Warning: Yakking away on your mobile may harm your baby

GIVING UP BOOZE and fags is no longer enough for expectant mothers who want a healthy baby. According to new research, they have to give up yacking away on their mobile phones too.

A huge study of 13,000 kids has come to the conclusion that pregnant women who talk on their cells, even as little as twice a day, profoundly impact their child’s behaviour and ability to form social relationships. The problem is magnified if the kids themselves use mobile phones before the age of seven.

Although this came as something of a surprise to the Californian and Danish boffins from the universities of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Aarhus who carried out the survey, Russians claim to have known about the risks for some time. A Russian radiation watchdog outfit even told the Independent that the risks to unborn babies from mothers chatting away on a mobile was "not much lower than the risk to children's health from tobacco or alcohol".

This latest study reckons mums who use mobile phones were 54 per cent more likely to have kids with behavioural problems, and that this statistic shot up to 80 per cent when the kids themselves were, for whatever nonsensical reason, given mobiles before school age.

Mobile mummies were also 25 per cent more likely to stunt their young ‘uns emotionally, 35 per cent more likely to produce hyperactive, Ritalin requiring offspring, 49 per cent more likely to have kids who just couldn’t behave properly, and 34 per cent more likely to have little terrors who would find it hard to relate to other kids.

The results will be tougher for the mobile giants to shrug off this time, because one of the boffins who conducted the study, UCLA's Professor Leeka Kheifets, has previously been notorious for his DEFENSE of the mobile phone industry, once writing that there was “no consistent evidence of a causal relationship between exposure to radiofrequency fields and any adverse health effect". He’s sure changed his tune (or ringtone).

But the researchers still aren’t entirely certain that their results lead unequivocally to the conclusion that it is, indeed, cell phone radiation causing kids to go loopy. They reckon that it’s just as likely that parents who spend most of their time with a phone glued to their ear, pay too little attention to their kids, which would result in the same behavioral and emotional dysfunctions. Either way, for your children’s sake, hang up the goddamn phone already! µ

L’Inq
The Independent

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