Is the low-level radiation emitted from cellphones bad for your health?
The scientific evidence is inconclusive, but the debate is nonetheless gaining steam as more and more smartphones fly off the shelves and into people’s front pockets.
The city of San Francisco is expected to pass a law today that will require retailers to display the amount of radiation emitted by the cellphones they sell. And an app that monitors the real-time radiation level of your phone is getting blocked from Apple’s App Store.
The San Francisco law will require stores in the famously progressive city to display the “specific absorption rate” level of every phone in 11-point type next to each phone for sale. The office of iPhone-toting mayor Gavin Newsom says it is not trying to be alarmist. Rather, it says consumers have a right to know this information, which cellphone manufacturers already provide to the government.
Meanwhile, Tawkon, an app that monitors cellphone radiation, has not been approved for inclusion in the App Store. A version of Tawkon is available in the RIM BlackBerry store, and the company says Google has encouraged it to continue developing a version for Android. But so far, despite meetings between Tawkon’s Israeli developers and Apple staff in Cupertino, the app remains absent from the biggest App Store of them all.
Tawkon isn’t giving up the fight. The company is petitioning Apple to greenlight the app, and has posted a video letter making its case on YouTube.
As we wrote in today’s paper, “Cellphone radiation is already regulated in the US by the Federal Communications Commission and the Food and Drug Administration, with an acceptable level of 1.6 watts per kilogramme of specific absorption rate, the unit used to measure such radiation. Phones on the market today have widely varying SAR rates, from 0.19 to 1.6.”
But a bevy of news stories, including a damning article in GQ and another one in Harpers, are stirring up new concerns, especially in the US.
More studies are planned, but with as many as half of all US wireless customers expected to have a smartphone by year’s end, it’s not unreasonable to think that this debate may have a very long half-life.
