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CELLPHONES COULD REDUCE MALE FERTILITY, WARN SCIENTISTS
By John Walko
CommsDesign.com
June 28, 2004

http://www.commsdesign.com/news/tech_beat/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221023
38

LONDON - The safety of mobile phones is again under scrutiny as researchers
at an international conference on fertility taking place this week in Berlin
suggested that men who carry phones in their trouser pockets may be at risk
of lowering their sperm count.

Imre Fejes and colleagues from the department of obstetrics and gynecology
at the University of Szeged in Hungary said that heavy mobile phone user had
sperm counts that were up to 30 percent lower than non-cellphone users. The
team studied the mobile phone use and sperm counts of 221 men over a
13-month period. They asked male subjects how long they had owned a mobile
phone and for how many hours they carried it with them in stand-by mode.
Subject were also asked how much time the spent on calls each day. The
researchers drew comparisons between heavy cellphone users and non-users.

The researchers said they found that not only did using the phone affect
sperm count and the motility (speed of movement) of human sperm, but simply
having it switched on in a pocket was enough to cause harm. To date, it has
been assumed that low-power transmissions posed no health risk.

Full details of the study will be formally presented at the European Society
of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference in Berlin on Tuesday (June
29).

"The prolonged use of cell phones may have negative effect on
spermatogenesis and male fertility, that presumably deteriorates both
concentration and motility," the Hungarian team reported in an abstract
produced for the conference.

However, the scientists stressed that further work needs to be done to
confirm the findings and established the mechanism by which sperm count may
be reduced.

Early reports of the Hungarian work attracted skepticism from other
scientists who pointed to the contradictory results of other research in the
field. For instance, Lawrence Challis, emeritus professor of physics at
Nottingham University, who chairs the British government's Mobile
Telecommunications and Health Research Group, reportedly suggested that many
other studies on the health effects of mobile phones, including the impact
on fertility, were too theoretical and contradictory to draw firm
conclusions.

Hans Evers of the Academic Hospital in Maastricht, Netherlands, said
conclusions about the meaning of the study should wait until scientists have
been able to digest the results. "This research is interesting but raises
more questions than it answers," Evers said.

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