Health call

New Delhi, Oct. 20: Government physicists have announced their intention to study radio frequency emissions from cellphones and collaborate with medical researchers to look for possible biological effects of such emissions.

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in New Delhi plans to use its expertise in radio science to study the intensity of radio frequency emissions from cellphones at different distances from the instruments, senior NPL physicists have said.

“This is still in a planning stage, but we would like to authenticate absolute emission measurements (around instruments),” said Ashesh Prosad Mitra, emeritus scientist.

“The standards laid down today are in an evolutionary stage. There is scope for more studies on the impact of emissions on biological systems.” The NPL would need to collaborate with medical experts for biological studies, he said.

Cellphones expose users to radio frequency energy. The exposures are currently limited by US and European safety guidelines developed in consultation with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other safety agencies.

But concern about possible long-term health impacts of cellphone use persists.

The US FDA has said laboratory results have so far produced “conflicting results”. None of the large studies has demonstrated the existence of any harmful health effect from wireless phone radio frequency exposures. However, the FDA has said none of these studies has answered questions about long-term exposures since the average period of phone use in these studies was less than three years.

Experts have said that more than 10 years of data may be required to study long-term health impacts, if any, from cellphone use.

“We would like to measure the intensity of the waves at different distances from the mobile phone,” said Parameswar Banerjee, the head of the time and frequency division of the NPL. Such measurements would help scientists verify that the emissions from different cellphones in use in the country today do indeed conform to the standard specifications, he said.

Banerjee said the NPL might seek to collaborate with scientists in other institutions to look for biological effects of emissions.