On Mon, 2015-09-07 at 12:39 +1000, David Lochrin wrote: > The Good Weekend section of Saturday's SMH included an article on > Electromagnetic Hyper Sensitivity
There is either scientific evidence supporting the existence of EHS, or there is scientific evidence debunking it, or there is no scientific evidence either way. Anecdotal evidence may be useful for suggesting that study is needed, but it is of itself not scientific evidence. You felt light-headed - there are many possible causes of light-headedness, and even allowing that it happened only when you used the phone, allowing that this was not coincidence, and allowing that it happened every time you used the phone etc etc, there are dozens of factors apart from EMR that may be causes or contributing causes. This is not intended to discount your experience - just to say that there is science and there is non-science, and unless you do a proper study, preferably of people who do not know they are being studied, it really doesn't count. > apparently the earpiece cable picks up radiation which the earpiece > directs into the skull What radiation does it pick up? And does it "apparently" do so, or does it actually do so? Has anyone set up the required experiment to find out? If so, great - we have real data. BTW science already has huge amounts of detailed scientific information on how radiation of all sorts is propagated through human heads; it's used all the time in various kinds of medical scans. > any biological effects of EM radiation might find a very unsympathetic > business audience. If there is evidence for the effect, then there is a problem that needs to be fixed and they can get stuffed if they don't like it. Cf the effects of smoking. If, on the other hand, there is no evidence or there is evidence against the idea, then their lack of sympathy is not unwarranted - cf the hatchet job being done on wind farms. > Some years ago I remember speaking to an Epidemiologist who has been > mentioned here before. He had done a desk-study of the suburbs around > the Gore Hill TV antennas and found a two-fold (from memory) increase > in childhood leukemia, even though location could only be identified > by postcode which is a very coarse measure. These results were widely > reported, but it is my understanding that phase-two of the study was > cancelled. Such studies are useful first steps; to see if a proper study might be warranted. But before putting the blame for such things on the antennas, it would be necessary to extend the study to other similar suburbs, and to eliminate other possible causes. Correlation is not causation - if it were, nylon stockings would be banned as a leading cause of lung cancer in women. It is possible that the EMR coming from mobile phones (and portables and all sorts of other things) does cause some people discomfort, and does cause various kinds of symptoms in some people. That's because there are billions of people, and pretty much anything is possible. But, given the massively widespread use of mobile telephony, it seems likely to me that such people are very rare. It seems likely that mobile phone EMR does not affect the overwhelmingly vast majority of mobile phone users, or that if it does the effects are very subtle or very long-term. Exactly the sorts of effects that can only be found through painstaking scientific research. Regards, K. -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Karl Auer (ka...@biplane.com.au) http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer http://twitter.com/kauer389 GPG fingerprint: 3C41 82BE A9E7 99A1 B931 5AE7 7638 0147 2C3C 2AC4 Old fingerprint: EC67 61E2 C2F6 EB55 884B E129 072B 0AF0 72AA 9882 _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
