Warning: Using a mobile phone while pregnant can seriously damage your baby
Pastor Dale Morgan
Warning: Using a mobile phone while pregnant can seriously damage your baby*
Study of 13,000 children exposes link between use of handsets and later
behavioral problems
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
Sunday, 18 May 2008
Scientists found that mothers who did use the handsets were 54 per cent
more likely to have children with behavioural problems and that the
likelihood increased with the amount of potential exposure to the radiation
Women who use mobile phones when pregnant are more likely to give birth
to children with behavioural problems, according to authoritative research.
A giant study, which surveyed more than 13,000 children, found that
using the handsets just two or three times a day was enough to raise the
risk of their babies developing hyperactivity and difficulties with
conduct, emotions and relationships by the time they reached school age.
And it adds that the likelihood is even greater if the children
themselves used the phones before the age of seven.
The results of the study, the first of its kind, have taken the top
scientists who conducted it by surprise. But they follow warnings
against both pregnant women and children using mobiles by the official
Russian radiation watchdog body, which believes that the peril they pose
"is not much lower than the risk to children's health from tobacco or
alcohol".
The research – at the universities of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and
Aarhus, Denmark – is to be published in the July issue of the journal
Epidemiology and will carry particular weight because one of its authors
has been sceptical that mobile phones pose a risk to health.
UCLA's Professor Leeka Kheifets – who serves on a key committee of the
International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection, the body
that sets the guidelines for exposure to mobile phones – wrote three and
a half years ago that the results of studies on people who used them "to
date give no consistent evidence of a causal relationship between
exposure to radiofrequency fields and any adverse health effect".
The scientists questioned the mothers of 13,159 children born in Denmark
in the late 1990s about their use of the phones in pregnancy, and their
children's use of them and behaviour up to the age of seven. As they
gave birth before mobiles became universal, about half of the mothers
had used them infrequently or not at all, enabling comparisons to be made.
They found that mothers who did use the handsets were 54 per cent more
likely to have children with behavioural problems and that the
likelihood increased with the amount of potential exposure to the
radiation. And when the children also later used the phones they were,
overall, 80 per cent more likely to suffer from difficulties with
behaviour. They were 25 per cent more at risk from emotional problems,
34 per cent more likely to suffer from difficulties relating to their
peers, 35 per cent more likely to be hyperactive, and 49 per cent more
prone to problems with conduct.
The scientists say that the results were "unexpected", and that they
knew of no biological mechanisms that could cause them. But when they
tried to explain them by accounting for other possible causes – such as
smoking during pregnancy, family psychiatric history or socio-economic
status – they found that, far from disappearing, the association with
mobile phone use got even stronger.
They add that there might be other possible explanations that they did
not examine – such as that mothers who used the phones frequently might
pay less attention to their children – and stress that the results
"should be interpreted with caution" and checked by further studies. But
they conclude that "if they are real they would have major public health
implications".
Professor Sam Milham, of the blue-chip Mount Sinai School of Medicine in
New York, and the University of Washington School of Public Health – one
of the pioneers of research in the field – said last week that he had no
doubt that the results were real. He pointed out that recent Canadian
research on pregnant rats exposed to similar radiation had found
structural changes in their offspring's brains.
The Russian National Committee on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection says
that use of the phones by both pregnant women and children should be
"limited". It concludes that children who talk on the handsets are
likely to suffer from "disruption of memory, decline of attention,
diminishing learning and cognitive abilities, increased irritability" in
the short term, and that longer-term hazards include "depressive
syndrome" and "degeneration of the nervous structures of the brain".