Friday, November 24, 2006

Just give me a buzz...

I'm one of those annoying people who only has a cellphone. Annoying, because when you try to phone me, it's invariable off, or it's on and I can hear it ringing, but I can't find it.

So I miss a lot of calls. I figure that's OK - I don't want to use my cellphone too much. Aside from the crazy phone bills I get if I'm not careful, there's been some debate about whether having that thing so close to your head for so long could cause brain tumours.

Well, apparently, it's not only my brain I might have to worry about. Cellphone radiation has just been shown to cause major reproductive damage to female fruit flies. Some scientists in Greece exposed fruit flies to radiation from two common types of cellphones for six days ... and thereby induced death of all sorts of cells associated with developing eggs. They figure the radiation caused the DNA in the cells to fragment.

Well, I'm no fruit fly. Aside from assuming that the reproductive system of a fruit fly is probably not like that of a human, I'm guessing the flies reveived full-body exposure to the radiation. And that the radiation wasn't "downsized" to match the size of the bugs.

Overall I can't say that I'm convinced that this is what would happen to me ... even if I placed my cellphone over my ovaries instead of my ear. And plus I wouldn't be able to hear anything that way.

But it's still kind of creepy. Maybe I should get a land line someday...

1 comment:

Jonkvrouw said...

Really? I have a fruit fly problem, maybe I should use my cell phone more...