Gill Moodie
The battle for your brain has arrived in South Africa as an international campaign over health fears linked to cellphone use begins to target local consumers.
Leading the way in convincing local users that cellphone calls may be frying your brain is Johannesburg-based Radiation Cellutions, the local importers of Microshield, a British product which, it is claimed, absorbs more than 90% of the radiation emitted by handsets.
The product, a nickel-mesh casing which fits over cellphones, was launched in late 1996 and sold about 100 000 units in the United Kingdom in 1997. The boom in sales coincides with growing suspicion that excessive cellphone use could cause headaches, short-term memory loss and even damage to embryos, brain tumours, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
“It’s like having sex with a condom if you don’t want Aids,” says Pete Jensen, marketing manager for Radiation Cellutions. The only catch is that this sheath costs R435.
Local service providers Vodacom and MTN are unconcerned. Vodacom says there is no scientific evidence that cellphones are a health risk. Representative Joan Joffe says Vodacom has had no indication from customers that they are worried about health risks. Microshield, she charges, is creating a fear which sells their product.
MTN representative Hendrina Westoll was amused to hear of the Microshield product. “Talk about money making,” she said. “You’d have to put a cellphone by your ear for the next 6 000 years for it to damage you.”
But if the local industry is sceptical, UK service providers are watching a lawsuit brought by Welsh radiation biologist Dr Roger Coghill against cellphone distributor, The Telephone Shop. He is suing the company for failing to label cellphones as potentially dangerous. “Mobile telephones are arguably the most radiative appliance we have ever invented apart from the microwave oven and people are putting them by their heads – arguably the most sensitive part of the body,” he warns.
Meanwhile, Radiation Cellutions see their marketing strategy as an “educational process”, says Jensen, who points out that cellphones emit electromagnetic energy classed as radio frequency.
Vicky Benjamin, who sits on the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS), says cellphones may be a wonderful product but we do not know enough about their effect on the body, though her view is not that of the SABS. Currently working on a book on the health risks of electromagnetic fields, Benjamin believes “greed has overtaken expediency.”
So should you bin your phones for the sake of your mental health?
The evidence is beginning to show that some fears may be well founded, but consumers also have to plough through conspiracy theories that would do Mulder and Scully proud.
Microshield’s website even contains an X- Files page which says: “Many independent scientists and victims believe that there may be what amounts to a cover-up by manu- facturers and even governments on the mobile phone health issue.”
Microshield claims to be in possession of copies of patent applications from cellphone manufacturers which show that there has been industry awareness of health risks since 1993.
There is also a growing body of scientific study linking cellphone use to health problems. While most research has been conducted on animals, two sets of human trials were released this year.
In May Dr Kjell Hansson Mild of the National Institute of Working Life in Umea, Sweden, found that the number of cellphone users experiencing fatigue, headaches, warmth on ear and a burning sensation of the skin rose with the amount of time they spent on the telephone.
He found in his study of 11 000 cellphone users that calls of between two and 15 minutes were twice as likely to cause headaches as those of less than two minutes. Mild suggested cellphones be redesigned so that the antennae which produce most of the radiation protrude from the bottom, and thus away from the brain.
In June, a study by Dr Stephan Braune of the University Neurology Clinic in Freiburg, Germany, found that cellphones caused an increase in blood pressure during calls.
A 1997 Australian report showed that the incidence of brain tumours in the country rose from six to eight in every 100 000 people between 1982 and 1992 – coinciding, claim researchers, with increased cellphone use.
The World Health Organisation is conducting a five-year study on humans into the potential health risks of electromagnetic fields including cellphones, but the results will not be ready until 2002.
If you can’t wait until then, there’s a wide range of products claiming to minimise the risk, including a Sudanese engineer’s invention: a turban with chemicals added to the fabric which may block out the radiation