The city of Berkeley, California, passed a law that goes into effect next month requiring cell phone stores to inform customers about safety recommendations. The move reopened a decades-old debate about whether mobile phones cause brain tumors.
The ordinance, called the Right to Know law, will start to require retailers to give customers a handout, or display a sign in the store, telling them about federal guidelines on the amount of radiation that cell phones can emit and the instructions on safe phone use.
Lawyers and clinicians involved in creating the new law said that it is meant to make consumers aware of the already existing regulations. However, the information will also go beyond the current regulations by stating that children and anyone carrying their phone in a pocket or bra could be at increased risk of radiation exposure, said Joel M. Moskowitz, director of the Center for Family and Community Health at University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. Moskowitz was involved in creating the law.
What the law does not require is that consumers be provided information about the specific health risks of being exposed to radiation. Although Moskowitz said that it is "highly probable" that long-term cell phone use causes brain tumors, many experts think that the evidence is far from definitive, or that it shows there is no risk.
In 2011, the World Health Organization classified the kind of low-energy radiation that cell phones emit as "possibly carcinogenic" because of a link between cell phone use and a type of malignant brain tumor called glioma and a benign brain tumor called acoustic neuroma.