I read this article in IEEE Spectrum about the perceived dangers of cellular phones. Although there has been some amount of talk in the media and some amount of concern from people, there is no conclusive evidence to say that radio frequency (RF) emissions from cell phones cause any sort of bad things to people.

Specifically they were talking about cancer. Although there have been studies done in the last ten years and more studies currently underway, it's really hard to find something that causes cancer. No study has been conclusive, ones that have claimed that RF radiation can cause cancer have not been duplicated by other scientists.

For brain cancer (which is what would be the most common cancer from cell phones) the numbers are so small (about 6 in 100000 per year) that you have to sample a lot of people to get a good study. There are a couple of ways to do a scientific study. One is to interview people, either just once for people who have used cell phones for years, or better would be to study new users and see what happens five years from then, since it takes a few years for cancer to show. You also a large control group with similar backgrounds to make sure the numbers you get are valid.

It is a slow and unsure process. People misrecollect when interviewed. Years long tests introduce their own errors. But when testing on people basically, there are limits to what you can do. So we turn to animals, little animals like mice. Irradiate mice with lots of RF radiation and see what happens. They live faster so tend to develop problems faster. Increase the dosage to make it even faster and try to get some results.

The problem with using real animals is that they're not people. You can get indications but it's not conclusive proof. You have to do more tests to make sure that it's not some mice specific problem but something that can be extrapolated to humans. But even if you do find a problem with RF radiation (and mice do get cancer if you irradiate them enough), the problem becomes determining what a safe level of RF radiation should be.

The numbers that the US uses right now, which is something like 1.6 milliWatts per gram of tissue, is sort of grabbed out of a hat. Well, not quite. They took the number where thermal effects would damage tissue. Divided by 10 to get an average rating (so that x10 spikes would still be safe), then divide by another 5 for safety. Only problem is that the initial value was for thermal damage, not electromagnetic damage since RF would interact with the body's natural electric field. There are no figures for that yet, so the standards were set with what information they had at the time.

Given that no repeatable scientific study has found conclusive evidence that RF from cell phones cause brain cancer. Does that make people feel safe? Not really. People get attached to certain concepts, especially if they don't know about it much. Brain cancer is very scary, cell phones do put these invisible waves, and there are well publicized legal cases where victims blame their cell phones.

What really gets me is that people continue to try to pin the blame on external factors when something bad happens to them. Firestone Tires are recalling a whole batch of tires because they're defective. People have died from accidents when their tire blew out or whatever. All I can say is, if you're driving responsibly when your tire blows out, you should be fine. Unless you're car goes totally out of control and you plunge off a cliff or run over a kid, I can't imagine anything really bad happening unless you were not driving safely.

People have to take responsibility for their own actions. If you insist on doing things on the edge, lower the safety factor to the minimum, then you shouldn't be surprised when a routine emergency becomes something life- threatening. Oh well, that's enough ranting for now.