Mon Jan 27, 6:21 PM ET

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By Maggie Fox

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Drivers who use a cellular telephone, even with a "hands-free" device, suffer from a kind of tunnel vision that endangers themselves and others, US researchers said on Monday.

Legislation that seeks to make mobile telephone use by drivers safer by mandating the use of a hands-free device may be providing a false sense of security, they warned.

New York is the only US state that requires the use of hands-free devices for mobile telephone conversations while driving, but 30 others have been considering similar laws, as has the Canadian province of Newfoundland.

"Sometimes you have to actually do the silly study that shows the obvious," David Strayer, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Utah, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

Strayer, whose team has done a series of studies on cell phone use while driving, set up a driving simulator and put 20 volunteers in it. Sometimes they used a cell phone and sometimes they did not. Their reaction time, driving style and performance were monitored.

Writing in the March issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Strayer's group said use of a cell phone clearly distracted the drivers.

The finding adds to a series of similar studies-most notably a 1997 New England Journal of Medicine (news - web sites) report that found talking on a phone while driving quadrupled the risk of an accident.

"People, when on a cell phone compared to when they weren't, overall their reactions were slower," Strayer said. "They got into more rear-end collisions. They just kind of had a sluggish style that was unresponsive to unpredictable events like a car breaking down in front of them, a light changing and things like that." There was no difference, Strayer said, between using a hands-free or a hand-held cell phone.

IMPAIRED EITHER WAY

"You were impaired in both cases," he said. "That suggests to us that whatever legislation may be put into place saying you can do one but not the other...might send the wrong message and give people a false sense of security."

Perhaps even more disturbing, Strayer said, was the finding that the volunteers did not realize they were driving badly. "We asked people afterward how they felt they performed and they usually felt they performed without impairment and, in some cases, thought they drove better when on the cell phones," Strayer said.

"It is like studies that show 90% of people think they are better- than-average drivers. Forty percent of them are wrong." Strayer wanted to know why talking on a cell phone had such a profound effect on drivers, so his team set up a second experiment.

"We used an eye tracker-a really precise device that allows us to see where someone is looking," he said. They found that while the drivers looked at objects, in this case billboards, if they had been talking on a cell phone at the time they could not remember having seen them.

"There is a kind of a tunnel vision-you aren't processing the peripheral information as well," Strayer said. "Even though your eyes are looking right at something, when you are on the cell phone, you are not as likely to see it."

This included road signs, other vehicles and traffic lights. "This is a variant of something called inattention blindness," Strayer said.

Tests showed this kind of inattention did not affect drivers who were listening to music, to audio books or talking with a passenger in the car.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=571&ncid=751&e=5&u=/nm/
20030127/hl_nm/cellphones_driving_dc

Informant: Gotemf and Robert Riedlinger

Following is an excellent critique of the site "Base Station Radiation Maps for the City of Ottawa, Canada" by Clas Tegenfeldt.

The "emfinfo" site may seem worthwhile to read - at first, but it is a site designed to firmly dismiss any claim that EMFs, power frequency or RF, may be harmful in any way. The man behind the site remains anonymous and there is no clue whatsoever who are responsible for the site. The maps with cellular coverage measurements are also designed to calm people down, instead of decibel which is customary the color coding is done linearly, intended to give an even calmer message. The coding is not done according to field strength but as a quotient of the maximum safety limit in effect in Canada, thus making a statement "see how low this is", BUT no emissions are allowed breaking limits set in law - are they? Shouldn´t it be perfectly clear that cellular basestations/phones are within limits? The discussion about EMF health effects are concerning mechanisms not covered by the limits as of today.

I cannot recommend the "emfinfo" site at all since it is missleading and anonymous (for me anonymous sites are always suspect, cowardly).

/Clas Tegenfeldt

Informant: Don Maisch (excerpt)

and from the same informant:

The Body Electric
Are electrical appliances dangerous to your health?
Joyce Slaton, Special to SF Gate
Thursday, October 17, 2002
</>©>003 SF Gate

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/10/17/emfs.DTL

For decades, power companies and official scientific entities such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the World Health Organization have been telling the public that there are almost no credible health risks from electromagnetic fields (EMFs) that emanate from power lines, power transformers and every single appliance that runs on electricity. The official public-health-agency position is that, aside from a small increased risk of childhood leukemia, consumers are perfectly safe no matter how many appliances litter their homes and offices, or how many power lines exist nearby. But a newly completed $8 million, seven-year http://www.dhs.ca.gov/ps/deodc/ehib/emf/RiskEvaluation/riskeval.html study by the http://www.dhs.cahwnet.gov/ps/deodc/ehib/emf/ California Electric and Magnetic Fields (EMF) Program has something quite different -- and quite alarming -- to say.

