Warnings in mobile phone leaflets now tell people to avoid carrying phones on your body or using them near your head!
As my regular readers will know I have always held clear views on Mobile Phones (see Mobile phones and cancer risk - it’s your call).
Firstly, they may well cause both malignant and non-malignant brain tumours. If you look at the non-mobile phone company sponsored research, it is pretty consistent in its claim that the risks increase with use, over time.
However, the rate of brain tumours is so low in the population as a whole that it is hard (unless the research sample taken is over a few million people) to draw conclusions that will stand up with any mathematical significance. This week a study expresses concern; next week another study will be produced by the mobile phone boys muddying the waters.
I am far more concerned that the issue of brain tumours (and remember my 26 year-old daughter died of one) takes peoples focus away from issues of potentially greater harm - like the electromagnetic forces damaging developing nervous and brain tissue and interfering with a persons natural body energy, something Western Medical Science knows frighteningly little about.
Police high-powered mobile phones have been associated with everything from headaches, to sickness, to deafness. Research on carrying a phone, even only on standby, has shown lowered immune systems and even lowered sperm count.
This has huge implications for our overall health, particularly in young people.
Having been a part of the marketing and business team that launched Mercury 1-2-1, a new mass-market breed of mobile phones in the UK in the early nineties I have a fair bit of knowledge on this subject you may like to read my article Mobile Phones its your call. My view is that these large corporations need to act responsibly. Far from frightening people, an on pack warning if done voluntarily will gain them enormous respect.
Take the case of the cigarette boys in the USA. When the first law suits came out, it wasnt a case of You caused my cancer, but You told a Senate hearing that nicotine wasnt addictive, whilst all along having research indicating it was! You should have been responsible and told us.
Now the mobile phone boys have decided to warn us but in a way that seems more about protecting them from harm, not my children. Apple tell people to keep their turned-on iPhone at least 15mm away from the body; Blackberry tell customers to use their phones hands-free or keep them an inch from the body (especially from the abdomen of pregnant women!), while other manufacturers have various and similar warnings.
Unfortunately your kids are unlikely to notice these warnings as they are buried in the small print of the leaflets inside the box!
Last year various countries within the International Interphone study broke rank and expressed real concerns over long-term mobile phone usage, contradicting the broad safety conclusions of this important, but yet again Telecom-funded, study.
At that time an independent report by mobile phone and EMF experts throughout the world asked me to comment on their own findings in their research review and I said this, which I stand by, In a world where a drug cannot be launched without proof that it is safe, where the use of herbs and natural compounds available to all since early Egyptian times are now questioned, their safety subjected to the deepest scrutiny, where a new food cannot be launched without prior approval, the idea that we use mobile telephony, including masts, and introduce WiFi and mobile phones without restrictions around our 5 year olds is double-standards gone mad.
I speak, not just as an editor and scientist that has looked in depth at all the research, but as a father that lost his beloved daughter to a brain tumor.
Mobile Phone company directors, if they care about their public image should start to behave more responsibly, reflecting that they too are mothers and fathers, and custodians of shareholder interests shareholders that themselves use mobile phones.
It is ludicrous to publicly claim that mobile phones are safe whilst simultaneously warning people not to carry them on their bodies or to use them hands-free.