In WTF News: GQ Claims Your Cellphone Is Damaging Your Brain

Photograph by Tom Schierlitz via GQ Magazine

You’ve probably heard the rumors that cell phone-radiation is microwaving your brain but ignored them, writing them off as the latest conspiracy theory from the tin foil hat brigade. You might even believe cellphones have to be safe because the technology is everywhere and is seemingly used by everyone, regardless of background. But then again, you only have to look at the cigarette industry as an example of how small details like “our product will kill you” can escape public consciousness for decades.

Now a recent article in GQ magazine, which should be required reading for all cell phone users, suggests that we are in the early stages of industry denial just like we were with cigarettes or asbestos. The new evidence presented by reputable sources has started to pour in from across the globe and the results are well…enough to make you put down your cell phone and question the entire technology.

According to Christopher Ketcham of GQ:

“It’s hard to talk about the dangers of cell-phone radiation without sounding like a conspiracy theorist. This is especially true in the United States, where non-industry-funded studies are rare, where legislation protecting the wireless industry from legal challenges has long been in place, and where our lives have been so thoroughly integrated with wireless technology that to suggest it might be a problem—maybe, eventually, a very big public-health problem—is like saying our shoes might be killing us.

“Except our shoes don’t send microwaves directly into our brains. And cell phones do—a fact that has increasingly alarmed the rest of the world. Consider, for instance, the following headlines that have appeared in highly reputable international newspapers and journals over the past few years. From summer 2006, in the Hamburg Morgenpost: ARE WE TELEPHONING OURSELVES TO DEATH? That fall, in the Danish journal Dagens Medicin: MOBILE PHONES AFFECT THE BRAIN’S METABOLISM. December 2007, from Agence France-Presse: ISRAELI STUDY SAYS REGULAR MOBILE USE INCREASES TUMOUR RISK. January 2008, in London’s Independent: MOBILE PHONE RADIATION WRECKS YOUR SLEEP. September 2008, in Australia’s The Age: SCIENTISTS WARN OF MOBILE PHONE CANCER RISK.

“Though the scientific debate is heated and far from resolved, there are multiple reports, mostly out of Europe’s premier research institutions, of cell-phone and PDA use being linked to ‘brain aging,’ brain damage, early-onset Alzheimer’s, senility, DNA damage, and even sperm die-offs (many men, after all, keep their cell phones in their pants pockets or attached at the hip). In September 2007, the European Union’s environmental watchdog, the European Environment Agency, warned that cell-phone technology ‘could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking, and lead in petrol.’

“Perhaps most worrisome, though, are the preliminary results of the multinational Interphone study sponsored by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, in Lyon, France. (Scientists from thirteen countries took part in the study, the United States conspicuously not among them.) Interphone researchers reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell-phone use, the chance of getting a brain tumor—specifically on the side of the head where you use the phone—goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Interphone researchers in Israel have found that cell phones can cause tumors of the parotid gland (the salivary gland in the cheek), and an independent study in Sweden last year concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. Another Interphone study reported a nearly 300 percent increased risk of acoustic neuroma, a tumor of the acoustic nerve.

“As more results of the Interphone study trickled out, I called Louis Slesin, who has a doctorate in environmental policy from MIT and in 1980 founded an investigative newsletter called Microwave News. ‘No one in this country cared!’ Slesin said of the findings. ‘It wasn’t news!’ He suggested that much of the comfort of our modern lives depends on not caring, on refusing to recognize the dangers of microwave radiation. ‘We love our cell phones. The paradigm that there’s no danger here is part of a worldview that had to be put into place,’ he said. ‘Americans are not asking the questions, maybe because they don’t want the answers. So what will it take?’”

Read the rest of the article here

I must say this spells doom for the piece of crap LG phone I got for free like six years ago.

posted by: Harold Johns III