Cell phones may make people lightning rods

Amanda Gardner

Citing the case of a 15-year-old girl struck by lightning while using her cell phone in a London park last year, some doctors are warning against using the devices outside during stormy weather.

The girl survived but lost some hearing in the ear to which she was holding the phone.

She also suffers from physical, cognitive and emotional problems. She has no memory of the incident because the bolt sent her into cardiac arrest.

“This rare phenomenon is a public health issue, and education is necessary to highlight the risk of using mobile phones outdoors during stormy weather to prevent future fatal consequences from lightning-strike injuries related to mobile phones,” three British doctors wrote in Saturday’s issue of the British Medical Journal.

But other experts point to a number of variables that could have played a role in the accident.

“I am not aware of any research on a cell phone being a particular attractor of lightning,” said John Drengenberg, manager of consumer affairs at Underwriters Laboratories Inc., in Northbrook, Ill. “There’s nothing that would indicate they would attract lightning other than the fact that this girl with her cell phone and antenna would be something that would be the only thing that lightning would go to in that area.”

Lightning is the second-leading weather-related source of fatalities in the United States, according to the National Lightning Safety Institute.

National Weather Service data show that 67 people die out of the 400 people struck by lightning each year.

That’s more deaths than are caused by hurricanes or tornadoes. Only floods are more deadly.

According to the doctors writing in the British journal, the high resistance of human skin means that if lightning strikes, it is conducted over the skin without entering the body, resulting in a low death-rate phenomenon known as flashover.

But conductive materials such as liquids or metallic objects, such as a cell phone, disrupt the flashover and result in internal injury with greater death rates. The doctors are on staff at Northwick Park Hospital in Middlesex, England.

The doctors could not find similar cases reported in medical literature, although they did find three cases reported in newspapers in China, Korea and Malaysia.