"Fred Tasker" - Non-ionizing radiation: Is it the friendly type?
March 29, 2011 http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/03/27/2138586/non-ionizing-radiation-is-it-the.html
Hold a portable radio up to your ear, spin the dial and count how many stations – AM and FM – you can get. Consider that all those radio waves are going straight through your head.
Make a cellphone call, and ponder that a radio signal powerful enough to reach a tower a mile away is being generated within an inch of your highly valued gray matter.
Stand before an old, leaky microwave oven. Or under a high-voltage power line. Or really close to your TV screen. Snuggle up to a space heater. Get nabbed by a sneaky cop with a radar gun.
All that radiation is going through you.
The good news is that this is “non-ionizing” radiation – the more-or-less friendly kind. It’s not the “bad” kind – ionizing radiation from x-rays in your doctor’s office or from accidents at nuclear power plants.
“Non-ionizing radiation is low-frequency radiation that does not have enough energy to directly damage DNA,” says the American Cancer Society.
Most scientists agree. But there are just enough doubters to leave a trace of anxiety. A study last week in The Journal of the American Medical Association says talking on a cellphone increases the activity in the parts of your brain near the phone’s antenna, indicating that it can affect the brain. The study didn’t go into whether that could do any damage, but suggested further research.
Repeated studies of high-voltage power lines have failed conclusively to show a link to medical problems. But they also produced enough hints of problems to bring on more studies.
“I think the jury is still out,” says Dr. Nagy Alsayyad, a University of Miami radiation oncologist.
— Fred Tasker
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