Valiant mice give lives to shut radiation scare-mongerers up

Forget everything you ever thought you knew about mobile phone radiation. Turns out those electromagnetic waves we’ve been vaguely worrying about for years could actually be good for the brain. Scientists at the Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centre have found that exposure to phone radiation may help protect against Alzheimer’s and reverse its effects.

Over ninety mice in Florida have given their lives to help scientists test this hypothesis – most of these brave rodent subjects were genetically altered to develop Alzheimer’s as they aged (who knew this was even possible? Don’t tell any evil geniuses), while some were left as your normal, run-of-the-mill vermin. For up to nine months, all the furry science martyrs were exposed to the electromagnetic field generated by a mobile phone for two hours a day. So, slightly less than your average teenager then.

If the phone exposure started when the mice were young adults (not a problem for their human counterparts) not even the genetically altered mice developed signs of dementia. What’s more, mice of a certain age already showing signs of the disease showed improvement when the phone exposure started.

Mice are very small, so what took months to show an effect on a mouse would take years to have the same effect on a human – again, not a problem for us phone-happy Western cultures. Obviously, one mouse-study in is in no way conclusive but it’s heartening news for anyone genetically pre-disposed to Alzheimer’s disease.

Is this simply a bold PR move by the secret society behind mobile phone prevalence? Probably not. Should we still be slightly concerned about all that radiation going in to our brains? Possibly. But when the poor test subjects finally croaked, autopsies didn’t find any abnormal growths in the brain nor any major organ defects.

We’ll leave you with this thought from Rebecca Wood, the chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust: “We don’t recommend spending 24 hours a day on a mobile phone – we don’t know the long-term effects, and bills could go through the roof.”