In the past years, with the break-in of more and more technologies, society has experienced a growing concern about possible harmful health effects that a constant exposure to radio frequencies emitted by antennas could cause. But which evidence proving these concerns which are somehow generalised could we find?
10 april 2017
Vertigo, nausea, fatigue... These are some of the symptoms that some people ─self-considerated as ‘electro sensitive’─ describe when they find themselves exposed to electromagnetic fields. On many occasions, scientists have put effort on proving that there is no cause-effect relation between the exposure to radio frequencies and the emergence of these symptoms. Now an expert committee dismiss these harmful effects after they revised 350 studies.
People considered as electro sensitive told that they had symptoms when they thought that they were exposed to electromagnetic fields despite they were not
The young Hungarian scientist Zsuzsanna Dömötö has been the one leading a research in which she asked to 72 participants ─half of them considered themselves as electro sensitive─ to talk about their sensing while in a fictitious electromagnetic field. Even though this field does not exist (despite they believe it does), the 36 participants considered as electro sensitive, they declares that they were suffering from different symptoms. This research is one of the 350 revised studies and the conclusion is very clear for scientists: “most of studies show that people with electromagnetic hypersensitivity are not able to detect when they are exposed to these fields“.
Controversy with a tradition...
This interest and concern about possible health adverse effects when exposed to electromagnetic fields has turned out in the World Health Organisation to deal with this debate. The WHO has repeatedly stated that, as when reading a book or listening to music, to be exposed to electromagnetic fields can carry biological effects. However, this does not mean that they are harmful to health.
This was assured by WHO after a multidisciplinary research project that started in 1995 and was about magnetic fields. This was known as the International EMF Project. About 25,000 articles have been published during the last years talking about biological effects and non-ionizing medical applications for radiation. The conclusion is that exposure to electromagnetic fields of low intensity does not cause any negative consequence to health.
With the aim of finding out if there is any other cause-reaction effect between electromagnetic fields and cancer; studies are being currently carried out. Even though it has been proved that exposure at low level to radio frequency fields causes harmful effects, the social concern has led to expand the researches to get to know if they can cause other health problems that are less evident.
