And so the debate still rages on … are cell phones bad for your brain? Of course the cell phone companies are hardly likely to tell you if they are and those who think cell phones are bad for your health are hardly likely to concede that maybe they’re wrong.

But over in Australia there’s one guy who a lot of people respect who wants you to be very cautious about the way you use your cell phone … your electric blanket and even your clock radio. Now that sounds just a bit radical but then this guy is known for radical … radical brain surgery.

He’s brain cancer surgeon Charlie Teo and he’s the guy who will operate when other surgeons declare that there’s no hope. And now he wants you to avoid taking risks with all forms of electromagnetic radiation around your head … and he’s got the support of the US government.

It seems that the United States government recommends that all electrical appliances should be put at the foot of the bed and not at the head of the bed. And that’s something that Dr Teo definitely agrees with.

He also suggests that electric blankets should be turned off before you get into bed and microwave ovens should be allowed to shut down completely before you approach them.

When it comes to cell phones the good Surgeon suggests that you use the loudspeaker function rather than holding the phone up to your head and you should even be careful about where you carry your phone because there is some research by the World Health Organization that suggests that cell phones affect bone density.

And before you laugh and think that this won’t happen to you just consider this rather chilling warning from Dr Teo. According to him most cancers take weeks or months to double in size and that means that there’s often plenty of time to discover the cancer before it’s too late.

Brain cancer on the other hand can double in size every 15 hours so it can become inoperable before you even know you have it. And a lot of people obviously do have it because brain cancer has just joined the list of the top 10 most common forms of cancer.

Now how important was that call you just made or took on your cell phone?

Telephones have become an indispensable part of modern society. Just try to imagine how we could possibly survive if suddenly all our telephones, cell phones and satellite phones were taken away from us.

Survival wouldn’t be possible … society just couldn’t survive without telephones because we have built our entire world around them. Even if we don’t physically use a phone to perform an action such as ordering stock for our business or checking the weather we’re still using the telephone system to transmit and receive the data we need.

So without that telephone system society would fail. But now we’re beginning to see that there is a growing cost for not failing … now we’re beginning to see that maintaining modern communications is costing people their lives. These aren’t just people who work in the telephone industry, they’re ordinary people like you and me who just happen to be in the wrong place for too long.

When phones were first invented … and for many years after … a connection between two people required a physical line between the person making the call and the person receiving the call. While the calls went through exchanges and switches there had to be a physical link established between the two people involved.

In many parts of the world there still needs to be a physical link although the copper wires of years gone by have been replaced with fiber-optic cables. In other places data and voice calls are carried by microwave with antennas and dishes mounted on high points between major centers and these are then channeled down into the copper network via exchanges in the major towns and cities.

There’s never been any health problems associated with the old copper wire network or the fiber-optic cables and the microwave towers are usually in fairly remote locations away from population centers. Distance has proven to be a great insulator when it comes to any harmful effects people may suffer from extended exposure to those microwaves.

But now society has taken a major step to free itself of that old copper network and the fiber-optic cables and we’ve gone mobile. Now when we use a cell phone there doesn’t have to be a direct physical link to the person we’re calling. Now we can be standing in the street, sitting in our home, driving down the highway or even on a boat offshore and we can make a call and be connected.

The ability to make contact with the person we’re calling doesn’t happen by magic though. There still needs to be something that will pick up the signal from our cell phone and transmit it through a network to the person we’re calling and that’s done by the installation of numerous roof top towers through every town and city.

The signal transmitted by our cell phones is quite weak and that means that there has to be quite a few cell phone towers spread throughout a large town or city to provide adequate coverage for cell phone users … there’s nothing worse than needing to make a call but finding that there’s no cell phone coverage where you happen to be. So these days we have cell phone towers and you’ll see them spread around on rooftops and that puts them quite close to people. They not only passively receive signals from your cell phone but actively transmit signals to the person you are calling.

Those cell phone towers aren’t very big and they certainly don’t look threatening but there’s a growing body of evidence that suggests they could be killers. In more and more places where cell phone towers are located the incidence of tumors and cancers … especially brain tumors … is increasing and the longer someone is exposed to a signal from a cell phone tower the greater their chance of being affected.

Cancer clusters have appeared in the most unlikely places … television stations, universities, apartment blocks and small suburban areas … and the only common factor is the presence of a cell phone tower nearby.

This has been something that has been developing over a number of years and quite a few studies have been done into the problem. As you would expect the findings of these studies have gone both ways and it’s hard to find a consensus opinion on whether cell phone towers cause cancer or not.

You will find eminent researchers on both sides of the fence on this issue and even if researchers were able to agree on the cancer-causing effects of cell phone towers it’s extremely unlikely that we would ever see their removal. We are all far too dependent on our cell phones to ever be able to discard them and go back to the old copper wire system.

So for now the very best we can do is to ensure that we don’t live or work in close proximity to a cell phone tower. Of course just what constitutes "e;close proximity"e; is not something that’s easily defined. In once instance in Melbourne Australia people working one or two floors below a cell phone tower seemed to have a higher risk of developing brain tumors than people working four floors below the tower but situations do seem to vary.

Ultimately I guess that for now it comes down to what you feel comfortable with when you’re trying to decide just how close is too close. There is one thing we have to accept though and that’s the fact that cell phone towers are not going to go away anytime soon. Society now depends on them and we’re never going to go back to what we used before cell phones came along.