Purse, keys, phone. This is my mental checklist every morning, the things I know I can’t leave the house without. A decade ago, my cellphone wouldn’t even have been on it, yet now I wonder how I ever lived without it.
My phone is my diary, my secretary (beeping several times a day to remind me to e-mail the travel agent/defrost the chicken/set the VCR to record ER), my contact list, my shiny accessory, and my conduit to friends and family. Most importantly, with a crime rate like ours it could, God forbid, one day prove to be my lifeline. I will not leave home without it.
But there are downsides. Like the tinny melody that intrudes on the silence of a Sunday afternoon and signifies you’re never really blissfully alone; the teenager who forgets to switch off her phone in the movies, the obnoxious businessman who conducts a loud conversation when you’re snatching a peaceful moment with the newspaper in a coffee shop… And those scary warnings about the link between cancer and cellphone use which appear in the media from time to time.
In 2006 scientists tracked over 400 000 Danish cellphone users, about 52 000 of whom had used their phones for 10 years or more. Matching phone records to the Danish Cancer Registry (which records every citizen who gets the disease), they concluded that cellphone callers are no more likely than anyone else to suffer a range of cancer types.
But given that brain cancer can take longer than 10 years to develop — and a decade ago a phone wasn’t on my check list of essential handbag contents could we be missing somethingg After all, there was a time when cigarettes were glamorous rather than dangerous, and today there isn’t a soul alive who doesn’t know that smoking equals cancer.
Now, a new Swedish study published in the International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health has concluded that if we spend 10 years or more using a cellphone for at least an hour a day, our risk of developing a brain tumor is 240 percent higher than someone who never uses one.
Dr Lennart Hardell and Prof Kjell Mild of Orbero University in Sweden (and colleagues) have found that cellphone use for 10 years or more results in “a consistent pattern” of increased risk for tumours of the nervous system. They emphasise, however, the importance of longer-term studies on the effects of cellphones and the radiofrequency energy they emit on our biology. Mild, a government adviser, also suggested that children not be allowed to use mobile phones because their thinner skulls and developing nervous systems made them more vulnerable.
While there is still no conclusive evidence and we’re unlikely to see any until cellphones have been in use for a lot longer the best we can do is limit how much we use them.
Like everything in life, moderation may well be the key to preventative good health.
MINIMISE THE MICROWAVES
> Use your landline when you’re at home.
> A hands-free set isn’t the most stylish accessory, but neither is your cycling helmet and you wear that for your safety. Get one.
> When you’re sitting still and alone switch to loudspeaker. Genius you can chat and give yourself a pedicure at the same time!
> Switch your phone off at night. Most phones’ alarm clocks still work when they’re switched off. Limiting the amount of radioactivity in your resting environment can only be a good thing.
For landline rates, go to www.telkom.co.za
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