Issues & Opinions

From today’s Independent, a story about a study funded by the mobile phone companies:

Radiation from mobile phones delays and reduces sleep, and causes headaches and confusion, according to a new study.

The research, sponsored by the mobile phone companies themselves, shows that using the handsets before bed causes people to take longer to reach the deeper stages of sleep and to spend less time in them, interfering with the body’s ability to repair damage suffered during the day.

…

Published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Progress in Electromagnetics Research Symposium and funded by the Mobile Manufacturers Forum, representing the main handset companies, it has caused serious concern among top sleep experts, one of whom said that there was now “more than sufficient evidence” to show that the radiation “affects deep sleep”.

(ellipsis mine)

The report refers to a “massive study” of 1,656 Belgian teenagers, the results of which are claimed to complement the lab studies done by MIT et al. Those MIT studies noted a significant effect (with “significant” left undefined in the article) on the level of tiredness found in study participants the day after exposure to RF in the 884MHz range.

The embarrassed Mobile Manufacturers Forum played down the results, insisting – at apparent variance with this published conclusion – that its “results were inconclusive” and that “the researchers did not claim that exposure caused sleep disturbance”.

The MMF should be embarrassed, for two reasons. First, it’s silly to assume that RF emissions have no effect on their surroundings, and it’s not unreasonable to try to quantify these effects, good, bad, or indifferent. More importantly, if you’re going to downplay the results of the study you’ve funded as “inconclusive”, you ought to at least not do so by simply & directly contradicting the stated result of the study. While holding no opinion on the degree to which sleep can be disrupted, I’m sympathetic to their conundrum, but there are far more credible ways to spin a study’s results than just to reflexively deny its conclusion.

In particular, the definition of “very tired”, judged in isolation from other influences on sleep, seems subjective to the point of absurdity, particularly in a study of only 70-odd people. I’m sure they considered this, of course, but it would be nice to read how they’d attempted to adjust for the effect.

It’s an interesting article either way, made more so by the omission (if not in the study, in the article itself) of any control group who’d simply used a wired phone during the same periods of the day. The lab tests, with RF but sans actual phone use, go some (undefined) way toward finding causality, but while studying the overall effect of late night phone use, it seems ludicrous to ignore the fact of actual conversation.

Because, at least in this case, the medium, all due respect to Marshall McLuhan, is not the message.

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