What Doctors Don't Tell YouMobile phones and their possible health hazards have been in the news recently, but scientists are now turning to something usually overlooked and more pervasive: the electricity in our homes.
It could be responsible for fatigue, severe headaches and skin problems. Electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS), as it’s called, is recognized by Swedish authorities as a very real condition, affecting around 3 per cent of the population.
Prof Olle Johansson at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden has been studying the effects of EHS for 20 years. He’s found that human cells react to electromagnetic fields just as they do to radioactive material. “If you put a radio near a source of EMFs you will get interference. The human brain has an electric field so if you put sources of EMFs nearby, it’s not surprising that you get interference, interaction with systems and damage to cells and molecules”.
Sir William Stewart, the UK government adviser on radiation, accepts that the problem exists, and included it in his report on the dangers of mobile phones. Now the National Radiological Protection Board is starting a review of the existing evidence.
* A tiny magnetic bead that costs pennies could block all harmful transmissions from hands-free mobile phones.
While experts agree that hands-free attachments cut radiation levels from mobile phones, emissions still travel up the wires and are absorbed by the head.
But Prof Lawrie Challis, a member of the Stewart committee into mobile phone safety, says that a simple ferrite bead clipped to the wires of the hands-free device could eliminate all emissions.
His suggestion is supported by Dr Stuart Porter at the University of York, who says the bead is most effective if placed below the microphone on the hands-free kit, at about chest height.
Daniel Redwood DC
Tom Ferguson MD
