The Perils of Having a Mobile Cellphone to One's Health

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Cellphones have always been a daily staple of our lives today. It has helped us communicate faster and better towards our peers, no matter the distance. For many, living without cellphones would create challenges in communicating with others. However, shocking discoveries by experts manifest that several terminal diseases could be acquired through high cellphone usage and that also create a significant amount of pollution. With that in mind, cellphones should be limited in use for emergency reasons, professional endeavours, (i.e. business, communications, etc.), and security purposes, but not used for anything other than the aforementioned reasons. Cellphones should not be banned; rather, they should be limited. They have become a useful part of most people’s lives, but should not be exploited at the expense of our health and environment. Despite the great advantages of cellphones, they have also a negative impact on the atmosphere. On average, cellular phones are “kept for eighteen months, are disposed into a cupboard and eventually discarded with the household trash” (Osibanjo and Nnorom, 2008). It was projected in the United States that 130 million mobile phones would be discarded by 2005, resulting tin 65,000 tonnes of mobile phone waste. The bitter part about this is that less than 1% (1.5 million cellphones) of the mobile cellphones is collected for reuse and recycling. The main reason why these mobile phones are thrown away is because people prefer to take the upgraded, “smart” version of the mobile phone, rather than their older counterparts (Osibanjo and Nnorom, 2008). Such examples are the materials that cellphones are made from like gold, antimony (Sb), arsenic (As), beryllium (Be), cadmium(Cd), copper (Cu), lead (Pb), nickel (Ni), and zinc (Zn) , which are later transformed into waste products and are highly toxic (Kumar Kaushal and Nema, 2012). Cellphone batteries, for instance, have cadmium that is “enough to pollute 600 litres of water”. Furthermore, its small size provides enough to pollute the air if burned in incinerators, or could leach into water if buried in soil (Kumar Kaushal and Nema, 2012). Mobile phones do not only produce environmental pollution, but can also lead to various health abnormalities. These health abnormalities, which include auditory problems, nausea and other head-related problems, damages in the nervous system, cancers such as tumours in the brain and lung, result from acquiring radiation in mobile cellular phones (Repacholi, 2001) . The origin of these diseases is linked mainly to Radiofrequency radiation (Armstrong and Bastawrous, 2013, and Kumar Kaushal and Nema, 2012).

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