Reporting from San Francisco — San Francisco officials are debating whether to make this famously liberal city the first in the nation to require retailers to prominently post the amount of radiation emitted by cellphones.
Although there is no scientific consensus that the ubiquitous devices cause health problems, Mayor Gavin Newsom plans to call for an ordinance next month that would require the conspicuous display of radiation levels wherever the phones are sold.
Some hail the proposal as evidence of San Francisco's long tradition of environmental activism; this was the first city in America to ban plastic bags and prohibit a class of chemicals called phthalates from use in children's products. Others view the move as proof of the increasing nannification of government, or as one online critic said, "Thank Newsom we will be saved from our own dimwitted choices."
The city's Commission on the Environment has been drafting a series of recommendations, which include a call for the federal government to reevaluate its limits on cellphone radiation and require warning labels on cellphone packaging. The resolution passed its first hurdle last week.
The proposal credits France for inspiration, because that country's Senate "is considering legislation that would restrict the promotion and sale of cellphones for use by children and would require companies to offer headsets for each phone sold."
A few days after San Francisco's action, a state legislator in Maine introduced a bill to make the Pine Tree State the country's first to require that the phones themselves be labeled.
The bill calls for "a warning label that advises people that the device emits electromagnetic radiation and exposure could cause brain cancer," said Rep. Andrea Boland, a Democrat and the measure's author. "It goes on to say that users, especially children and pregnant women, should keep [cellphones] away from the head and body."
This bicoastal legislative targeting of mobile devices comes as policymakers and consumers await the results of Interphone, an international study of cellphone radiation and brain tumors.
Some components of the study -- the United States did not take part -- have been released, although full publication has been delayed.
"The short-term studies [in Interphone] generally did not find risk," said Olga Naidenko, a senior scientist with the Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy organization. "The long-term studies did."
