A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

Children and Phones: The Health Risks

Toronto Star’s Series

July 11, 2005

The Toronto Star is running a series of articles on the growing use of mobile phones among children and whether the radiation exposure may endanger their health. The first, Kids at Risk?, appeared on Saturday, July 9, followed by Is Her Cell Phone Safe? on Sunday and "Can We Reduce Cell Phone Risk for Kids?" today. They feature many familiar members of the RF community, including Martin Blank, Om Gandhi, Henry Lai, Mary McBride, Jerry Phillips, Mike Repacholi, Norm Sandler and Mays Swicord —as well as Louis Slesin of Microwave News. In addition, there are a number of related stories posted on the newspaper’s Web site.

In Sunday’s piece, Star reporters Robert Cribb and Tyler Hamilton highlight the mystery of how language that downplayed an observed biological effect was added to a 1997 paper published by Jerry Phillips in Bioelectromagnetics. The last sentence of the paper states that the change in gene expression following exposure to mobile phone radiation, seen by Phillips, “is probably of no physiologic consequence.” But Phillips says that he did not write those words. “I have no idea how that statement got in there,” he told the Star. Phillips notes that Motorola's Swicord had originally asked for that language to be included in the paper, but he had refused. (Motorola helped pay for the study.) For his part, Swicord dismisses the allegation that he had interfered with the paper as “pure nonsense.”

You can access all the articles in the Toronto Star’s special report on cell phones here.