The number of people who are alive and well today, directly BECAUSE they or someone nearby had_a_mobile_phone.

Excuse the shouting and thumping, but this is my #1 pet peeve, and should it arise is guaranteed to turn any dinner party deader than a Korean quarry worker or Apple sales projection.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of people alive now directly because of mobiles. Irrefutable. If you believe in the ‘golden hour’ of trauma management, you must accept that any device that gets you medical help faster is, by the law of averages and the number of serious injuries dealt with every day, going to save lots of lives every_single_day.

Anyone who objects to a local cellphone mast based on health grounds should have to do the following:

Be taken to an area of poor-to-non-existant coverage.
Injure themselves badly or invoke a medical condition so that their life is in serious danger if not treated urgently.
Look for a phone box.

Hopefully in a few generations the ‘NOHGs’ (Not On Health Grounds) will have bread themselves out of the gene pool, dying peacefully whilst out on a woodland walk, serene in the knowledge that the aneuyrsm / broken ankle / wrong-turning-resulting-in-hypothermia they suffered was infinitely preferable to being – all medical and scientific arguments to the contrary notwithstanding – slowly mobilised to death.

Gaa.