Shielding Cell Phones, Portable Phones, and other EMF Sources:
Some Cursory Research & Recommendations
by Alan Muskat
www.alanmuskat.com
10/4/07
Overview
"The best solution I'm aware of (aside from getting rid of your cell phone and slowing down your life) is the BlueTube headset with a shielded holster (plus see recommendations for car & home use below)."
See also:
"Mobile Phones - Reducing Your Exposure"
Cell Phone War, one hour documentary
7-minute 'trailer'
This piece at least is quite sensationalist and not too informative.
Public Exposure: DNA, Democracy & the Wireless Revolution
another documentary
Lots of links here.
SARs
SARs are EMF radiation ratings, and
Powerwatch's opinion is that SARs are only minimally useful. If you are concerned about the SAR of your phone, then you would be much better using a personal-hands-free headset (especially the ones with "air, stethoscope" pipes where the wires stop at the microphone) which can reduce the effective SAR to your head by 500-fold, or using a 1cm foam spacer between the phone handset and your ear which will usually reduce the SAR by a factor of over 20-fold...
Shielding
Unlike cheap chips which don't work (see below) or using a phone with a speaker (which may not be acceptable in public places to you or those around you, this simple $50 solution makes sense to me. It looks dorky, but so does cancer. I imagine that, like the holster they also sell (see above), it shields the side facing your head while allowing the sound to pass through and the signal to exit the phone out the back (unshielded) side of the pouch– otherwise the phone wouldn't work. Now ideally, you should only have to buy one of these products– i.e., a shield that clips onto your belt. But I'd rather buy the holster and a decent earpiece so you can talk hands free.
Ear Pieces (headsets)
Testing has indicated that your headset can even act as an antenna and may actually raise the amount of radiation being directed into your head by more than 300 percent!
Apparently this issue is discussed in both documentaries listed above, but I haven't seen either. It's true that any wire placed in an EMF will have current induced in the wire, but as far as I know that doesn't mean the field is "directed" into the ear. This site however says it does happen and offers a cheap product (a $5 "ferrite snap bead") that I trust does prevent this.
But there is another problem with traditional earpieces: the speaker in the earpiece, like all speakers, has a coil, i.e., an electromagnet. This acts as an antenna which can pick up electromagnetic radiation and in turn radiate it into the head.
infrared
This article (from 2003) announces an alternative earpiece that uses an infrared signal. Infrared light does not induce electric currents in the human body and is widely believed to be safe (see here). But I don't know if this product is now available.
air
Powerwatch recommends the RF3 headset (illustrated, available for $33 here). Mercola used to sell it for the same price but he's come out with an improved yet cheaper version, the BlueTube Headset.
Keep in mind that if you're using an earpiece you're probably putting the phone near other organs besides your brain. If you have it on your hip and you're male, you might lower your sperm count. If you're female and pregnant, you could be hurting your baby (see also "Why Regular Hands-Free Headsets DO NOT Protect You from Cell Phone Radiation").
holster
To hopefully resolve this issue (assuming that radiation can't "curve around" the shield), you can buy and wear this shielded cell phone holster (see images on right), which you can buy for $50 here. My guess is you can probably make one by taking any cheap hip pouch and adding a piece of something like lead sheet metal).
Note that the pouch is only shielded on the side against your body, so the phone still works. Of course this doesn't protect anyone else (just like smoke from a cigarette is worse for the people around you, who don't have the benefit of the filter).
Car use
If you're in a car, even with the holster recommended above, I've read that the car frame catches the signal and can re-radiate it back to you (I've read this about metal boxsprings in bed frames as well; for that matter, I don't know what EMFs cars themselves emit). In a car it makes sense to me to have a rooftop antennae (receiver/transmitter). I don't know if the hands-free systems built into some cars have this, and I don't know of any aftermarket ones available. Short of that I would just somehow (securely) attach the phone outside of the car, which I imagine would help with reception anyway.
Home use
Here the same applies. It makes sense to me to have most of the reception and transmission work take place outside of the house. But I haven't looked into these options, and I understand that even then, you would have to consider and address the same issues associated with cordless phones (see below).
Wireless earpieces (Bluetooth)
Apparently wireless Bluetooth devices are not believed to be safe, only multiplying your exposure to EMFs.
Although [Bluetooth] works at a lower power, we cannot recommend it, as some people, and it is impossible at the moment to predict who, can be affected by levels of microwave exposure as low as 0.05 volts per meter. The effects reported have included memory, learning and concentration difficulties and behavioral disturbances…
http://www.powerwatch.org.uk/faq.asp
Bluetooth also pulses at 1600 Hz, again quite near the proton resonance frequency in the Earth's magnetic field. Bluetooth (also called Wi-Fi) is used to allow electronic devices to send data to each other, (e.g. PCs, modems and mobile phones, through to allowing kitchen appliances to 'talk to each other', and increasingly continuously active Bluetooth systems are being installed in more expensive cars. These expose the driver and front passenger to continually pulsing microwaves). We do not recommend the use of Bluetooth in your home, car or workplace.
http://www.powerwatch.org.uk/tech/pulsing.asp
Protective Chips
Biopro
For $35, a little piece of plastic that you glue onto the cell phone, and when EMFs go through it, it emits its own signal, apparently strong and irregular enough to turn the EMF signal into supposedly harmless noise. One of the more well-known is the Biopro chip. However, according to Powerwatch,
"I wouldn't go near that stuff with a very long pole. We have had an example of products from both firms and believe that they are completely ineffective and lack any scientific basis that would suggest otherwise. Our FAQ at chips FAQ was a generic criticism of these types of products, but it was all taken very specifically from a BioPro promotional site...
...having dissected the chip there is nothing in our opinion that could be capable of doing anything..."
