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Monitor health risk is rubbish

So says leading monitor industry analyst, and who are we to argue

The debate over the health implications of sitting two feet away from a computer monitor all day, goes on. Yesterday, many of the UK's national newspapers devoted many column inches to a survey which claimed radiation from monitors represented a health risk. This radiation, it was suggested, can penetrate concrete walls more than eight feet thick. And if it can blast through concrete walls, just think what it must be doing to you. Perhaps not surprisingly, the research had been commissioned by a company selling a device which it claimed could limit the damage this radiation might cause. The company is called Tecno Ao and is based in Swindon. The device costs £67. No links between the radiation alluded to and documented health problems have been made. Click here if you want to read more details of the science behind the health scare. Bob Raikes, senior analyst at Meko, said that while the Tecno Ao report demonstrates a positive effect from the company's device, it has no specific measure of a negative effect from the monitor. "It's basically rubbish," Raikes said. "As far as we can tell, this paper has not been subject to peer review. We think that they have targeted the monitor as a way of exploiting public concern over issues that have been raised in the past." Anthony Fraser, managing director of Tecno AO said: "We are not saying monitors will make you sick, but that prolonged exposure to electro-magnetic radiation can aggravate symptoms in susceptible people. 23 per cent of the population are sensitive and 24 per cent have no reaction at all. The rest of us are somewhere in between." He said that computers and mobile phones are far too useful for us to give them up, and that what we need is a way of mitigating their effects. ® Additional reporting for this story was by Linda Harrison.

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