Mothers, are some your children misbehaving? If the answer is yes, it may be that you made excessive use of cell phones when you were pregnant. That is the conclusion reached by some American researchers who have been studying the health effects of cell phones.
The researchers say they have found evidence that when pregnant women use them regularly, their children are more likely to have behavioural problems.
To a rational mind, the conclusion sounds implausible but the study, reported in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, is sure to renew controversy over the safety of mobile telephones.
The study does not, however, demonstrate that cell phone use causes the behavioural problems and does not suggest a possible way it can. But experts always advise that while people should not panic as a result of such inconclusive studies, precautionary measures should be adopted.
According to statistics, about five billion mobile phones are in use worldwide. But the World Health Organisation, the American Cancer Society and the National Institutes of Health have found no evidence that cell phone use can damage health.
However, the researchers, according to a report in Reuters, say their findings are worth studying.
“It is hard to understand how such low exposures could be influential,” Dr. Leeka Kheifets, an epidemiologist at the University of California Los, Angeles who led the study, told Reuters in a telephone interview.
“It is just something that needs to be pursued.”
Kheifets and her team claim they surveyed 28,000 seven-year-olds and their mothers in a large Danish study that has been tracking 100,000 women who were pregnant between 1996 and 2002.
The mothers of about three per cent of the children said they had borderline behavioural problems, and three per cent showed abnormal behaviour, such as obedience or emotional issues.
According to the researchers, children whose mothers used cell phones while pregnant and who also used the phones themselves were 50 per cent more likely to have behavioural problems,
Children whose mothers used the phones but who did not themselves use mobile phones were 40 per cent more likely to have behavioural problems. The researchers found that the children were no more likely to have epilepsy or delays in development.
In May, experts backed by WHO studied 13,000 cell phone users over 10 years hoping to find out whether they cause brain tumours but found no clear answer.
Kheifets and his team tried to account for other possible causes, such as whether women who used cell phones were different from women who did not, especially during the time of their pregnancies when cell phone use was less common than it is now.
“We looked at social status, we looked at the sex of the child, we looked at the mother‘s history of behavioural problems, we looked at the mother‘s age and stress during pregnancy and whether the child was Bosom fed or not,” she said.
“One thought was that it was it not cell phone use but mothers‘ inattention that led to behaviour problems. While it was important, it didn’t explain the association that we found.”
Nonetheless, some experts questioned the findings.
“I am skeptical of these results, even though they will get a lot of publicity,” said David Spiegelhalter, a professor of Biostatistics at Britain’s University of Cambridge.
“The authors suggest that precautionary measures may be warranted because they have ‘virtually no cost,’ but they ignore the cost of giving intrusive health advice based on inadequate science.”
Experts at the US National Institutes of Health have yet to comment on the study.
But John Walls of the mobile telephone industry group, CTIA, notes that other studies have failed to show a health risk from cell phones. “We just don‘t comment on any specific studies because we don’t have any expertise, frankly,” Walls said in a telephone interview with Reuters.
For the president of National Association of Telecoms Subscribers, Mr. Deolu Ogunleye, the health effects of cell phones seems to be exaggerated.
He said, “We seem to be overplaying this issue of the health effects of mobile phones. The radiation from mobile phone is not as dangerous as that from computer which people can use continuously for over six hours, yet more emphasis is on mobile phone.
“Any researcher anywhere can come up with findings but they have to be authenticated. The World Health Organisation has said cell phones do not harm the health, so until they say anything to the contrary, people should not panic as a result of these unauthenticated findings.”
However, he agrees that cell phone users should be cautious about their use of cell phones.
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