They also point out:
An example of a typical "scam" scientific proof is that shown on most of the "BioPro" sites (see here,
under "Scientific Tests Prove That The BIOPRO Chips Really Work!"): This shows a supposed
study from a Dr. Braun, of the Reseach Institute for Vital Energetics. There is no link to the study
that the summary is supposed to be summarising. There is no data saying how many people were
tested, no scientific methodology, and no description of jargonised terms such as "t-Test". The
second paragraph states of a statistical verification, but there is nothing to say what this was or
how it was performed. 
There is no quantified definition of "a significant stabilization" in the third
paragraph, nor what the supposed "identical parameters" were. There are no tables of data or any
obvious pieces of information to come to the conclusions stated in the last paragraph. They site a
"research institute for vital energetics", yet if you use Google to search for it, you will only find
reference to it on BioPros sellers websites, which is not what you would expect to see if such a
place really existed (which it may do, but it is certainly unlikely to be a large or well-known
research institute).
This is followed by looking at "Stress Response" levels, which use arbitrary units and arbitrary guidelines to healthy and unhealthy levels. Not only does this mean that nothing they are showing is actually testable, but if they are going to assert an unhealthy level, you would expect to see a reference to a paper, journal or guideline that explains why this level is unhealthy, and what it means in real terms.
Even without the other points mentioned above, these references to the site on their own would be enough to make us completely discount the product.
Sounds like if you're gonna rely on this chip you should probably also choose to smoke Camels.
EMX
Apparently there are products that operate on the same principle and do work, but note last paragraph below:
What are EMX Biochips? Do they really work? EMX biochips are a technology based on genuine scientific research. These are not the same as protection devices that are widely marketed yet have no real effect (other than placebo). The EMX devices work on the basis of superimposing random, low frequency magnetic fields over other electromagnetic fields (EMFs) being emitted by other devices.
The theory behind this is that the extra fields hide the unwanted EMFs, in a similar way to music being played in a restaurant hides conversations between other people on nearby tables. A number of peer-reviewed scientific studies have been carried out and replicated, showing that this has genuine scientific basis.
While this appears to be effective, we do not think that increasing EMFs is an ideal solution, and we believe that other options should be explored first. For more information see [link]
Digital cordless phones and their base units emit pulsed microwaves and these can exceed the levels from an actual mobile phone in areas where the mobile phone service has good signal strengths. Holding a digital cordless (DECT) phone to their head will always expose the user to higher levels of microwave fields than they will ever experience (in public access areas) from a mobile phone base station. Most DECT base units continuously emit pulsed microwave radiation even when no call is in progress. The level is typically still over 3 V/m half a meter away from the base unit and can be over 1 V/m in rooms directly above. These are higher field levels than those measured from a typical mobile phone mast. If you are concerned about the potential adverse health effects from microwave radiation, you might want to think carefully about whether you want a DECT phone in your house. If you want it to monitor incoming calls when you are, for instance, at the bottom of the garden, then answer the call briefly, and have the main conversation on a normal wired phone when you go back inside. All types of microwave exposure at the levels received from handset use have been shown to produce genetic damage inside blood cells. Radio frequency radiation has been used for a variety of covert purposes for some :considerable time. It was used to deter the women at Greenham Common, some of whom still suffer ongoing health problems. The Soviet's irradiation of the US embassy in Moscow produced serious adverse health effects, including Leukemias and lymphomas, was the conclusion reached by a relatively recent reanalyzes of the Lilienfeld report (Refs) based on information from USA Defence Intelligence Agency papers that only became fully available following the Freedom Information Act. Over 23 years ago the US was well aware of both cognitive and biochemical changes in the brains of adults exposed to pulsed microwave radiation. It is also interesting to note that the microwave frequencies the Russians used in many of their microwave weapon experiments were around 1800 MHz the same as is now used in Europe for GSMI800 / PCN and for DECT cordless phones.
from What About The Cordless Phones I Use In My House?
There has been quite a lot of publicity about the research showing that using digital cordless (DECT) phones results in similar adverse health effects as using a mobile phone, including the risk of developing brain tumors [1,2]. This research seems to be scientifically sound and the evidence for problems is growing...
We have written a much more detailed article on DECT phones on the subscriber part of the website, available from [link].
from Are Digital Cordless Phones (DECT) dangerous?
Keep in mind that there are many other, much stronger sources of EMFs. For example:
2.5 mG is the generally accepted limit of ELF magnetic field exposure but no one tells you that the average hair dryer, vacuum cleaner or can opener you use EMITS AN AMAZING 300 mG or more!
Note (on the same page) that
you can reduce the EMF exposure from your hair dryer 90% or more by arranging to hang the dryer on a wall hook, get a flexible plastic hose for the nozzle, and direct the hot air to your head with the hose.
Here's more examples measured around the home & office:
.. the EM field around the power strip next to my desk is ENORMOUS... 2 to 3 times as large as that of the CRT monitor that I work from...
... the fan that moves air around the office creates a large and oddly shaped EM field...
... the air filter that sits quietly and unobtrusively in the corner creates a good sized EM field...
... my digital camera (5MegaPixles) generates almost no EM Field – right up to when I take a picture, at which point it creates a field more powerful than my CRT or the power strip. This is the camera that I hold RIGHT NEXT to my eye/face when I am taking pictures/video...
... light switches and dimmer switches generate more powerful EM Fields than I expected...
... the old office clock (circa 1970) generates an EM Field larger than my monitor...
... a hair dryer generated the largest EM Field that I measured – at least twice as strong as the power strip (I could actually not measure its relative strength as it was way off the scale)...
... my brand new all digital PDA/cell phone generates an EM Field less than 1/3rd of a cell phone that is only 2 years old (that does not mean that it is harmless, just that the EM Field is smaller)...