News & Comment

Metal earrings can spark hotter hot spots in the heads of cell phone users. A team of Spanish scientists has found that the peak SAR —a measure of the energy delivered to human tissue— can be up to 25% higher when a 900 MHz phone is pressed up to an ear pierced with a metallic object. In a paper that will appear in a future issue of Bioelectromagnetics, David Sanchez-Hernandez and coworkers at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena don't say exactly where such hot spots may turn up nor whether this type of magnification will also occur with 1800 MHz phones, but they do advise that this finding merits "special attention."   

As the investigation of the RMIT University brain tumor cluster continues in Melbourne (see our May 13 post), we are reminded of another cancer cluster, which was also much in the news down under about this time last year. In this earlier case, some ten women working in the Australian Broadcasting Co.'s (ABC) offices in Brisbane developed breast cancer and, as at RMIT, power-frequency EMFs and RF radiation were under suspicion because there were antennas on the roof of the ABC building.

EMC Technologies, a test and measurement consulting company, was called in to survey the entire ABC site. Soon afterwards, ABC Queensland director Chris Wordsworth told the Sydney Morning Herald that testing had shown "nothing adverse." That April, Chris Zombolas, the technical director of EMC Technologies, confirmed to us what Wordsworth had already told the local newspapers: He had not found high levels of any electromagnetic signals. But, Zombolas added, he was not in a position to release the report —that would be up to ABC. Figuring there was nothing much more to the story, we moved on and did not give it much thought until the RMIT cluster became news.