Direct mobile phones radiation influence: Dial 1-800-EXTINCTION

Electronic devices and the Internet have changed the way people interact with each other. Be it via lap-top computers with Wireless LAN, mobile phones or smartphones, nowadays everybody seems to be electronically connected to everybody all the time. These changes have brought about an enormous increase in everyday exposure to radio waves. Concerns have been raised that radiofrequency energy might cause cancer, since it is absorbed by the tissues of the human body. However, to date there is no clear scientific evidence that this non-ionizing energy has the potential to alter DNA and cause cancer [1]. Apart from the question about cancer, fertility is another area of interest since many men keep mobile phones in their trouser pockets in the proximity of their testicles. Several reports on the decline of semen parameters have been published over the last decades and even before mobile phones were invented. Igor Gorpinchenko and co-workers [2] devised an in-vi-tro study to test the hypothesis that electromagnetic waves from mobile phones have a detrimental effect on sperm parameters. When placed 5 cm from a mobile phone, they observed a significant decrease in the number of spermatozoa with progressive movement and an increase in the number of spermatozoa with non-progressive movement. Additionally, a significant increase in DNA fragmentation was found during the 5 hours of electromagnetic exposure. The approach is not genuinely new and other research groups came to similar conclusions. How these findings translate into an in vivo setting remains unclear. If mobile phones had a detrimental effect in real life, additional questions will arise. In this case the use of laptop computers 'on the lap' would cause the same damage. And what about women trying to get pregnant? Spermatozoa have the ability to survive several days in the female reproductive tract. Would laptop computers and mobile phones produce the same damage to spermatozoa there? So what do we know about the decline of semen pa-rameters? In 1992, Carlsen et al. published a paper about decreasing semen quality during the past 50 years [3]. It gained a lot of publicity, not only in the scientific community, but also in the media. The media love such headlines and in the last twenty years it has become common knowledge to practically everybody on this planet that deteriorating sperm quality is a fact. Keeping in mind the retrospective nature of Carlsen's data, dating back as far as 1938, with …