Dear Editor:
I totally disagree with your unsupported conclusion that digital cellular phones are less dangerous than their analog counterparts. The exact opposite is true! The brain cells of digital cellular users are quite literally being “all shook up.”
Digital cellular phones are continuously being pulsed on and off at a very rapid rate. This has the undesirable side effect of creating a wide band of electromagnetic shock waves around the phone.
High powered pulsed shipboard radar is well known to have the potential to injure sailors that get too close to the antenna, while the same amount of RF exposure to signals from an analog transmitter has not been shown to produce any injurious effects.
Fluorescent lights are a known health hazard. They create eyestrain and headache in many office workers that work under them because of the shock wave effect of the lights being pulsed on and off.
Jackhammers used to break concrete derive their power from a pulsating action that multiplies their effectiveness many times over. I do not think than many of us would want to hold one next to our head!
The deleterious effects of digital cellular phones can be easily observed by holding one near the phone on your desk. My experience with a Nextel digital phone is that it totally disrupts the operation of my landline phone. We have not seen this problem with any comparable analog devices.
I wonder what ABC tells its own people who work as transmitter engineers at its analog TV stations. They certainly over time have a much higher exposure to RF energy by working near a TV transmitter that operates at a power level approaching millions of times what a cell phone would generate. By ABC’s standards, the health hazards should be especially pronounced around a UHF TV transmitter due to the shorter wave length. Maybe because digital TV is the coming thing, ABC chose to say nothing on this subject! The higher UHF TV channels are next to the electromagnetic spectrum occupied by cellular phones.
20/20 did the cellular industry a favor (albeit short-term), and the public a disservice by remaining silent on the critical issue of analog vs. digital. As the body of available evidence grows, the lawsuits that will arise out of this fiasco will make the tobacco cases pale by comparison. We must remember that the early tobacco cases were all won by the tobacco companies!
Ted S. Henry
President
Henry Radio Inc.
