Is It Safe To Put A Cell Phone In Your Pocket? The FCC Doesn’t Know, Exactly

The only study I’ve heard that sounded more conclusive than inconclusive was a study that determined that men who carried their phone in their pocket had a 33% lower sperm count. Whether the damage was permanent….well, that was inconclusive.

What’s the long-term consequence of holding up a low-level source of transmission radiation to the same point on your head (or body) for hours on end, and repeating the practice daily?
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The signal emitted is strong enough to be picked up as interference by a TV or computer standing several feet away.

Testing for head use is more realistic. There are two positions tested, near the head. Some criticize the testing for using a phantom head that is too large, with too big an ear, without the phone pressed hard against the head. But companies don’t offer similar disclaimers about head use. One big study, called Interphone, which I mention in the story, found higher brain cancer in people who talked on their phones a lot for a long period of time, but the same study also found lower cancer rates in people who used cell phones rarely than those who used cord phones. So the results are inconclusive. Without a doubt, however, if you keep the phone farther from your head, you will be exposed to less energy. The short answer is what I say in the story. There is not clear evidence that it will hurt you, but neither can harm be ruled out, and there are ways for you to protect yourself if you want to be cautious.

…but the same study also found lower cancer rates in people who used cell phones rarely than those who used cordless phones. So the results are inconclusive.
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Maybe I’m mis-understanding, but the findng that rarely using ANYTHING that transmits would yield less cancer risk than using it more is a no-brainer. Looks like an apples to oranges comparison.
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Have they compared rates between those who use JUST cellphones and those who use just a land line (factoring out the radiation of the handset)?
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Cordless phones have a finite range (usually a couple of hundred feet). Cell phones have to reach a tower that MAY be a few miles away. I suspect they are on different frequencies too (which MAY change the penetration characteristics of the radiation).

Sorry Afguy, comparison was to corded phones, not cordless. FIxed in my comment above.

Thanks, Michael.
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Now, with the proliferation of earpieces for cellphones, there’s another variable. Those that use them may keep the phone in the same pocket during use. Those that have to manually answer the phone transfer the radiation location up to the head, away from the body.
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And then there’s the “housekeeping” transmissions that occur when not actually being used for talking.
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No wonder any study is said to be conclusive…

I am sure the religious right will tell you this is God’s punishment for using a device invented for evil purposes, transmitting liberal media propoganda.
Or, it is an invention given to us by the almighty to control homosexual activity by radiating their privates.
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Personally, not being in a profession where I need 24 hour access, I don’t own a cell phone and don’t want one. I know they can be helpful in an emergency but I will take my chances.

Michael, saw the author, Magda Hayas, on CSpan. I didn’t pay much attention but here is her book link, “Public Health SOS, The Shadow Side of the Wireless Revolution:

Is that a cell phone in your pocket or are you glad to see me?

They — the very same “they”* that spent decades telling us that there was “no scientific evidence” that smoking caused cancer or heart disease, or was addictive, and are now engaged in telling us variously that there is no global warming; that there is, but it’s entirely natural, not man-made; that there is but it isn’t harmful; that there is but it will be beneficial to human life and to our economy (with few people noticing, and almost nobody in the media pointing out, that these are largely mutually exclusive claims) — have for over 25 years succeeded in keeping the scientific jury (and the legal ones, too) out on the question of whether hi-voltage power lines and much smaller sources of electromagnetic fields are dangerous, and if so, how dangerous, and what constitute sufficiently low levels of exposure to be deemed “safe.”
Now, if we can’t even get a straight answer on whether electric fields from things like hi-voltage powerlines, electric blankets, and CRT monitors — to which almost every one of the 300+ million Americans are regularly exposed — are harmful, over that span of time, how long do you expect it will take before it becomes undeniably clear that heavy cell-phone use without certain precautions is killing us? If this is actually the case, we can be very confident we’ll be blissfully unaware of it til long after our deaths…
One final observation: isn’t it interesting that the very same pundits, pols, and parties that insisted that if there was even just a 1% chance that some country had weapons of mass destruction with which to threaten us and/or their neighbors (and/or the flow of oil), it was incumbent on us to take immediate action, at costs of trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives — but when it comes to environmental threats an order of magnitude higher, now insist that we must suddenly be supremely cautious and tempered in our concern, awaiting — always, always waiting — more data and certain proof of a threat, before we spend so much as a penny on prevention or mitigation?

*not hyperbole: the identical individuals and enterprises. For a fun start, Google the names of S. Fred Singer and Fred Seitz, and of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. Because it’s easy to be a well-financed “scientific expert” on both the medical impacts of smoking and the geophysics and climatology of greenhouse gases, hugely overlapped fields as they are. (“Airologists,” no doubt.)