The Times of Israel: The sorry story of cell phone radiation exposure — how did we get here? Part II

By Paul Ben Ishai

A synopsis

At the end of Part I left you in 1980.  A great year!  Punk was in full swing.  I was 15.  Cellphones hadn’t been invented (they had, but in Thatcher’s Britain we didn’t know about them).  It was a blast!! You could go out of the house for 5 hours and nobody called you or asked where you were.   Oh, I forgot.  The Soviets were going to nuke us, but Jimmy (Carter) would save us, and you could sneak into a pub and get served! The youth of today don’t know what they are missing!  But I digress, let’s talk about serious stuff…….

I left you with a plum.  In the world of exposure safety levels to Radio Frequency radiation the choice of 10 mW/cm² as the safe limit was little more than a whim from Bell Labs.  The belief was that the only damage to you from prolonged exposure would be tissue heating and less than 100 mW/cm² wouldn’t kill you (literally. They boiled dogs alive at this level after one hour [1]).  As long as exposure was limited to no more than an hour  (the recommendations of H. Schwarm [1]) everything should be ok.

Indeed that was ok.  Most of us were exposed only to our AM/FM radio and the TV.  The ambient level of exposure was only 10^-7 mW/cm², one ten millionth of the recommended exposure level.

Actually, this was not a standard yet, just a recommendation.  It became a standard in 1966. The policies, thinking and motivation that turned this to a standard was summarized in two documents in 1980 , one a federal study [2] and the other a Science paper [3].   Initially, after Col. Knauf had boiled his dogs and their testes (literally), the matter had been handed over to a joint committee of the US Navy and the American Standards Association (ASA).

About Paul Ben Ishai

Paul Ben Ishai is an academic staff member of the Physics Department of Ariel University. He has authored 80 publications in various fields of physics and chemistry.  He specializes in the interaction of human skin and high frequency radiowaves and is a scientific advisor for Environmental Health Trust.

Read more of Dr. Ben Ishai’s blogs in The Times of Israel:

• The sorry story of cell phone radiation exposure — how did we get here? Part I
• The green dilemma of 5G densification
• Barrister battles over 5G — many a David and one Goliath
• The day Don Quixote found his mark
• The art of conspiracy and 5G
• The 5G morass – tales and tattles or reasons for concern?