Mobile Phones and Male Fertility: the debate continues on BBC Radio 4 

A poster campaign in men’s washrooms at over 130 service stations, bars and gyms across the UK is warning that carrying a mobile phone in a front trouser pocket could affect men’s fertility

Professor Malcolm Sperrin, Director of Medical Physics at the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust and  IPEM’s spokesman on electromagnetic radiation was invited yesterday to comment on the validity of this assertion in a ten-minute slot on BBC Radio 4’s daily consumer affairs programme “You and Yours”.

The posters have been produced by The Radiation Research Trust, a charity that aims to highlight  dangers of electromagnetic  radiation from phones and other gadgets. They say that their warning comes from medical experts.  Brian Stein, a trustee of the organisation said: “In the last 10 years about 20 pieces of research have been done showing correlation between mobile phones and male fertility.” He also quoted a recent paper from Loughborough University which found that phones in a pocket with other metal objects had SAR levels over the RF exposure standard. (A phone’s SAR or Specific Absorption Rate is a measure of the amount of radiofrequency energy (RF) absorbed by the body when using the handset. These levels vary by model and carrier, and also with the type of date being transmitted.)

Professor Sperrin emphasised that much research had been done on both sides of the argument but there was no proof of a drop in birth rate relative to measured fertility in a population.

The Health Protection Agency also confirms that there is no evidence that mobile phones have an adverse effect on fertility, and says that guidelines for exposure to radio waves have been agreed internationally, and underpin product standards of mobile phones. Official government advice was therefore to ignore the posters. 

Professor Sperrin went on: “The point that is raised about these safe limits by the various research is that it is impossible to say that a risk doesn’t exist. But that isn’t the same thing as saying there is a risk. If the posters encourage people to do self examination, that is a good thing. But we don’t want to encourage people to assume that there is a well-proven medical link here because I don’t believe that there is.”

The International Agency for Research on Cancer this summer classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as “possibly “ carcinogenic to humans (Group 2b) based on studies of cancer in animals and humans. It felt research was inadequate to draw conclusions for other types of harm. The full report Carcinogenicity of Radiofrequency Electromagnetic Fields was published in The Lancet Oncology in June.

Mr Stein is himself “severely electro-sensitive” and told listeners he bleeds internally if in a WiFi environment. He said: Isn’t it a sensible precaution not to put your mobile phone with keys and your coins in your pocket next to where you’re storing your sperm?”.

Professor Sperrin doesn’t put his phone in his front trouser pocket either. “It digs in,” he said.