The cellphone radiation controversy takes a new turn

The sudden firing of head football coach Jim Leavitt for going all George Patton on one of his players is not the biggest controversy this week on the campus of the University of South Florida in Tampa.

That honor goes to Gary Arendash at the school's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, who reports that mice exposed to cell phone radiation lost some of the beta amyloid plaques in their brain and gained relief from the animal version of Alzheimer's Disease.

Arendash got his exposure by building a big mouse condo of plastic boxes containing mice bred with a gene making them prone to the disease, and exposing them for two hours per day to a centrally-located antenna blasting radiation at cell phone frequencies, with enough power to simulate holding the phone to the head.

(Looks a bit like the condo I stayed at in Chengdu, China last year, where I borrowed WiFi from the neighbors.)

His press release at the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease gushed:

“If we can determine the best set of electromagnetic parameters to effectively prevent beta-amyloid aggregation and remove pre-existing beta amyloid deposits from the brain, this technology could be quickly translated to human benefit against Alzheimer's Disease” said USF’s Chuanhai Cao, PhD, the other major study author. “Since production and aggregation of beta-amyloid occurs in traumatic brain injury, particularly in soldiers during war, the therapeutic impact of our findings may extend beyond Alzheimer’s disease.”

Now just wait a gul-durn gol-darn, the research community responded. Scientists have been looking at cell phones as a possible cancer cause for over a decade. It can't possibly be a cure for Alzheimer's. Can it?

"This is nonsense," said the editor of Alzheimer's & Dementia, which is out with a new study linking dietary supplements to improvement in patient cognition.

Or is it?

Two years ago researchers at the University of Sunderland in England claimed they could reverse Alzheimer's with a helmet that bathed the patient's head in infrared (left). Infrared light is an electromagnetic frequency. Cell phones are a higher electromagnetic frequency.

Obviously the only thing we know for certain right now is that Dr. Arendash's job prospects at this point look better than those of Coach Leavitt. (Can you say grant proposal? I know you can.)

Arendash himself admits he was surprised by his results. Tests are needed of a variety of frequencies, at a variety of strengths, to see if there is something therapeutic here.

Some of those tests are going on right now, albeit without controls, inside your own head. We have all been absorbing increasing amounts of radiation, at a wide variety of frequencies, since the dawn of radio a century ago. Our iPhones and the wireless web just increase the load.

Is it possible that Alzheimer's isn't an inevitable result of aging on Earth? Call me and let's talk about it.

I'll be on my cell.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com