By Wendy Anders

While the latest craze of briefs that shield men’s genitals from cellphone radiation may work, are they really necessary?, asks The Conversation in a recent article.

Sales pitches for the undergarments include claims that protecting one’s testicles from radio waves emitted by cellphones will help maintain a robust sperm count and high fertility.

Urban myths that electromagnetic radiation in the radio frequency range can cause male sterility, either temporary or permanent, have been circulating for a long time.

As Timothy J. Jorgensen describes in his book, “Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation,” during World War II enlisted men would consistently and inexplicably volunteer for radar duty just prior to scheduled leave. They believed a rumor that exposure to radio waves from radar equipment produced temporary sterility, which the soldiers thought might buy them more leave time or perhaps get them home quicker.

The military asked Hermann Muller – a Nobel geneticist who found x-rays could cause sterility and genetic mutations – to use the same fruit fly experimental model to evaluate the effects of radio waves, continued Jorgensen in The Conversation.

Muller came up empty handed. No dose of radio waves produced either sterility or genetic mutations, thus he concluded they did not present the same threat to fertility as x-rays.

All electromagnetic radiation travels through space as invisible waves of energy. But it’s the specific wavelength of the radiation that determines its physical and biological effects. The shorter wavelengths carry higher amounts of energy than the longer wavelengths.

X-rays can damage cells and tissues because their extremely short wavelengths – one-millionth the width of a human hair – and thus are highly energetic and very harmful to cells, said Jorgensen. Radio waves, in contrast, have very long wavelengths – about the length of a football field, and have really low energies – too low to damage cells, said The Conversation.

Those on the infertility bandwagon seem to fail to recognize this crucial difference between the wavelengths of x-rays and radio waves.

The cautious reader may still protest: What about those sporadic reports claiming that cellphones suppress sperm counts?

Well, Jorgensen says, “For the moment, that’s all they are – sporadic reports, unconfirmed by other investigators. You can find all kinds of assertions about the effects of radiation on health, both good and bad. Most of the very limited “scientific” reports of infertility caused by cellphones, often cited by anti-cellphone activists, come from outside the radiation biology community, and are published in lower-tier journals of questionable quality. Few, if any, of these reports make any attempt at actually measuring the radiation doses received from cellphones (probably because they lack either the expertise or the equipment required to do it).”

Research that measures sperm counts is unreliable because counts can vary widely between normally fertile individuals and even within the same individual from day to day. Many factors influence sperm counts, and men who frequently ejaculate have lower sperm counts; those who ejaculate daily can have sperm counts 50 percent lower than men who don’t. Maybe cellphone users with lower sperm counts are just having more sex!

In short, says Jorgensen, infertility claims are not the consensus of the mainstream scientific community. Laboratories that specialize in radiation effects would by now be singing the cellphone infertility song the world over if such a real threat to men’s health existed, said The Conversation.

Current ideas about cellphones causing infertility are too weak to counter over 100 years of commercial experience with radio waves. “Radio waves have been used for telecommunication ever since Marconi first demonstrated in 1901 that they could carry messages across the Atlantic Ocean,” says Jorgensen.

These early radio workers were exposed to massive doses of radio waves, yet no fertility problems in them were reported. And if they didn’t have problems, how can the relatively low doses from cellphones have such an effect?

If you remain skeptical but aren’t quite up for a change in underwear style, just try using your shirt pocket, says Jorgensen.