Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Wednesday 13 February 2008, 2:03 PM
My mobile radiation health fear: apoplexy
Exradia is a London-based company at MWC, and Iīve just come out of its press briefing. I donīt honestly know quite where to start.
Letīs get the facts out of the way first. Exradia makes Angel-brand mobile phone batteries that contain extra electronics and a coil of wire. This wire emits a low level, low frequency, randomly modulated magnetic field.
Thatīs it.
What Exradia claims for this technology - which it calls Wi-Guard - is something else again. It says that it eliminates possible risk from the biological effects of mobile phones - and yes, the company uses the word eliminate. Moreover, when I talked to the CEO, David Shick, he said that the device "completely neutralises all known biological effects". And, as heīd gone on at length about the dangers to children of mobile phones, pointing out that official government advice is to restrict mobile use among the youngest, I asked if that meant he was recommending that children could safely use mobiles if they had Wi-Guard. Yes, he said. "Governments should change their guidelines and get behind our technology."
Thatīs an amazingly strong statement.
Other problems he quoted as being linked to mobile phone radiation were disrupted sleep, male fertility, DNA breakage - in all, some forty effects. Of course, nothing has been proven. No link has been shown. Many studies show nothing.
But, says Exradia. "it is an indisputable fact that the EMF from mobile phones has a biological effect on the brain and body... Exradia makes no claims about how the biological effects might affect the health of technology users in the long term... More research is needed. In the meantime, Wi-Guard means you can eliminate the possible risks from these biological effects and make your life safer - the same way a seat-belt makes you safer in the car."
Thatīs another extremely strong statement.
As you might imagine, I have one or two small issues with this.
Firstly, everything we do has a biological effect on the brain and body, from our first breath to our dying sigh. Effects do not equate to harm.
I talked to the CTO and the PR after the event, and although the CTO did have an interesting line Iīm going to investigate - briefly, that pulses of electromagnetic energy at a certain frequency seem to make electrolytes flow around the outside of a a cell, and this triggers an immune reaction - that is infinitely far from anything the company is claiming.
For a start, even if all the studies that the company uses in support are of good quality and valid (see Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog for many examples of how medical studies can be neither): as the PR admitted, they are all in-vitro studies. Thatīs when you take cells or other biological systems, plonk them in a test-tube or a petri dish and expose them to the conditions youīre testing for.
No scientist worth their salt would say that in-vitro tests are enough to come to conclusions about what happens in real bodies - in-vivo. But Exradia has taken these tests and said that they prove that the technology "eliminates possible risks from these biological effects".
There are any number of ways that the in-vitro observations might not be replicated in-vivo
But no, Exradia is saying that it will make your children safer. It will protect your testicles. Furthermore, in a survey the company commissioned, it said that 96 percent of Europeans wanted mobile operators to implement Wi-Guard technology - and yes, weīve asked to see the survey questions, metholodogy, sample size and return data. We doubt that 96 percent of Europeans have any idea about Exradia.
That didnīt stop the PR from comparing the mobile phone companies to the tobacco lobby - all, that is, apart from the handset maker whoīs incorporating Wi-Guard already, who he couldnīt name and was off the record anyway. (I did point out that you canīt make something off the record after you say it. Sorry, Didier).
So, weīre on it. Weīll be talking to the company again, and going through their claims with care.
I did ask one final question. No, the PR doesnīt use Wi-Guard himself.
PreviousComments on this post
Excellent article. Your final question (and answer) says it all, doesn't it? The PR man doesn't use it himself... sigh.
I have an alternate solution, which is guaranteed to help just as much. I learned it many years ago, watching NYPD Blue. Line your underwear with aluminum foil. it will not only protect you from all those nasty "possible risks from biological effects", it will equally as well protect you from the horrible death-rays that are bombarding us from outer space!
Seriously, though, did they say anything about what effect this thing has on battery life in the mobile phone?
So they can protect our testicles, by offering something that's utter bollocks? I say nail them.
I'm surprised they could bear to come into such a hot-bed of radiation as MWC in the first place - surely if they actually believed what they say, they would have got a huge does of gonad damage just stepping on site.
And I'm equally surprised they got out of MWC without being lynched by all the mobile operators in the place, for trying to revive a scare they all thought they'd defused. .
They said that the battery life wasn't affected by a noticable amount, but there were no numbers.
Which begs its own questions. How can a few milliwatts of magnetic noise counteract a watt or so of radio frequency electromagnetic radiation? What mechanisms could possibly work that way? Again, I didn't get a good answer, but if the theory's all based on the papers they depend on then at least I can see if there's any correlation between the sort of energy levels in the tests and what's likely to be the case in real life.
The CTO of the company - I don't have his name here, unfortunately - is very approachable and open, and keen to discuss details. His first degree was in communications and electronics from Bath (if I remember correctly), so he knows his stuff. I think if we can get togther for a more relaxed conversation than was possible at the event, it should be very interesting.
