Mobile phones potentially dangerous in hospitals

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By Stevie Smith Sep 10, 2007, 14:21 GMT

With existing scare stories of mobile MP3 players causing potentially deadly malfunctions in consumers fitted with pacemaker hardware, it perhaps only follows that a team of researchers from Holland are now suggesting that mobile phones taken into hospital facilities could seriously affect sensitive lifesaving equipment.Late last week the Dutch research team, working out of the University of Amsterdam, revealed the results of a specific study had concluded that mobile phones should not be operational within a one-metre vicinity of hospital beds and vitally important medical devices, reports Reuters.Specifically, the team recorded close to 50 different instances of electromagnetic interference caused by the use of mobile phone handsets in hospitals, subsequently outlining that 75 percent of those cases could have posed serious risk to the function and benefit of closely situated machinery.The study, which was published in Critical Care, the online journal of BioMed Central, warned that critical care medical equipment "is vulnerable to electro magnetic interference by new-generation wireless telecommunication technologies with median distance of about 3 centimeters."While not all mobile devices pose the same level of potential danger to medical equipment, the study uncovered that handsets using the GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) signal were more likely to cause serious interference. The team tested the effects of close proximity mobile phone use across 61 medical devices. Some of the recorded effects caused by the handsets included unregulated rhythmic changes in pacemakers and also total failures in syringe pumps. Interestingly, despite the Dutch research findings, a recent gamut of tests carried out over a five-month period by the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota concluded that cell phone usage did not cause any serious interference in hospital equipment. The clinic conducted its research across 300 separate tests.

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