One of the questions I am often asked, as a scientist in the telecommunications industry, is whether mobile phones and mobile network infrastructure poses a health hazard. The news commentary on RMIT over the past week has made this question topical, so let me address it in this week’s blog.

First of all, let me start off by saying that there has been a huge body of research around possible health effects of radio waves and mobile phones. The scientific way is to look for clues and evidence and then to validate through careful experiments. Despite much searching (and don’t forget radio has been around for a long time – most of us have experienced it in the environment our whole lives and the dominant source still is broadcast radio), no scientific evidence of a problem at levels below the mandated standards has been found. The standards in Australia are set by ARPANSA - Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency - and based on strict World Health Organisation guidelines and, needless to say, Telstra obeys these standards strictly.

It is good to have such standards, but it is even better if people understand the reasoning behind them, so let me try and explain. First of all, the term ‘radiation’ is somewhat unfortunate in relation to radio waves, because people associate ‘radiation’ with nuclear radiation which is so-called ‘ionising radiation’. To understand what this means, let’s suppose I take 2 billiard balls and glue them to opposite ends of a spring, to represent an atom or molecule. If I shoot a billiard ball at high speed at one of the balls, the chances are that it will rip the ball off the spring and send it flying apart from the other one. This is somewhat analogous to an atom which has been ‘ionised’. On the other hand if I take the 2 billiard balls and give one of them a tug, it will set the spring in motion and the balls will oscillate back and forth towards and away from each other. This is like the effect of radio waves on an atom (which is why a microwave oven heats up your food). As long as I don’t tug the ball too hard, the ‘atom’ I have created out of my 2 billiard balls and the spring, will not break apart. In other words it will not be ‘ionised’, so radio waves are ‘non-ionising radiation’ which is very different from the nuclear or ionising type.

So the standards are set on the basis of known scientific evidence about how hard you can ‘tug’ the atoms before they oscillate too violently. And on top of that a big safety margin is then added. Most of the time, whether you are on the phone or simply walking around the city, the level of exposure you are getting to radio waves is well below these safety standards (in fact, usually the levels that you are experiencing from mobile phone towers are thousands of times below the safety standards).

Let’s get back to that scientific research. There have been literally thousands of studies searching for any unforeseen effects of radio waves on human beings. A number of governments have conducted major reviews of this research, and the conclusion to date remains, as stated by the World Health Organisation,

“None of the recent reviews have concluded that exposure to the RF (radio frequency) fields from mobile phones and their base stations cause any adverse health consequences”