This week in cellphone risks: now it's your eyes
posted Jul 27th 2005 11:30AM
Forget
brain damage; that's so
2004. If you're looking for the latest risk you may be incurring when using your cellphone, just open your eyes.
Israeli researchers have found that microwave radiation could lead to permanent eye damage, including cataracts, after
they exposed calves' eyes to microwave radiation, and found microscopic bubbles formed on the lenses. The scientists
now theorize that long-term exposure to microwave radiation from cellphones could lead to "both macroscopic and
microscopic damage to the lens and that at least part of this damage seems to accumulate over time and does not seem to
heal." Ah, who cares? You don't need your eyes to use your cellphone, right? Now, if we're talking
hearing loss, that's another story…
[Via RPTT]
what about this electron gun i'm sitting in front of 8 hours a day because the man tells me to?
i'll take my chances with my cell phone.
that's actually pretty interesting.
i've got a condition in (mostly) my right eye - i hold my phone on my right ear 99% of the time - called kertakonis.
kertakonis is more or less a small protrusion from the cornea...or "microscopic bubbles" maybe?
this condition popped up for me over the past 3 years. no previous condition existed.
anyway, i don't think i use my cell phone more than an average person, but it's an odd coincidence.
by the time that becomes a big problem, you would think that they would either have it fixed or have a way to counteract the problem. *shrug*
ok people the whole cell phone causes cancer myth is reaching almost hoax proportions... how may police have you seen wearing motorola radios with the antennas on the microphones and the mics placed by their left or right ears.. or even the normal walkie-talkie’s that they hold up to their faces….yea you’ve seen them... well they transmit at 5 watts usually in the 900 mhz band that is close to one of the common gsm frequency pairs. (see http://www.gsmworld.com/using/spectrum/frequencies.shtml )
and how many years have police had radios like this? several decades, any reported cancer or blindness? no absolutely not, otherwise we would not have radios like this and motorola would be bankrupt from lawsuits. i also contend that our microwave ovens we use every day "leaks" more 2.4 ghz rf radiation than your cell phone could ever produce. besides, cell phones these days are digital. this means that they have little bursts of signals not a continuous carrier like fm radio stations. come on guys stop wasting time and money doing biased studies for technophobes and focus your energy on a real problem like our fixing our oil dependency.
mike down
kd5qln (amateur radio operator)
is it me or does that guy look like adolf hitler in predator vision?
mike,
if you had bothered to read the linked article, you might have realized that the story we are discussing is one based on an actual scientific study. that's not to say it couldn't possibly be flawed, but it is a lot more convincing than your entirely anecdotal talk of police radios. the researchers in this story subjected calves' lenses to 1.1 ghz rf at 2.2 mw for 192 cycles where one cycle means the transmitter is on for 50 minutes, then off for 10. they also had a control group of lenses that weren't exposed to rf. the lenses that were exposed to rf clearly (as evidenced by the photos) had bubbles develop in them, whereas the control group did not. these results actually support previous studies which found that even a slight increase in temperature of lens tissue increases the risk of cataracts. of course, it is well established that microwave energy heats up flesh, this principle is exploited on a large scale in microwave ovens. based on the previous information, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that there is a link between microwave radiation near the eyes and and increased risk for cataracts. the results of this experiment seem to support that hypothesis.
i'm not saying one way or the other that cellphones are harmful, but intelligent people usually learn the hard science behind scientific phenomena before they start arguing about them.
73,
thrasher
#5 - yeah he kinda does.. odd
#6: if you had bothered to read the linked article, you might have realized that the story we are discussing is one based on an actual scientific study. that's not to say it couldn't possibly be flawed...
hmmm, they sandwiched dead tissue between two antennas and pumped microwave signals through it 24 hours a day for 2 weeks. umm, yeah, i'm going to have to say it's flawed. first, no cell phone user has that much exposure. second, dead tissue has no mechanism to repair itself, unlike live tissue. third, while i'm not certain about the actual physics of the situation, those antennas are hardly omnidirectional. my best guess is that they are bi-directional (signal strongly emitted from each flat side) and the tissue is placed in the cross-fire between two of the antennas.
so, let's see they did not take into account normal values for proximity, directionality, exposure period, or live tissue responses. as far as i'm concerned, they could have just thrown one set of eyes into a microwave and the control set into a refrigerator and produced the same accuracy.
the point is that cell phones do not use continuous carriers they are small blips of a carrier that jump around within a spectrum window this is called gmsk (gaussian minimum shift keying) . now if they had used an actual gsm cell phone left on for 50 min at at time and i would be more willing to believe their results. but otherwise they are just trying to scare the general public. besides, thrasher you’re missing the point, "there is more rf energy loose in our environment than a meager cell phone produces, thus cell phones cannot be the direct cause of damage to our eyes and ears." so you should look at the 20 kilowatt rf tv and am radio station transmitters and complain about them. when i lived in tulsa the am radio station kvoo was so powerful that all it took to get a signal was a ground and an inductor and a speaker. it was always in the phone system.
mike down
kd5qln
as long as my colon remains safe i will continue to use a cell phone.
Cellphones are the breast implants of the new millennium.
#11: Does that mean I can place cell phones in my bra to fill out my sweaters better?
Dear Nick Santilli,
I find that Keratokonus is hereditary and mostly both sides (see below in German). Keratokonus means that the lense gets the shape of a cone. It is possible to correct this by special lenses. Maybe you have keratokonus indeed, but at one side, and the phone is a coincidence. Hypothetically keratokonus can be triggered by the radiation (but that is not what the Israeli found). Probably you don't have keratokonus but your right eye is affected by the phone radiation indeed.
There are people who report eye problems (focus, blurry sight) related to radiofrequent radiation of phones and antennas. If these people don't have diabetes there could be a causal relationship. In that case it could be a specific symptom of the radiation sickness syndrom, and it can be meaured objectively.
The Israeli team did not get permission to repeat the research with human eyes.
"Der Keratokonus ist eine angeborene Erkrankung der Hornhaut des Auges (autosomal dominanter oder autosomal rezessiver Erbgang) und geh?in die gro? Gruppe der Hornhautdystrophien (erblich bedingte krankhafte Ver?erungen der Hornhaut). Charakterisiert ist die Erkrankung durch eine ver?erte Struktur des Hornhautgewebes mit dadurch bedingter Verd?ng und kegelf?ger Vorw?ng der zun?st unteren, sp?r auch der zentralen Hornhautanteile. Der Keratokonus tritt zumeist beidseits ...."
Source: http://augen.uniklinikum-dresden.de/seite.asp?ID=104
im rajesh from chennai.me,brother&sister also keratacones problem please any ideas tell sir.