The Hindu Business Line : Absorbing talk… and heat

Some decades ago, speaking on the telephone demanded patience. The speech would be understandable as long as it was heard. Because it wouldn’t be for long.

Telephone sets then were black and hideous, and dialling a number took ages, with the dialling disc stalling at times. Cables poked out like bandicoot tails wrapped in thread jackets that yielded soon to expose two wires within, each with three thin s trands of copper core. But the telephone was a status symbol. Getting the service (the instrument was rented just as modems are today) was difficult and was usually celebrated as birth of a privilege.

Daring to imagine phone officials falling on their knees to woo customers would have been sacrilegious. There was no competition, so the department basked in the glory of being ‘the one’. The entity was more daunting than the fortress in Alistair Maclean’s Where Eagles Dare. And complaints rarely helped. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd was still unborn.

Whether the prized possession worked or not, it was pampered like a prince. Often one would be privy to cross-talks but as getting a number was difficult, many would brave the cross-talks than trying again. “If one could do it at the railway reservation counter, why not on the phone?” users probably thought. So hanging up was rarely reciprocated even when one aired one’s ire and asked the cross-talkers to disconnect or go to …

The hideous set has vanished. Even if the phone department yelled “Appearum At-Once-um!” with a magic wand (like Harry Potter or Hermione), to please you — the patron — the prized antique would resolutely remain invisible. The instruments now are flatter and once you hook the line jack in, your phone will come alive! If it doesn’t, the Customer Service Centre would help. Almost immediately… This was unthinkable once.

Cross-talks are rare today, but there’s no flat monthly rate with unlimited local calls. Given that hundreds surrender their BSNL landlines each month, the prospects of this facility seem remote. Not only is there competition among landline service providers, but also there is a run by private players in mobile telephony.

Telephony has finally been unleashed from its dreary corner of two adjacent walls and has cut across economic classes. From the Prime Minister to a postman; from a regent to a rickshaw puller; from a witty president to a waste paper vendor, almost everyone owns a handset today. And some flaunt more than one, juggling with two callers effortlessly. Haven’t you noticed thick friends exploding to take calls before huddling together again?

And cross-talks? Not anymore; but the high decibel sound energy from someone on the mobile nearby can be a trifle unsettling if you are using your phone too. You can, of course, walk away. By the laws of classical physics, the decibels will fade quickly because sound energy is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source.

The flip side

But the law of universal harmony seems to bless every good thing with a flip side. There are more than 1.6 billion mobile phone users worldwide, and a sizeable section use GSM (Groupe Special Mobile) handsets that are stated to have a peak power output of 2W. The base station to which a handset is docked at any point in time constantly checks the reception quality, and increases the transmission power automatically to improve reception. So, the handset’s power use is never constant. Where there are many users, phones may work at the highest power levels. The issue is tricky because “…radio frequencies are invisible and imperceptible, (and) individuals cannot directly report on their exposure …” (‘Epidemiology of Health Effects of Radiofrequency Exposure’, Environmental Health Perspectives, Vol. 112, No.17, Dec. 2004)

You will have noticed that the area near your ears feels hot if you have been on your mobile phone for long. The high frequency radio waves shake the particles in the medium (the cells of your skin and muscle round your ears) through which they pass. This is called dielectric heating. In dielectric material, including living tissue, the polar molecules can rotate and shift position. Radio frequency waves (GSM handsets send out and receive RF waves at 849 megahertz and 1763 megahertz, up to 2 gigahertz) cause the shift. The effect is classified as Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity Syndrome that includes tingling of the skin, fatigue, sleep disturbance, dizziness and loss of memory.

The World Health Organisation refers to it as Idiopathic Environmental Intolerance and recommends precaution. An international EMF (electromagnetic field) project report with database updated on June 13, 2007, in its research (number 1354) titled “849 and 1763 MHz phone exposure to humans, and isolation of lymphocytes after phone use to analyse DNA damage via Comet Assay” by seven scientists in the Republic of Korea observed “a significant difference before and after mobile phone use in comet tail length and comet moment in lymphocytes, T-cells, B-cells and granulocytes.”

To a layman, like you and me, it means there is some effect, no matter how small.

Fortunately, the human skin and muscle tissue can get rid of excess heat, but not the cornea of the eyes which have no blood vessels to cart the heat away. So exposure to high frequency EMF can cloud the cornea (leading to cataracts).

Little agreement among scientists

There is little agreement among scientists on the other impacts even though they agree that for hand-held radiotelephones the power absorption is “very inhomogeneous. … Specific absorption rate values in the head depend on the radiated power, frequency, antenna design, its position with respect to the head, and the mode of operation (duty cycle)”. (‘Health Issues Related to the Use of Hand-held Radiotelephones and Base Transmitters’, ICNIRP, Health Physics, April 1996, Vol.70, no.4)

There seems to be some agreement, that unlike ionizing radiation such as gamma or x-rays, radiotelephone EMF is non-ionizing and therefore may not be mutagenic and “…unlikely to initiate cancers.”

But it is too early to relax. As Sir William Stewart, Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones, said in his report “Mobile Phones and Health” in 2000, “Little research specifically relevant to these emissions has been published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. This presumably reflects the fact that it is only recently that mobile phones have been widely used by the public and as yet there has been little opportunity for any health effects to become manifest…”

The report also states that “… it is not possible at present to say that exposure to RF radiation, even at low levels below national guidelines, is totally without potential adverse health effects, and that gaps in knowledge are sufficient to justify a precautionary approach… In line with our precautionary approach … the widespread use of mobile phones by children for non-essential calls should be discouraged… (T)here is now evidence that effects on biological functions, including those of the brain, may be induced by RF radiation at levels comparable to those associated with the use of mobile phones.”

Forget about decoding what researchers say, the sensible step will be to accept the golden law from classical physics: RF energy varies inversely with the square of the distance from its source. In layman’s language that translates to a golden norm: use a headset (not a Bluetooth-enabled one that uses RF) and keep shifting the handset around, if possible. Best will be to use SMS.

Your fingers ache? Sure. But isn’t that better than headaches, memory loss, or worse?

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