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Fear mongering suggests you shouldn’t hold a mobile phone to your ear for too long, lest you fancy a melon-sized brain tumour; you shouldn’t secure one in a breast pocket if you happen to be equipped with a pacemaker; and you should only shove one into the back pocket of your jeans if you’re feeling charitable to the criminal fraternity.
New study suggests mobile phone exposure can hurt the little swimmers. Image: Articotropical/Flickr.
And now, following a male-only study into how sperm is affected by mobile phone exposure, it would appear front pockets are also now a danger zone and the only safe place to actually carry your phone is in a hand raised high above your head -- lead-lined gloves being optional of course.
The small study, which was conducted across 32 male volunteers by the Cleveland Clinic, found that mobile phone handsets left on talk mode while placed in a front-facing pants pocket could potentially damage the quality of sperm within the testes.
A team of researchers, headed by Ashok Agarwal, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine, took sperm samples from the volunteers and placed them within a distance of 2.5cms of an 850MHz mobile phone left in talk mode for one hour.
When measured against non-exposed control samples also provided by the volunteers, the results of the test revealed an 85 percent average increase of free radicals and oxidants throughout the samples, while also registering a decrease in protective antioxidants.
According to Agarwal, who noted that free radicals have been linked to poor sperm quality in previous studies, the Cleveland Clinic’s test results equate to a definite drop in sperm quality, including negative effects to both motility and viability.
“We believe that these devices are used because we consider them very safe, but it could cause harmful effects due to the proximity of the phones and the exposure that they are causing to the gonads,” he commented regarding the study results.
However, while speaking to CNN, Agarwal pointed out that such a small study has limitations, such as being carried out in lab conditions that did not replicate the potentially protective benefits provided by the human body in physically separating the testes from the phone.
While adding that the team are in the early stages of replicating the body’s effects so as to continue the research, Agarwal also said men shouldn’t necessarily stop pocketing their phones and that the initial study needs to be significantly expanded to factor in many other things before being in a position to prove that sperm is damaged by close exposure.
In commenting on the study, a spokesman for the Cell Telephone Industries Association (CTIA) maintained that published scientific evidence and the opinion of various global health organisations, supports the CTIA’s standpoint “that there is no link between wireless usage and adverse health effects.”
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