A huge increase in kids’ daily media use since 2004 “can be attributed to the transformation of the cellphone into a content delivery device,” says yesterday’s LA Times report on a Kaiser Family Foundation study. Get past the big number (7+ hours) and the study says nothing new: parents have worried about wasted time, bad influences, and threats to harmony from outside media since the dawn of civilization.
But a very new concern has emerged in the past few years: long-term health risks from radiation emitted by mobile media devices. The city of San Francisco will be considering legislation on this issue next week.
Last Sunday, the San Francisco Library hosted a panel discussion on teens and cell phone use and premiered a new video aimed at teenagers, Cell Phones: Just Like Cigarettes?, which draws parallels between the long-term health effects of smoking and “electro-smog” (the radiation emitted by cell phones and their transmitters).
Featured speaker Dr. Devra Davis, a Professor in Preventive Medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center and founder of The Environmental Health Trust, is “deeply concerned about troubling findings of serious health problems from cell phone use in countries where cell phones have been used for a longer period of time. Many governments, including Finland, Israel, Russia, China, France, Sweden and India recommend that children simply not use cell phones.”
Last September, Dr. Davis testified at a U.S. Senate hearing on cell phone safety. This month, the Maine state legislature will consider a bill requiring warning labels on cell phones. Next week, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom will introduce legislation requiring retailers in San Francisco to post information on Specific Absorption Rates (SARs), wherever cell phones are sold in the city (a ranking of all cell phones by SAR rate is available from this Environmental Working Group webpage).
More on the proposed legislation in an upcoming post.
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