"To one degree or another, all three of the scientists who worked on the EMF Program are inclined to believe that electromagnetic fields (EMFs) can cause some degree of increased risk of childhood leukemia, adult brain cancer, Lou Gehrig's disease and miscarriage," says Dr. Raymond Neutra, one of the scientists who wrote the report. Neutra is chief of the Division of Environmental and Occupational Disease Control for California's Department of Health Services (DHS), which ran the study with funding provided by the state's Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).

Considering that most of us work and live in areas full of electronics in appliances from refrigerators to television sets to computers, each of which emits more than one EMF frequency, the EMF Program's linking of health problems to the fields is cause for some alarm. If you sit in front of a computer all day long, should you be worried? Will you get a brain tumor if you live too close to a power line or routinely use a copy machine? Is that friendly-looking little electric pencil sharpener sending out waves of energy that'll kill you someday?

The answers aren't easy, but assessing your risk starts with some basic background on the fields. Artificially generated EMFs are produced when alternating current passes through a wire or device -- like when you flip on your computer, or pop bread down into the toaster. The force that's produced, an EMF, exerts pressure on everything around it -- your body, the kitchen counters, your desk, you name it. This pressure is not necessarily harmful. After all, you may remember from Science 101 that Earth has its own static magnetic fields, with magnetic poles located roughly at our North and South Poles. We don't fully understand why these magnetic fields exist or how they're generated, but humans evolved in their presence, and it's thought that many basic functions such as sleep and sense of direction are governed largely and unconsciously by these fields.

About a hundred years ago, however, humans started figuring out how to generate and use electricity, thereby changing the kinds of fields we are exposed to. These fields are not static, as are Earth's own EMFs. Human-exposure conditions created by artificially generated EMFs can vary dramatically according to the type of wiring, the number of appliances in an area, how many of those appliances are turned on at a given time and how close a person is to those devices. Exposure to EMFs can range from barely detectible levels (less than one milligauss, the unit used to measure magnetic fields) to quite strong levels (up to 100 milligauss and more).

Power companies and public-health agencies would have you believe that these artificially generated EMFs have practically no effect on human health. I was surprised when a communications officer at the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health told me flatly that "there are no known health effects from appliance EMFs" and then refused to let me talk to an FDA doctor to confirm or deny this statement. But despite this hard-line stance, evidence is mounting that, in fact, EMFs do affect health -- and not in a good way.

"There is some evidence to suggest that magnetic-field exposure reduces melatonin levels," says Dr. W. Gregory Lotz, chief of non-ionizing radiation for the http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/homepage.html National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). "It's an open question for now which needs more study, but at least some animal studies have shown melatonin changes."

EMF-related hormonal changes in the amount of melatonin your body produces may not, on the surface, seem like a big deal when compared to something as scary as a brain tumor. But melatonin has a far larger effect on your health than you may realize. The hormone, which is secreted by the pineal gland in the center of the brain, controls your sleeping and waking cycle. But melatonin also shores up your immune system, lowers cholesterol and blood pressure and, most important of all, is a potent antioxidant that plays a part in preventing cancer, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, diabetes and heart disease. Make no mistake: Anything that messes with melatonin messes with you in a big way.

"The effects of EMFs on melatonin have been known for at least 10 years, as has the evidence linking EMFs to cancers, Alzheimer's and childhood leukemia," says Libby Kelley, executive director of the http://www.energyfields.org Council on Wireless Technology Impacts (CWTI), a San Francisco-based nonprofit health-advocacy group.

Even the shadow of a threat from these potent killers may have you wanting to throw the computer and all your other electronics out the window and jump after them. But for most people, the dangers aren't as severe as they may seem at first.

For one thing, most of the risks associated with EMFs kick in when fields are at a strength of 3 milligauss and higher. According to the DHS' Raymond Neutra, most California office workers are exposed to daily fields at an average strength of 1.5 milligauss daily, well below the level of exposure known to cause deleterious health effects.

