By Cecilia Kang
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2010; A01
original link: www.washingtonpost.com
San Francisco, a city that banned the plastic bag, now has waded into the muddy territory of cellphone radiation, setting off a call to arms in the $153 billion wireless industry.
Last week, the Board of Supervisors passed a law — the first in the nation — requiring retailers to inform their customers how much radiation the cellphones on their shelves emit, so shoppers can figure out how close the devices come to the upper limits on radiation set by the Federal Communications Commission.
The law, which goes into effect early next year, didn’t mention the word, but it was all about one thing: cancer, and whether cellphones cause it.
cellphone industry answered with its own C-word — cancel. After the vote, the CTIA wireless trade group called off its fall show, scheduled for San Francisco. Elsewhere in the country, the industry has been more successful. Earlier this year, similar laws in Maine and California were beaten back by the makers of the iPhone and Droid and the telecom giants that carry those phones on their networks.
“San Francisco has gotten out front on a number of issues historically,” said John Walls, a CTIA spokesman, “but in this case, we are concerned they are leading the pack down a wrong and misleading road.”
Lacking conclusive evidence one way or the other, studies relating to cellphone safety are being hurled about frenetically as cellphones grow ever more powerful and pervasive: Americans have more than 285 million mobile phones at their ears, and the number in use globally reaches 4.5 billion.
In 2006, Lennart Hardell, a professor of oncology and cancer epidemiology at the University Hospital in Orebro, Sweden, reported that adults he followed who had used cellphones for more than 10 years “give a consistent pattern of increased risk for acoustic neuroma and glioma,” forms of brain tumors. That study has been used as the basis for public health alerts by way of commercials, billboards and warning labels in nations including Britain, Israel, Finland and France, but it has had little resonance in the United States.
Continue reading about Cellphone Industry Attacks San Francisco’s Ruling On Radiation