Inner Ear Insult from mobile phones and ear phones

Abstract

There is widespread public concern about the potential adverse health effects of mobile phones and especially their associated base-stations. Alongside this there are hundreds of reports in the media about the health effects of mobile phones & base-stations. The scientific literature is large and confusing, also apparently showing very inconsistent effects across studies. Most studies on human hearing insults from use of cellular phones are controversial studies, many reports and reviews have been published, most concluding that there is little evidence for any adverse health effects that can be attributed to mobile phone base-stations such as: • Royal Society of Canada (1999) conducted Surveys in proximity to base stations operating in Canada and indicated that the public is exposed to extremely low intensity radiofrequency fields in the environment. • Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE, 2001) report that public exposure to radiofrequency fields near wireless base stations is far below recommended safety limits, consequently, wireless base stations are not considered to present a risk to the general population. • U.K. Advisory Group on Non-Ionizing Radiation (2003) note that exposure levels from living near to mobile phone base-stations are extremely low, and the overall evidence indicates that they are unlikely to pose a risk to health.” Also there are studies demonstrating that 10, 15, 20 and 30 minutes of Global System for Mobile Communications mobile exposure did not induce a measurable effect on the human auditory system as Hyland, 1999, do. In addition there are studies based on auditory brainstem response and middle latency response concluded that 30 minutes of mobile phone use has no short-term adverse effects on the human auditory system by Penafiel et al, 1997. On the other hand there are studies reported risky effects of mobile phone use on hearing. For example, Alsanosi et al, 2013, reported that use of mobile phone for 60 minutes daily for 3 years had significant effects on hearing threshold levels and distortion products otoacoustic emission in the test-ears, while non test-ears did not show any significant effect. This present results show a significant effect after a prolonged period of mobile phone use for 60minutes on 1000 Hz and 2000 Hz frequencies and average pure tone audiogram on the test-ears.