Smart phones: How smart are they?

Whenever I peer round the library, my eyes cannot escape the little black shape of phones. They’re either in someone’s hands or sitting on the desk – buzzing incessantly. Basically, everyone has a “smartphone”. Whether it’s an iPhone (probably the winner at the moment), a Samsung Galaxy (on the rise) or a Blackberry (definitely headed for a sludgy puddle), St Andrews students have got ’em.

It’s hard to escape the marketing campaigns telling us we can’t live without them, especially with all this 4G and EE business (Kevin Bacon say what?). But there’s lots they don’t tell you. Adverts and phone companies slyly avoid any mention of what it could be doing to our health.

Apparently there are more than 52,000 phone masts in the UK, which – would you believe it – emit microwave pollution. Phone masts not only send out radiation to our phones, but through every cell in our body as well. There’s more than a monetary price to pay to have our mobile broadband and Wi-Fi. We are literally ‘irradiated.’ It’s invisible, odourless, soundless, and appears to have no immediate effect upon us, which makes it easy for everybody to ignore. Pretty perfect for manufacturers and phone companies eh! In reality, researchers have noted a whole host of effects, such as increased headaches and poor sleep in people living near masts. Furthermore, pulsed microwaves can cause long term hormonal-imbalances and DNA damage within cells.  Health researcher Magda Havas of Trent University, Ontario found that even cordless phones at home can disturb the heartbeat.

It’s not just us – calves grazing near masts have been documented to develop multiple cataracts. Belgian researcher, Joris Everaert of the Research Institute for Nature and Forest, has observed a remarkable decline in house sparrows living in fields containing masts. I’m sure lots of you will shrug off these details about animals, but what about cancer? Physiologist Ronni Wolf of Tel Aviv University recorded triple and quadruple cancer rates in the surrounding area due to local mast density. So… you want to reduce the risk of cancer? Maybe it would help if we pulled down phone masts and stopped demanding faster and faster internet access.

I’ll admit freely that I do have a smartphone, but I’m in no way addicted to mine like so many other people appear to be. I rarely use it for internet, and whenever I have a long conversation, I try to use earphones so that I’m not shoving it into my ear for long periods of time. Of course, how much mobile phones actually affect us is a debateable subject. But it’s just sad that there are probably only a handful of places in Britain that are free of mobile-phone signals and microwave pollution. You may not have noticed, but there are a whopping eight mobile phone base stations dotted about this little town. 

Next time you pick up your smartphone or tap into the Wi-Fi around town and campus, consider whether all the hoo-ha about 4G and smartphones is worth it. We scurried about our lives just fine without internet floating in the air before. Apparently a number of French libraries have swapped Wi-Fi for cabled internet… Could the St Andrews University library be next?

Image courtesy of http://cellphoneradiationprotection.com/reports00.html