The bottom line: Don’t talk on your mobile while it’s charging and never use it within 50cm of your groin and you shouldn’t keep your cellphone in your pants pocket.
A groundbreaking study done in Israel, albeit on a very small sample group, has found a stark correlation between sperm abnormalities and cellphone use. The main dangers are using it while it’s charging, or for more than an hour a day – or using the phone less than 50 centimeters from the groin, says the team in their seminal paper “Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality.
Male fertility has been declining for decades, for a great number of reasons. The short list includes pollution, sleep deprivation, gender-bending chemicals in everything from pesticides to fertilizers to cleaning solutions, tight briefs, overindulgence in Jacuzzis and smoking. Now an Israeli team has shown that radiation from mobile phones, an invention of the last 20 years, is also a potential cause.
Cellphone “abuse” can double the probability of decline in sperm concentration, the team found.
As for how the cellphone measures against other risks to sperm count and quality, that hardly matters, points out paper coauthor Martha Dirnfeld, director of the Fertility and IVF unit at Carmel Medical Center and a professor at the Technion in Haifa. Indeed many things can and do affect male reproductive capability, but there’s nothing a given man can do about pollution. They’re unlikely to stop smoking, either, and can’t change the concentration of fluoride in the water – but they can stop using the phone within whispering distance of their gonads and sleeping next to them. The cost is negligible and the benefit could be enormous, if one values one’s sperm. “Even 50% compliance would be something,” Dirnfeld says.
Pretty soon none of us will be able to do anything without some detrimental effect on our health.