Can Mobile Phones Cause Disease
1 "Mobile phone killed my man," screamed one headline last year. Also came claims that an unpublished study had found that mobile phones cause memory loss. And a British newspaper devoted its front page to a picture supposedly (假定地) showing how mobile phones heat the brain.
2 For anyone who uses a mobile phone, these are worrying times. But speak to the scientists whose work is the focus of these scares and you will hear a different story. According to them, there is no evidence that mobile phones cause cancer or any other illness in people.
3 What we do have, however, are some results suggesting that mobile phones’ emissions have a variety of strange effects on living tissue that can’t be explained by the general radiation biology. And it’s only when the questions raised by these experiments are answered that we’ll be able to say for sure what mobile phones might be doing to the head.
4 One of the odd effects comes from the now famous "memory loss" study. Alan Preece and his colleagues at the University of Bristol placed a device that imitated the microwave emissions of mobile phones to the left ear of volunteers. The volunteers were just as good at recalling words and pictures they had been shown on a computer screen whether or not the device was switched on. Preece says he still can’t comment on the effects of using a mobile phone for years on end. But he rules out the suggestion that mobile phones have an immediate effect on our cognitive abilities. "I’m pretty sure there is no effect on short-term memory," he says.
5 Another expert, Tattersall, remarked that his latest findings have removed fears about memory loss. One result, for instance, suggests that nerve cell synapses (突触) exposed to microwaves become more-rather than less-receptive (感受的) to undergoing changes linked to memory formation.
6 Hopefully, microwaves might turn out to be good for you. It sounds crazy, but a couple of years ago a team led by William Adey at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in California, found that mice exposed to microwaves for two hours a day were less likely to develop brain tumours when given a cancer-causing chemical.
Can Mobile Phones Cause DiseaseTattersall said for sure that the ______ over memory loss caused by mobile phones was ungrounded.