Slashdot Mirror
San Francisco Requires Cell Phone Radiation Warnings
Lord Ender writes "Poor phone reception may soon be a selling point in San Francisco. A city ordinance was just approved which requires those selling phones to indicate the 'specific absorption rate' (SAR) caused by the radio transmitters in the phones. Cell phone industry groups opposed the law. The FCC already requires phones sold in the US to have SAR levels below 1.6 W/kg, though adverse health effects from such levels of radio exposure have never been conclusively demonstrated."
Recently it was reported widely that “airport scanners, power lines, cell phones and microwaves” ain't got nothin' on medical scanning radiation. Now people are asking for tracking systems and calling them a threat.
...
I'm not really worried about cell phones as much as when I roll into my new dentist's, get 18+ x-rays of my entire mouth for their record. Find out I need two inlays on the lower left. Come back in two weeks and get two more xrays so they know where to drill. Come back in two weeks to get the inlays put in only to have them re x-ray the inlays after they were in to make sure they were in properly since they couldn't floss between them. What. the. hell? Can't you use regular light and your eyeballs to set those in there? I mean, I'm glad you did a good job, I just don't know what to do about this malignant jaw tumor now
My work here is dung.
Poor reception means that the phone has to transmit at higher power to reach the cell base station.
WARNING: The Sun is radioactive! Avoid using it to make phone calls. -- San Francisco.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Please educate yourself.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
What about second hand radiation? Maybe they should only call in their own homes!
There are populations that have been using cell phones for almost 30 years, and before them there were groups that used hand held radios of similar power levels for another few decades. Granted, the levels of use are probably going up, but in many cases the power output is also going down so you're talking about minimum 30 and up to 60 years of use, it shouldn't be too hard to get a group of long term radio and cell phone users together and have them take a health survey. In fact, you probably wouldn't even have to, all you'd really have to do is look at the rate of brain cancers compaired to the rate of cell phone adoption and if there's a strong correlation you can investigate further (here's a hint, there isn't one).
If everything is labeled "warning" including things that have shaky evidence to support it, eventually warnings become less useful and ignored.
That being said, I really do not see what "information" is being provided.
Just like a bunch of Californian wussies to get all worried about a little bit of cell phone radiation, when we have FREAKING UFO's flying around everywhere.
Did anybody tell them that when the wind blows East to West that dust from the Trinity site settles in the fog?
Put sharp 1 inch spikes on the phone. They will have the added benefit of preventing pigeons from landing on your phone.
... not just a crown. They drill a screw down into your jaw or skull bone, then mount a tooth on it.
I would *definitely* not want to have problems with that, they could take as many X-rays as they want. At 0.005 millisieverts (see parent's link) that's still 1/20th the amount of a chest Xray.
Now off to brush my teeth compulsively for the next hour.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
And semi-coincidently California now has so many warnings on so much stuff that the warnings do get ignored.
CA should just save time and require everyone and everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) within the magical borders of CA to be labeled as being possibly cancerous.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Over here, the SAR has to be noted with the technical details for at least 10 years now. Not a cellphone less was sold.
bickerdyke
It will kill you by heating and denaturing the proteins in your brain, but it will not give you cancer. Only ionizing radiation has sufficient power to damage DNA.
> its better safe than sorry.
Right. What if living in houses causes cancer? It's never been proven that it doesn't. Better live outside.
> Count me in with the "nut jobs"...
Ok.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I'm curious what the measure of cell phone radiation exposure is in bananas?
From wikipedia:
"""
Many foods are naturally radioactive, and bananas are particularly so, due to the radioactive potassium-40 they contain. The banana equivalent dose is the radiation exposure received by eating a single banana. Radiation leaks from nuclear plants are often measured in extraordinarily small units (the picocurie, a millionth of a millionth of a curie, is typical). By comparing the exposure from these events to a banana equivalent dose, a more realistic assessment of the actual risk can sometimes be obtained.
The average radiologic profile of bananas is 3520 picocuries per kg, or roughly 520 picocuries per 150g banana. The equivalent dose for 365 bananas (one per day for a year) is 3.6 millirems.
"""
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
Studies have shown that nearly all of people who contracted cancer had lived in a house within the past 5 years. I'm surprised there isnt more of an uproar.