Emergency Call: San Fran Aims Law at Cell Phone Risks

When someone is looking to buy a cell phone, they don’t generally want to hear about how the World Health Organization has classified such devices as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” But the city of San Francisco now requires that such a lovely piece of info be passed along to its more than three million residents upon purchase.

The city's board of supervisors approved a new law on Tuesday, giving their "final approval to a law that would require retailers to disclose information about the radiation emitted by cellphones. No other city in the nation has passed similar legislation," according to The Bay Citizen.

Earlier this month, “the San Francisco Board of Supervisors gave preliminary approval to a revised ordinance that would require cell phone retailers to provide information to customers about radio frequency energy emissions from cell phones,” according to CNN.com. “ This energy can be absorbed by the head and body, and retailers also would have to explain how consumers can limit this exposure.”

It certainly doesn’t sound like a plan that cell phone brands or wireless carriers would be embracing anytime soon. At least they would have some ammo of their own: The US National Institutes of Health published research in March that said, “Although there remains some uncertainty, the trend in the accumulating evidence is increasingly against the hypothesis that mobile phone use can cause brain tumors in adults.”

With the new law, retailers would need to prominently display a poster that shows that the phone gives off radio frequencies and distribute a fact sheet to all with the information as well.