Handset Makers Back To Court Over Radiation Levels

from the sue-away dept

Thu, Mar 17th 2005 1:28am — Mike Masnick

Debates over whether or not mobile phone radiation is harmful never seem to get very far. Every other week or so, a new study comes out claiming proof one way or the other. At best, you can say the proof supporting the concept of dangerous radiation from mobile phones is "inconclusive." However, that's never going to stop lawyers. A bunch of lawsuits have been filed against handset makers for exposing people to radiation that might or might not be there. Those lawsuits were tossed out by a court saying that federal law prohibited them. However, an Appeals Court has reversed the decision, and the various lawsuits will procede. This doesn't mean that those filing the class action suits will win, but it does at least open up that possibility.

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dorpus, 17 Mar 2005 @ 2:32am

The Power of Placebo
What if you conduct an experiment in which you give black plastic boxes that look like cell phones to people, tell them that it emits deadly radiation, and then count how many of them get cancer?

This sounds like a classical problem for Poisson regression. What would be the autocorrelative structure, though? How would you explain log-odds ratios, logistic functions, or Pareto distributions to lawyers? If we pick different brands of cell phones as covariates, would we use the Akaike Information Criterion to compare models, or the Bayesian criterion?

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- Peter Kearney, 17 Mar 2005 @ 10:53pm
  
  Re: The Power of Placebo
  The original article contends that mobile phone radiation may or may not exist. This is exactly the story the industry wants people to believe.
  Its basic physics that when energy is sent through the air, in this case microwaves, they emit radiation. If you probe the industry they can't disgree on this one. The industry also agrees that most of the radiation is absorbed into the head when a person puts their phone to their ear, again common sense.
  The games played by the industry are based on questioning whether the radiation has any harmful effect on people. There have been huge numbers of studies done on this subject and its only a matter of time before the dam will burst. Scientists not paid by phone companies say it does have harmful effects and straight after studies are released the phone companies refute them.
  It will be very interesting to see what happens with this large class action law suit in the US from people who have brain cancer and claim its from using their mobile phones. This is not a spivvy action brought up by lawyers. Its a landmark case that could change the whole environment for recognition of the risk of using mobile phones.
  I talk with people each day who get health effects from using mobile phones, and I have a very high sensitivity to the radiation myself, so I know it real
  regards
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