I remember years ago there were concerns about high votltage power lines causing leukemia. But then they did a study of people who worked on repairing high voltage power lines and found they were, on average, far healthier than the average population (it was thought that this is because they have a non-sedentary job). I can provide links to the studies tonight when I'm home if you are curious.
It never hurts to be prudent and cautious. To use a wired headet - more comfortable anyway, not sleep with your cell phone under your pillow, and generally avoid exposure unless you need to... it doesn't hurt, might help, but probably has no effect.
That said, while being prudent, as an engineer I don't see how these signals at these power levels could have a long term impact beyond a minor issue of localized heating of tissue but you can get a similar effect by blow-drying your hair - or merely taking a hot shower. With my 6 years of education in electronics and RF signalling, I can't see a problem. Beyond that, while I see a lot of people worried about it, I haven't seen any mainstream peer-reviewed medical literature showing a significant correlation.
I did look over the websites but they seem more conspiracy oriented than informative. Lots of discussions of where information is omitted not a lot of discussion about the data itself. Also lots of discussion over why there could be a problem, but not a lot of good studies well funded, large population sample studies showing that there is a problem. There have been lots of studies - but even the biggest of all, the Interphone study, has a lot of strange conflicting data (if you look at the data from a couple of countries, among them, France, it showed that using a cell phone had a statistical chance of reducing the liklihood of cancer). The sampling sizes are too small. I would like to see a large sutdy, with a control group, over a large percentage of the random population - not selectively picking people with cancer like Interphone. It would take longer, and cost more, but the results would be statistically valid.
Still, by far the biggest cause of deaths in teenagers and young adults is motor vehicles. I think money would be better spent in continuing to improve motor vehicle safety (mandated ABS and traction control systems in all vehicles, prohibiting the use of cell phones while driving) - where there is a known and very obvious correlation.
One thing that I was thinking was that would expected to be an increase in the cancer incidence rate over time correlating to an increased exposure rate. I pulled the data from the SEER database at cancer.gov, and shows that - despite better screening methods - the cancer incidence rate for both children and adults from 1990 (cell phones rare) to 2006 (cell phones common) - the numbers look pretty much the same.
Children:
http://seer.cancer.gov/csr/197...=sect_28_table.02.html
Adults:
http://seer.cancer.gov/csr/197...=sect_02_table.04.html
In fact, given better screening techniques (we are better at finding cancer) you would think the rates would be slightly up so I was a bit surprised to see the trend line is fairly flat.
sorry
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