Anyone who uploads videos of their scenic walk in a rural area with 5G is exposed to almost twice as much radiation as someone in a city, according to a new study.
Researchers believe the additional radiation is not coming from 5G cell towers, but from users’ own mobile devices working overtime to spread the signal in rural areas.
A team from the Swiss Institute of Tropical and Public Health (Swiss TPH) tracked the exposure of 5G mobile phone users to radio frequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) in two cities and three rural communities.
RF-EMF is the medium by which radio waves transfer energy, allowing wireless devices to communicate over frequencies that include microwave radiation, which in the wrong circumstances can generate a dangerous amount of energy.
The team found that the average exposure in rural areas was 29 milliwatts per square meter (mW/m2) when charging, almost three times the safety risk threshold recommended by the World Health Organization. 10mW/m2.
That amount was also much higher than the amount recorded by phones loading content in the two Swiss cities, for which the team found an average reading of 16 mW/m2.
The measurement represents how much radio frequency energy passes through a given surface (such as human skin) in the path of these wireless signals.
According to a new study, anyone who uploads rustic photos of their farm or posts videos of their scenic walk in a rural area with 5G is exposed to almost twice as much radiation as someone in a city. Above, the first 5G ‘Optus’ mobile tower erected in a suburb of Canberra, Australia
RF-EMF is the means by which radio waves transfer energy, allowing wireless devices to communicate over frequencies that include microwave radiation, which in the wrong circumstances can deliver a dangerous amount of energy.
“In summary, this study shows that environmental exposure is lower when the density of base stations is low,” said the study’s lead author, epidemiology researcher Adriana Fernandes Veludo.
“However,” he added, “in such a situation, emissions from mobile phones are much higher.”
“This has the paradoxical consequence that a typical mobile phone user is more exposed to RF-EMF in areas with low base station density,” according to Fernandes Veludo, a doctoral student collaborating on 5G research. GOLIATH Project.
But Fernandes Veludo also noted that the new findings “could underestimate the actual exposure” from these 5G mobile phones, when used in rural areas.
While European nations consider those levels to be 29 mW/m2, they are well below the looser limits in the United States.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has set the maximum allowable exposure level at 10,000 mW/m2.
The launch of 5G has sparked conspiracy theories that the new form of wireless technology somehow causes Covid-19 or could even be. a new secret and high-tech form of mind control.
While the new research out of Switzerland does not assess health risks, it does provide detailed new information about what people are exposed to in today’s world settings.
In both city and rural tests, researchers conducted comparisons of “microenvironments,” where different factors come into play, including: residential neighborhoods, industrial areas, schools, public parks, and public transportation. Above, the data from the ‘maximum load’ experiment
The possible underestimation is due to how Fernandes Veludo and his colleagues first collected radiation data from their 5G mobile phones.
The team measured exposures in each of the five test municipalities by traveling to specific locations using a backpack with a portable device that measured RF-EMF exposure plus a smartphone equipped with sensors and radiation monitoring software.
‘We have to keep in mind that, in our study, the phone measured about 30 cm (11.8 inches) away from the measuring device,’ Fernandes Veludo noted.
“A mobile phone user holds it closer to the body and therefore the exposure to RF-EMF could be up to 10 times higher,” he said.
The Project GOLIAT team tracked RF-EMF output from cell tower base stations and mobile phone devices in two cities. Zurich and Basel, against three rural towns, Hergiswil, Willisau and Dagmersellen.
In all five areas, they carried out comparative experiments in “microenvironments” where different factors and human behaviors come into play, including: residential neighborhoods, industrial areas, schools, public parks or traveling by public transportation.
But the researchers also performed all of these same experiments while the devices interacted with local 5G towers in two other common scenarios.
In the first scenario, the backpacker researchers collected data while the cell phone was in “flight mode” or “airplane mode,” meaning its sensors were mostly only exposed to the ambient signal coming from 5G cell towers. .
The exposure value of 29 mW/m2 was above the World Health Organization’s recommended safety threshold of 10 mW/m2, but well below US regulators’ own threshold limits. Above, a summer morning in the rural Swiss town of Zermatt with views of the Alps.
In the other scenario, “maximum data download was activated”, instead of maximum upload, when setting the phone to download large files from the internet.
The results of these other two tests, published online in the journal Environmental research in December, they were slightly less surprising, as urban areas showed greater exposure to RF-EMF radiation.
The average for their rural test villages was 0.17 mW/m2, while Basel’s average was 0.33 mW/m2 and Zurich’s average was 0.48 mW/m2.
“The highest levels were found in urban shopping areas and on public transport,” according to co-author Dr. Martin Röösli, professor of environmental epidemiology at the Swiss TPH and specializing in atmospheric physics.
Dr. Röösli stressed that all these values were “still more than a hundred times below the international reference values.”
In the maximum discharge scenario, the radiation increased almost uniformly to approximately 6-7 mW/m2, which according to the GOLIAT Project team probably comes from a technique implemented by 5G towers called ‘beamforming’.
As the name implies, ‘beamforming’ redirects and focuses signals from the tower directly to the phone to which it delivers the download information, creating increased RF-EMF exposure in the process.
The effect was slightly greater in both cities.
Fernandes Veludo stressed that this is only the first study of its kind. Future efforts to collect 5G levels in the environment for mobile phone users will continue, with repeat studies to be carried out in nine more European countries over the next three years.
