Cellphones probably don’t cause brain cancer and might or might not cause planes to crash, but researchers at the Italian Institute of Health in Rome are pretty sure that GSM phones could interfere with a person’s pacemaker, possibly causing them to have a heart attack:
They report in Physics in Medicine and Biology that the radio frequency signals from GSM phones passed straight through the standard filter device. “This phenomenon could pose a critical problem for people wearing pacemakers because digital mobile phones use extremely low-frequency signals, which can be mistaken for normal heartbeat,” explains Calcagnini. “If a pacemaker detects a normal heartbeat it will not function properly and could be very dangerous for the wearer.”
Newer pacemakers equipped with special ceramic electromagnetic filters appear to be immune to any interference from cellphones.
