U.K.
Mobile Phones To Carry Health Warnings
The Standard
Journalist: Laura Rohde
November 27, 2000
The final
wording is being worked out, and by Christmas, all mobile telephone handsets
sold in the U.K. will come with leaflets warning of the potential health risks
the technology may pose to children, the U.K.'s Department of Health said on
Monday.
"The
leaflets should be available in the shops, probably before Christmas, but we
don't know exactly what date or exactly what they will say," said a
spokeswoman for the Department of Health who asked not to be named.
Already 34
million mobile handsets have been sold in the U.K., according to the
Federation of the Electronics Industry, a group representing the mobile
telephone industry. Some estimates have put a quarter of those users under the
age of 18, though the FEI feels that number "may be a little bit
high," according to an FEI spokeswoman who asked not to be named. About
4.5 million handsets were bought at Christmas last year, and sales are
expected to be high again this holiday season, the FEI spokeswoman said.
The
government leaflets are expected to warn parents to monitor and limit the
amount of time children spend talking on the mobile handsets. The warning is
based a report published in May by the U.K.'s Independent Expert Group on
Mobile Phones (IEGMP), entitled "Mobile Phones and Health." The
report is known as the Stewart Report after William Stewart, chairman of the
IEGMP.
The report
singled out mobile phone use by children, the elderly and the infirm as cause
for concern. "Children may be more vulnerable because of their developing
nervous system, the greater absorption of energy in the tissues of the head
and a longer lifetime of exposure. We believe that the widespread use of
mobile phone by children for nonessential calls should be discouraged,"
Stewart said in a press conference in May.
The IEGMP did
not set out guidelines for how many minutes per day would be considered safe
for a child to use a mobile phone, nor did the group give its age definition
of a "child." But the report did, however, urge the mobile phone
industry to "refrain from promoting the use of mobile phones by
children." Some companies currently allow for cheaper phone usage after 6
p.m.
At the time,
the Department of Health publicly welcomed the report's findings, adding that
the government has already commissioned an additional "multimillion-pound
research strategy, spanning several years." The department said it would
print leaflets to be enclosed with mobile phones, warning of possible health
risks to children, according to Yvette Cooper, minister for public health.
"The
leaflets aren't really news. I guess it's the fact that we're almost ready to
publish them that is causing attention," said a Department of Health
spokeswoman on Monday.
Two articles
published on Friday in the medical journal the Lancet presented conflicting
views on the safety of mobile phones. The Lancet articles, by Dr Kenneth
Rothman, of Epidemiology Resources in Boston, and Gerard Hyland, a theoretical
biophysicist at the University of Warwick in England, look at the issue from
the viewpoints of epidemiology and mechanism, respectively.
In his Lancet
article, Rothman found that driving while using mobile phones was the greatest
health risk posed by the technology. Heavy mobile users were involved in twice
as many fatal road accidents as light users, according to Rothman. The Stewart
Report recommended that drivers should be "dissuaded" from using
either handheld or hands-6.00 phones while driving.
And while
both Lancet articles agree that there is no conclusive evidence about the
possible health risks posed by mobile phones, Hyland claims there is enough
evidence that "the low intensity, pulsed radiation currently used [in
mobile phones] can exert subtle non-thermal influences," especially in
the case of children, putting them at increased risk of headaches, memory loss
and sleeping disorders.
Furthermore,
Hyland criticizes the mobile telecommunications industry for hiding behind the
Stewart Report. "The Stewart Report, published in May, 2000, makes some
sensible recommendations, but unfortunately some of its grayer areas are now
being exploited by the industry to obfuscate the issue," Hyland said in
the article.
"The
Stewart Report did state clearly that mobile phones were not proved to cause
adverse health effects," the FEI spokeswoman said. "When it comes to
the leaflets, we don't know that the Health Department have confirmed they
will be available before Christmas, but we agree that first of all, the health
and safety of children are a top priority."
As for the
study promised in May by the Department of Health, little progress has been
made on that front. "We said in May that we had commissioned a study. The
group that will take that study forward has not yet been established nor have
we determined how much it will cost," said the Department of Health
spokeswoman.
