If we really had to hang up our phones

YOU DON’T see them so much now, but a few years ago you’d notice quite a few people had stuck flashing patches on to their phones. They had bought into the idea that these devices were scientifically proven to intercept radiation just before it hit your head and burrowed into your brain. That they were sold in pound shops only emphasised their scientific credentials.

Anyway, a lot of people bought them, ignoring how they lit up only in response to the noise coming from the speaker and in ignorance of cases in the US that had instructed some manufacturers to stop claiming the things actually worked. They hoped it would protect them from harm.

Sometimes, you would see a phone user’s patch flickering away as they held the phone in one hand and a fag in the other. While driving.

The State’s chief medical officer didn’t mention these devices in his advice this week, following the World Health Organisation’s announcement that radiation coming from phones is “possibly carcinogenic to humans”.

Dr Tony Holohan did, though, restate advice that children and young people should reduce their mobile-phone use. Not stop, just cut down to “essential purposes only”. Good luck with defining essential purposes to a teenager.

One recent analysis said that a quarter of fifth-year students will make four to six calls per day. They send about 30 text messages a day, and half of them can text with their eyes closed. The irony is that mobile-phone use has been shown to disrupt teenage sleeping patterns, meaning they can’t actually sleep with their eyes closed.

Research into mobile phones has been far outpaced by their spread into our lives. However, this week’s findings are not news, really. In 2009, the US-based Environmental Working Group claimed that a longer-term study of 1,200 phones showed what previous short-term studies didn’t: that radiation dangers were understated. “We think that based on current standards there’s increased risk of developing brain tumors in long-term users – people who have used cellphones for more than 10 years – from radiation in cellphones,” it said.

The group, though, sets out to warn people of “unsettling facts that you have a right to know”, so you’d worry about confirmation bias. And the findings were not enough to cause much shock – the WHO has more clout – although San Francisco’s city council voted to put warnings on packaging. (As an aside, the Environmental Working Group also said microwave ovens emit radiation but aren’t nearly as worrying as phones, because “you don’t put your head inside the microwave”.)

But for all the headlines this week, the more interesting quesion is not so much whether phones are dangerous but what would happen if it turned out that they were. What, honestly, would it take you to persuade you to go hands-free or to put it down altogether? There are already plans for some written warnings on phone packaging, but cigarette packs have proven that you could print a picture of someone’s head exploding all over an iPhone, and there would always be people who would call their friends to say, “Won’t happen to me.”

Much has been written in recent years about people’s perceptions of risk, both how they veer towards unwarranted hysteria in some cases (bird flu, Sars), choose not to see it in others (diet, the housing bubble) or just plough on regardless of everything they’ve been told (smoking, speeding).

And mobile phones bring a particularly ironic mix of the lot in how many people fear living near mobile-phone masts but will spend the day with a phone pressed to their ear.

If it was established definitively that mobile phones caused cancer it would be a nightmare for everyone – the public, governments, corporations – not just because of the basic health implications but also because of the long battle that would then ensue between each to gain the upper hand. Corporations would contest or play down the findings (just as manufacturers did this week), governments would have to legislate, legislate and legislate again, and their citizens would continually assess the perceived risk, acknowledge that brain cancer does not sound at all like a pleasant consequence, and then in many cases just go ahead and make that call anyway.

You know, because my grandmother made 20 calls a day for 50 years and lived to a ripe old age, eventually dying peacefully when her head exploded in her sleep.

shegarty@irishtimes.com, twitter.com/shanehegarty