a.drian/Flickr)" />Cellphones do not cause any adverse health effects to the user, a new study says.
Mobile phones have eventually become an inevitable part of life, after it was introduced to this world 40 years ago, by the American telecommunications giant Motorola. It was Martin Cooper, a Motorola executive and engineer, who made the first cell phone call, using the company's DynaTAC in 1973. Since then, the product has gone through several renovations on its way to conquering the world.
However, as the popularity of cellphones went up, so did the concern about its safety and health impacts.
According to the National Cancer Institute in the US, cell phones produce radiofrequency energy, a kind of radiation that is often absorbed by the body. Exposure to this radiation can be influenced by different factors, including the frequency and length of mobile use, phone technology and proximity to phone's antenna or cell phone towers. They cited certain studies in the past that linked mobile phones to brain and nerve cancer.
Many studies in the past have also succeeded in amassing solid evidence to prove that excessive cellphone use can lead to poor sleep, brain cancer, infertility in men, depression and addiction. A 2008 study on medical students found that excessive mobile use caused impaired concentration, sleeplessness, memory problems, hearing problems and facial dermatitis. Another study, conducted on 212 young Indians aged 21, found that excessive mobile use can lead to psychological problems, including sleeplessness, loneliness, depression and low self-esteem.
In the new study, the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research (MTHR) program in the UK looked at 31 research projects, including 60 papers in scientific journals from the year 2001. At the end of the study, researchers could not find any link between maternal exposure to base station emissions in pregnancy and childhood cancer or excessive use of mobile phones and leukaemia.
"We can now be much more confident about the safety of modern telecommunications systems," David Coggan, MTHR chairman, professor of environmental medicine at Southampton University, told The Sydney Morning Herald.
However, the findings do contradict an incident happened in 2012. The Italian Supreme Court in Rome governed that mobile phones can cause brain tumour after a 60-year-old Italian businessman, named Innocente Marcolini, developed tumour in the trigeminal nerve (the area where phone touches head) from his 6-hour long handset use at work for 12 years. Though, the tumour was found to be non-cancerous, Marcolini was paralysed as it had spread to the main blood vessel to the brain called carotid artery.
