[LINK] EMF Health problems

[jim birch]

Jan wrote

I'm sure the asbestos industry used the same argument at one stage.
> You don't do your position any good at all by comparing to those
> other activities. It puts nothing in perspective whatsoever,
> regardless of the effects of EMF.


Yeah but no but.

(Just about) everything we do entails risks and benefits. Eating leafy
greens is beneficial but leafy greens contain known carcinogens.  In fact
virtually all plants contain toxins that the plants developed to counter
creatures that would like to eat them.  But there's a major health campaign
at present to encourage eating of fruits and vegetables.  Why? It's not
because there's no risks, it's the risk-benefit balance.  Open heart surgery
has extreme risk levels but the benefits are very high.  Working with
asbestos has a much greater risk than leafy greens or car travel but less
than heart surgery but the benefits are relatively minor.

If using a mobile phone was found to have a comparable health risk to, eg,
two cross town car trips a year, would you give it up?  I wouldn't (though I
don't use the a mobile a lot.)  If a risk is eventually delineated it's
likely to be something of this magnitude.  The possibility of emf radiation
from low level sources being a major health risk is very low, given the
number of people exposed to date without any *obvious* epidemiological
impact, unlike asbestos.  We certainly can't say that emf is risk free, but
it looks at this stage to be pretty marginal.  On the other side, the
perceived benefits of mobile phones is enormous.  People everywhere love
mobiles and they are willing to pay enormous amounts of money for use them.

I'd love to see the risks of mobile phones worked out so that people could
potentially make an informed choice, but on the evidence I've seen I expect
that it will turn out to be the kind of low level of risk that most people
are more-or-less happy to live with.

Not that people are typically able to analyse low level risks very well at
all....

Jim