Yes but, with all the extra power floating around we could enjoy wireless street lights.

Radiation of all kinds has been studied for years and I've never heard or read of adverse effects from radio transmission towers or even high voltage power lines. But some people persist in their suspicions. "...used as a colony of guinea pigs..."? I don't think so.

I'd be more worried about the electromagnetic radiation from your electric blanket, if I were you. Distance is critical.

Having that much high freq energy bombarding you over time is hard to correlate back. Besides how do you track people over 20 years when they all may manifest differing symptoms.

However, we know things like X-ray exposure in dental offices causes harm over time and it is just at a different frequency. Mr Bog is right though, energy increases geometrically (ie move 2x as close and you get 4x the energy) as you get closer to a source of RF.

There is no healthy dose of x-ray exposure for healthy people. I remind my dentist of that twice a year so he delays taking new x-rays as long as possible.

Do people actually think there is a healthy dose of microwave radiation? Fine, then put the cell phone antenna as close to your house and as far from mine as possible.

But some people persist in their suspicions.

Read the GAO report. There's no conclusive evidence one way or the other.

I'm not even gonna get into the health consequences or lack thereof. But a couple things.

The electromagnetic spectrum consists of lots of familiar things, from radio to visible light to x-rays. The higher the frequency -measured in Hertz, or 'Hz' - the more energetic the radiation. Here's a few familiar sorts of radiation, listed by frequency:

FM Radio: about 1 x 10^8 Hz
Analog TV: about 2 x 10^8 Hz
Cell phones (GSM): about 1 x 10^9 Hz
Cell phones (CDMA): about 2 x 10^9 Hz
WiFi (b): about 2.4 x 10^9 Hz
Microwave ovens: about 2.4 x 10^9 Hz
WiFi (a): about 5 x 10^9 Hz
Visible light: about 5 x 10^15 Hz
Medical X-Ray: about 3 x 10^19 Hz

Note that the first seven examples are all within about one order of magnitude of one another at 100 to 5000 megahertz. Visible light, however, is about 1 x 10^7 - or more than a million times - more energetic than the high end of WiFi and cell phone radios. Medical x-rays are a thousand times more powerful than visible light.

So comparing cell phone radios to x-rays is probably not a real valid comparison.

Visible light: about 5 x 10^15 Hz

Think sunburn.

Jack, I think the detrimental danger item is the handset. Your cell phone is a radio transmitter, too, right next to your skull. The towers aren't the only transmitting thing, communication is a two-way proposition.

And the transmissions other than your individual cellphone, fill the air everywhere we go, indoors or out. We breathe in a veritable flood of frequencies -- radio, TV, microwave relays, satellite freq's 'scanning' over us, plus of course the other terrestrial radio transmissions: fire, police, aircraft, and plain ol' citizens-band busybodies. I try to imagine a way to make them visible to see around us in the air, like if some freq's could be shafts of purple light, and other freq's in other colors, all crisscrossing the ambient we're in.

Oh, and then there's the standing EMF around the high-voltage power lines, the ones under which you find all the 4-leaf and 5-leaf and 6-leaf clovers growing ....

And there's this: The Biggest Breast Cancer Risk Factor That No One Is Talking About, By Lucinda Marshall, AlterNet, October 23, 2008.

The most deafening silence, however, is about radiation, which is a 100 percent known cause of cancer.

Before 1945, cancer mortality was very rare.

This breast cancer map from Centers for Disease Control data (see below illustration) identifies that within a 100-mile radius of nuclear reactors is where two-thirds of all U.S. breast cancer deaths occurred between 1985 and 1989.

My wife died of breast cancer, so I'm sensitized to it but not unreasonably fear fit. She was around radiology in clinics and hospitals, (a 'normative' amount ... as if hospital environment is normal), she had routine (annual?) mammograms and teeth x-rays, immersed in high-stress work, and had the genetic 'marker.' (Her grandmother died of it; our daughter worries about birthing a daughter -- it 'skips' a generation.)

All-in-all, I am intractably certain that the onset of her cancer and millions of others' is environmentally caused, and radio frequencies are a significant part of that. There is negligible harm at the receiving end; the important thing is to stay away from the transmitter.

Oh, and count 'doppler-shift radar,' radar guns, radar installations, radar pulses.

Tens, did that map also happen to show the percentage of the healthy US population within a hundred miles of a nuke plant? Or the percentage of hospitals with oncology wards?

I don't doubt a link to above-ground testing; three of five members of my immediate family who were downwinders in the 50s have cancer. But I think the map you cite has some serious selection bias to sort out.

i wonder if i could get hand cancer if i text all the time.