Cell phone radiation not risk to your health, report finds
If you spend a lot of time on your mobile phone, you’ll be happy to learn that your habit isn’t hazardous to your health, according to a new government safety report.
The findings, released Friday by the National Toxicology Program, reaffirm the agency’s previous research.
“The reports don’t go much further than what we had reported earlier, and I have not changed the way I use a cell phone,” NTP senior scientist John Bucher said in a briefing.
The new evidence is based on experiments with rats and mice that were exposed to radiofrequency radiation for as long as two years. The rodents were bathed in the radiation for 10 minutes at a time, followed by a 10-minute break, for about nine hours a day.
On the whole, the mice weathered the radiation just fine, with “little indication of health problems,” the NTP said in a statement.
The rats didn’t fare quite so well.
Both male and female rats exposed to radiation were more likely to experience cardiomyopathy, a disease that causes damage to heart tissue.
In addition, male rats exposed to the highest levels of radiation had an increased incidence of malignant tumors in the tissue that covers nerves in the heart. These nerve sheath tumors, called schwannomas, were not seen in female rats.
The researchers also reported that rats and mice exposed to radiofrequency radiation developed more tumors in the brain, prostate, liver, pancreas, pituitary gland and adrenal gland. But they said they weren’t sure whether the radiation was responsible.
Strikingly, the rats exposed to radiation lived longer than rats in an unexposed group that served as controls.
The researchers were at a loss to explain this. Perhaps the radiation reduces inflammation, as is seen in a therapy called microwave diathermy, they said. Or it could just be chance.
Bucher cautioned that the mice and rats in the study were exposed to far more radiation than humans experience through normal mobile phone use. “So, these findings should not be directly extrapolated to human cell phone usage,” he said in the statement.
