San Francisco Abandons Mobile Phone Radiation Labels 132
judgecorp writes "The city of San Francisco has abandoned a law proposed in 2010 which would have required mobile phones to be labelled with their radiation level. Mobile phone industry body the CTIA fought the bill in court, arguing that there is not enough evidence of harm. The city is not convinced phones are safe — it says its decision to abandon the law is simply based on the legal costs."
so consistent (Score:2, Interesting)
Casual, recreational use of a variety of brain-altering drugs: fine.
Anonymous bathhouses where one can - hetero or homo - have sex with a variety of strangers: lifestyle choice.
Cellphones: "We should make sure we warn people about the dangers!"
Thermal- not really a problem (Score:4, Interesting)
I slightly disagree. Radio waves can cause thermal heating in human tissue (close enough to the emitter, if there's high enough power),
Exactly.
Cell phones don't have enough power to cause significant heating.
It turns out that the body is very well adapted for cooling. The circulatory system is a good heat exchanger; it takes a lot of input to overload. Going outside on a 90 degree (F) day, maybe. Lying in the sun and absorbing a kilowatt per square meter, maybe. A one-watt (average transmit power) cell phone, no.
There is one exception to the fact that the cooling system of the body regulates the temperature, actually, the one place the blood vessels don't reach: the lens of the eye. You can't have blood vessels running through the eyeball, since it has to be transparent! If the scaremongers had been saying that cell phones caused glassblower's cataract, they would have had a mechanism. But that isn't the charge. (And, in any case, the power of a cell phone is just way too low to cause this-- you just don't get much heating from the 0.7 to 1 watt average transmit power of a cell phone to cause any damage. Don't stare into a red-hot furnace, though.)
[...] Although I haven't seen enough specific data on cellphones in this regard, I don't expect the effects to be significant.
You got it. The effect is not significant.
Re:can't get past the hype and bad studies (Score:2, Interesting)
I am not making any claim whatsoever regarding the harmfulness of cellphone radiation. I just point out that saying "non-ionizing" is not sufficient refutation of adverse health effects. Non-ionizing radiation can be harmful. The thermal effect is well known and can clearly damage tissue if the radiation is strong enough. Override the safety features of your microwave oven and you'll quickly find out that non-ionizing radiation can indeed damage DNA molecules. Other effects have not been conclusively proven, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
If I say that cellphone radiation is harmful, you're right to ask me for evidence. But if you claim that cellphone radiation is harmless, then I'm equally right to ask you for evidence. There's no shame in saying "I don't know". Don't make claims that you can't substantiate.