But don't be putting on the party hats yet -- though the average worker has a safe level of exposure, some workers may be getting stronger doses of EMFs due to faulty wiring or an unusually high number of appliances in some areas. And since the strength of EMFs increases as you get closer to an appliance, those working eyeball-to-screen on a computer many hours a day face some increased risk of harmful EMF exposure, as does anyone who works very near other office appliances such as fax machines, copy machines and printers. The more electronic equipment you have clustered near you and the more time you spend in the high-EMF zone, the greater the risk you face.

"Copy machines, as it turns out, have one of the strongest magnetic fields, and they increase as you get closer," says the NIOSH's W. Gregory Lotz. "I've seen some measurements taken a foot away from the machine. The lowest field measured was 2 milligauss. The highest was 40 milligauss. Electric pencil sharpeners are even worse -- I've seen measurements of up to 90 milligauss."

"People are practically wrapped around their equipment at home or at the office, and while you're working on it, it's working on you," says the CWTI's Libby Kelley. "It's one thing to pass by your microwave in the kitchen, which produces a very strong field but isn't typically used all day, every day. It's quite another to work 40 hours a week or more right next to a piece of equipment putting out a strong field."

So what to do about these potential risks? Well, you could pick up a http://home.t-online.de/home/electrosmog/ gaussmeter, easily available via the Web for $50-$100. This simple instrument definitively shows the strength of fields in a given area and may uncover potential problems. The DHS' Neutra, for example, used to work in an office where a gaussmeter showed that he and his colleagues were exposed to unexpectedly strong EMFs of 9 milligauss. After the faulty lighting circuit causing the strong fields was replaced, the EMF level dropped dramatically to normal levels.

If you're not quite worried enough to shell out for a gaussmeter or get your wiring checked by a competent electrician, there's a simple solution -- distance. Stay at least two to three feet away from your computer as you work, and make sure other appliances are at least that far from your work space. Move your desk if you have to, or cluster your appliances so that they are as far away as possible from where you generally work or hang out in your house. Practice prudent avoidance of EMFs and you will lower your risks.

Of course, these are just suggestions for what you can do on a personal level, and there's a limit to how much risk you can avoid. Moving farther away from your appliances won't do much if your home is quite near a power line, an electricity-generating plant or a power-company fuse box, where you are exposed to constant, ambient strong EMFs. And, until now, the location of these facilities and lines has been largely unregulated, with the power utilities deciding almost carte blanche where to place facilities. And, also until now, those utilities have shown a distinct tendency to ignore the mounting evidence of EMFs' effects on health.

"The EMF Program report is the strongest evidence yet of the health risks the power companies have been trying to pretend didn't exist," says Louis Slesin, publisher of http://www.microwavenews.com Microwave News, the definitive journal on EMFs and health. "The utilities have played a very sophisticated game and have managed to smother the health risks as a nonissue -- and, to an extent, it's worked. You never see coverage of EMFs in most media, and after the California EMF Program closes down there will be no research on the issues going on in the United States. The risks can be controlled, but only if the utilities stop pretending that there are no risks and start addressing them."

"Estimated lifetime risks smaller than the ones we've uncovered have triggered regulatory evaluation and sometimes actual regulation of chemical agents such as airborne benzene," says the DHS' Neutra.

Will the California EMF Program's report trigger increased regulation of the power utilities, bringing about some sorely needed changes in how power and its attendant EMF fields are allowed into our lives? Only if the utilities -- and their regulatory agencies -- start hearing a whole lot of protest from the public. Have you ever examined your PG&E bill closely? Ever wonder why there's a disclaimer releasing PG&E from responsibility over childhood leukemia on there? Take a good look -- and then think about what you'd like PG&E, the CPUC, the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory agencies to hear.

"As we bring more and more electronics into our homes and neighborhoods, we are being exposed more and more to EMFs," says the CWTI's Libbey Kelley. "We're already seeing breast cancer at younger ages, the onset of cancer at younger ages. It could be due to EMFs, environmental toxins or a whole combination of things -- we just don't know. Meanwhile, we have these aging electrical power systems, we're not looking at alternative power sources, we're building power lines and generating plants near homes. It's business as usual. Unless there's public outrage over making the world a safer place, the dangers are just going to continue."

For more information on the California EMF Program Report or plans for public hearings, or if you have questions about EMF health and safety, call the California EMF Program at Oakland's branch of the DHS at (510) 622-4300.

You may also call the http:/www.cpuc.ca.gov CPUC at (800) 649-7570, or the CWTI at (415) 892-1963.

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