I decided to look into the health effects of mobile phones and exposure to low-levels of electromagnetic radiation.
Initially, I thought the topic was pretty simple and straight forward: there should be no health effect.
- Radio wave frequency radiation is non-ionizing and non-dangerous, especially at low power densities.
- Human beings emit higher frequency radiation (infra-red) than cell phones, and radiation does not become dangerous until it gets to very high frequencies with wavelengths similar to molecular bond distances.
- Natural sources (like the sun) bathe us in more radiation than most artificial sources.
But, we've been wrong about health effects before, and, to be honest, I would not want to live under high-power transmission lines.
I was only a little surprised, therefore, to find so much research (millions and millions of dollars, decades of time) focused on the health effects of radio-wave frequency, low-energy radiation.
The World Health Organization has a summary of the health effects research.
http://www.who.int/peh-emf/about/WhatisEMF/en/index4.html
An amateur radio website (tech geeks) gives a very good summary of the research.
http://www.sss-mag.com/rfsafety_bkg.html
An excerpt from this gives a glimpse as to why the topic is not so simple:
There has also been considerable laboratory research about the biological effects of EMR in recent years. For example, it has been shown that even fairly low levels of EMR can alter the human body's circadian rhythms, affect the manner in which cancer-fighting T lymphocytes function in the immune system, and alter the nature of the electrical and chemical signals communicated through the cell membrane and between cells, among other things.
A possible explanation for this effect is discussed here http://www.ehponline.org/docs/2004/112-6/ss.html#emfs
One thing about life that seems to be empirically solid is that we all die.
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