Should You Be Snuggling With Your Cellphone?
By RANDALL STROSS The New York Times November 13, 2010
WARNING: Holding a cellphone against your ear may be hazardous to your health. So may stuffing it in a pocket against your body.
I'm paraphrasing here. But the legal departments of cellphone manufacturers slip a warning about holding the phone against your head or body into the fine print of the little slip that you toss aside when unpacking your phone. Apple, for example, doesn't want iPhones to come closer than 5/8 of an inch; Research In Motion, BlackBerry's manufacturer, is still more cautious: keep a distance of about an inch.
The warnings may be missed by an awful lot of customers. The United States has 292 million wireless numbers in use, approaching one for every adult and child, according to C.T.I.A.-The Wireless Association, the cellphone industry's primary trade group. It says that as of June, about a quarter of domestic households were wireless-only.
If health issues arise from ordinary use of this hardware, it would affect not just many customers but also a huge industry. Our voice calls - we chat on our cellphones 2.26 trillion minutes annually, according to the C.T.I.A. - generate $109 billion for the wireless carriers.
The cellphone instructions-cum-warnings were brought to my attention by Devra Davis, an epidemiologist who has worked for the University of Pittsburgh and has published a book about cellphone radiation, "Disconnect." I had assumed that radiation specialists had long ago established that worries about low-energy radiation were unfounded. Her book, however, surveys the scientific investigations and concludes that the question is not yet settled.
Brain cancer is a concern that Ms. Davis takes up. Over all, there has not been a general increase in its incidence since cellphones arrived. But the average masks an increase in brain cancer in the
20-to-29 age group and a drop for the older population....