radio-frequency radiation, affects the health of operators. “We did not really pay attention to the importance of this thing,” he recalls. But during his research, cell phone giant Motorola Inc. indicated that someone had told the company about Lai’s unpublished results. Motorola asked to meet with him in his lab and at a meeting in Copenhagen.
After Lai and Singh’s research finding an effect on DNA was published in 1995, Lai learned of a full-scale effort to discredit his work. In an internal company memo leaked to Microwave News, a publication that examines health and environmental effects of electromagnetic radiation, Motorola described its plan to “war-game” and undermine Lai’s research. After initially accepting industry funding for continued research from the Wireless Technology Research (WTR) program (created to manage $25 million in research funds), Lai and Singh wrote an open letter to Microwave News questioning restrictions placed on their research by the funders. After that, the head of WTR sent a memo asking then-UW president Richard McCormick to fire Lai and Singh. McCormick refused, but the dustup sent a clear message to Lai and his colleagues.
“This shocked me,” Lai says, “the letter trying to discredit me, the ‘war games’ memo. As a scientist doing research, I was not expecting to be involved in a political situation. It opened my eyes on how games are played in the world of business.”
SNIP
Lai’s frustration with the increasing body of contradictory research led him to do an analysis in 2006 of the available studies on cell phone radiation between 1990 and 2006, and where their funding came from. What he found was that 50 percent of the 326 studies showed a biological effect from radio-frequency radiation and 50 percent did not. But when he filtered the studies into two stacks—those funded by the wireless industry and those funded independently—Lai discovered industry-funded studies were 30 percent likely to find an effect, as opposed to 70 percent of the independent studies.
Lai says that, while his findings highlight the crucial role industry funding plays in scientific research, the 50-50 split alone should be cause for concern. “Even if you accept all the industry studies, you still end up with 50-50,” he says. “How could 50 percent all be garbage? People always start with the statement ‘Hundreds of studies have been done on this topic, and no effect has been found,’ but this is a very misleading statement. (The statements) come out from the cell phone industry, and people just use it, like the American Cancer Society. People haven’t even gone in to look at the real studies and look at the effects that people have reported. This really worries me, because people come out and say things without the facts.”
SNIP
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