Cellphone radiation warning as researchers reveal new risk factor for 5G networks
Anyone who uploads videos of a nice walk in a rural area with 5G will be exposed to almost twice as much radiation as someone in a city, according to a new study.
Researchers believe the extra radiation comes not from 5G cell towers, but from users’ own mobile devices working overtime to broadcast a signal in rural areas.
A team from the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH) monitored the exposure of 5G mobile phone users to radio frequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) in two cities and three rural communities
RF-EMF is the means by which radio waves transmit energy, allowing wireless devices to communicate over frequencies that include microwave radiation – which can deliver a dangerous amount of energy under the wrong conditions.
The team found that the average exposure in rural areas was 29 milliwatts per square meter (mW/m²) at upload, almost three times the safety risk threshold recommended by the World Health Organization. 10 mW/m².
That was also much higher than the amount recorded for phones uploading content in the two Swiss cities, for which the team found an average value of 16 mW/m².
The measurement represents how much radio frequency energy passes through a given surface (such as human skin) in the path of these wireless signals.
Anyone who uploads rustic photos of their farm or posts videos of their scenic walk in a rural area with 5G is exposed to almost twice the radiation of someone in a city, according to a new study. Above, the first 5G ‘Optus’ phone tower, built in a suburb of Canberra, Australia
RF-EMF is the means by which radio waves transmit energy, allowing wireless devices to communicate over frequencies that include microwave radiation – which can deliver a dangerous amount of energy under the wrong conditions
“In summary, this study shows that environmental exposure is lower when base station density is low,” said the study’s lead author, epidemiology researcher Adriana Fernandes Veludo.
“But,” she added, “in such a situation, the emissions from mobile phones are many times greater.”
“This has the paradoxical consequence that a typical mobile phone user is more exposed to RF-EMF in areas with low base station density,” said Fernandes Veludo, a PhD student working on the 5G study. Project GOLIAT.
But Fernandes Veludo also noted that the new findings could “underestimate the actual exposure” of these 5G mobile phones when used in rural areas.
While European countries consider such levels as 29 mW/m2 high, they are well below America’s own, more relaxed thresholds.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has set the maximum allowable exposure level at 10,000 mW/m².
The rollout of 5G has led to conspiracy theories that the new form of wireless technology is somehow causing or even could cause Covid-19. a secret and high-tech new form of mind control.
While the new research from Switzerland doesn’t address the health risks, it does provide new detailed information about what people are exposed to in real-world scenarios.
In tests in both urban and rural areas, the researchers conducted ‘micro-environment’ comparisons, involving several factors including: residential areas, industrial areas, schools, public parks and public transport. Above the data for the ‘maximum upload’ experiment
The possible underestimation stems from the way Fernandes Veludo and her colleagues collected the radiation data from their 5G mobile phones in the first place.
The team measured exposure in each of the five test municipalities by traveling to specific locations a backpack containing a wearable device that measures RF-EMF exposure, plus a smartphone equipped with sensors and radiation tracking software.
‘We have to take into account that the telephone in our study was about 30 cm [11.8 inches] away from the measuring device,” Fernandes Veludo noted.
“A mobile phone user will hold the phone closer to the body and therefore RF-EMF exposure can be up to ten times higher,” she said.
The Project GOLIAT team monitored the RF-EMF output from cell phone base stations and cell phone devices in two cities, Zurich and Basel, against three rural towns Hergiswil, Willisau and Dagmersellen.
In all five areas, they conducted comparison experiments in ‘micro-environments’ where different factors and human behavior play a role, including: residential areas, industrial areas, schools, public parks or public transport.
But the researchers also performed all of these same experiments while the devices communicated with the local 5G towers in two other common scenarios.
In the first scenario, the backpacking researchers collected data while the cellphone was in “flight mode” or “airplane mode” – meaning their sensors were mostly only exposed to environmental signals coming from the 5G cell towers.
The exposure value of 29 mW/m² was above the World Health Organization’s recommended safety threshold of 10 mW/m², but well below the thresholds of US regulators. Above, a summer morning in the rural Swiss village of Zermatt overlooking the Alps
The other scenario activated ‘maximum data download’, as opposed to maximum upload, by setting the phone to download large files from the internet.
The results of both other tests, as published online in the journal Environmental research in December were slightly less surprising, as urban areas showed higher exposure to RF-EMF radiation.
The average for their nationwide test villages was 0.17 mW/m2, while the average for Basel was 0.33 mW/m2 and for Zurich 0.48 mW/m2.
“The highest levels were found in urban business areas and in public transport,” said co-author Dr. Martin Röösli, professor of environmental epidemiology at TPH Switzerland and specialized in atmospheric physics.
Dr. Röösli emphasized that all these values ”are still more than a hundred times below the international guideline values.”
In the maximum download scenario, the radiation increased almost uniformly to approx 6–7 mW/m², which the Project GOLIAT team believes likely comes from a technique deployed by 5G towers called “beamforming.”
As the name implies, beamforming redirects signals from the tower directly to the phone it is providing download information to, leading to increased RF-EMF exposure.
The effect was slightly larger in the two cities.
Fernandes Veludo noted that this was only the first study of its kind. Future efforts to collect ambient 5G levels for mobile phone users would continue, with repeat surveys conducted in nine more European countries over the next three years.