Phone health an elusive call

From Swinburne Magazine, September 2008:
How do you look for a health effect when there is no scientific precedent, no obvious physiological or physical mechanism to explain it, and the effect is likely to be so small that you will need extremely sensitive testing processes? This is the challenge facing researchers at the Australian Centre for Radiofrequency Bioeffects Research (ACRBR), which is investigating whether mobile phones and base stations affect people’s health.
Although there has been public concern and debate about mobile phone health risks, there is little scientific basis for this fear, according to centre director Professor Rodney Croft from Swinburne University of Technology. “One of the big difficulties is that physics doesn’t provide a mechanism that explains how a mobile phone or base station could have an effect on a person,” he says.
Therefore, in the absence of a clear starting point, ACRBR researchers have tried to cover every possible base, says Dr Vitas Anderson, Associate Professor of Bioelectromagnetices at Swinburne and associate investigator at the ACRBR. “You name it, just about every biological endpoint you can think of is being investigated with respect to radiofrequency (RF) exposures.” Read more.