While microwaves are not much different from the rest of the radiation that bombards us from the moment we are born, the proliferation of cellular transmission towers produces many areas of locally intense microwave radiation. Each cell is a small geographic region covered by a single transmission tower. As you move from one cell to another, your phone call is handed off to a different tower. The more cells there are, the better your reception, because you are never far from an antenna that links you to the rest of the network. Consequently, cellular phone companies are pushing to install more and more antennas as the mobile phone craze spreads.
Health risks The health risks of cellular communication, if indeed there are any, remain uncertain.
Very little research has addressed the dangers of prolonged, low-level microwave exposure. Everyone with a microwave oven knows that intense microwaves can damage tissue by heating it, but so far no one has found a significant direct biological effect of low-intensity microwaves on living tissue. However, several experiments on laboratory animals and epidemiological studies on humans have suggested a link to cancer. For two years beginning in 1990, researchers at the University of Washington monitored 200 rats, while giving half of the rats continuous, low-level microwave exposure. While none of the 155 metabolic conditions tracked varied in any significant way between the two groups, the exposed rats developed primary tumors at four times the rate of the non-exposed rats.