cellphone Archives - Fran Moreland Johns

SOME LIFESTYLE CHANGES ARE MORE DIFFICULT THAN OTHERS

Telephone of olden days (Author photo)

We go way back, the beloved landline and I. Maybe not really as far back as the above instrument, which was actually rescued from my friend Cynthia who wanted to toss it. But I have loved my landline and it loved me back.

For my part, I listed its number on my business cards, letterhead and with countless agencies which will now have to be alerted about its demise. In return it faithfully showed me who was calling, played a pleasant little message to friends if I were out or (most often) to foes who sought money — either legitimately, for causes I support, or (most often) illegitimately.

Good old landline would also tell me, if I happened to be nearby and paying attention, exactly who was calling — giving me the option of answering before the friendly machine did. And most delightfully, it took messages from friends while almost never recording anything from the scammers, who tend not to leave their evil messages on answering machines.

It was also boldly proactive. If you left a message while I was out, it would blink at me ferociously on return until I played things back. Unlike the cellphone, which disappears messages with abandon and is still mildly bewildering after all these years, the landline saved me untold embarrassment from friends who sought to connect.

“You left a message on my cellphone?” Oh dear. “Two weeks ago?”

In short, my trusty landline has been, over the twelve years since I moved and had to change from the old trusty landline number, far more than just a relic of bygone days. But time came to hang it up.

(Another Author photo, after hanging up the phone)

AT&T finally pushed me over the edge. They’ve been trying to push friends of landlines over the edge for years by any means they can think of. Resistance has been fierce. Generally not for fleeting affections such as listed above but for truly valid reasons.

For one: not everbody in the world owns a mobile phone. I know that’s hard for anyone under 70 to imagine, but once there was life before cellphone towers. Also, cellphones can cost big bucks.

The main argument pro-landline, though, comes from people in remote areas where cellphone coverage is spotty to nonexistent. The telephone is both a friendline and a lifeline. I have friends in this category, as well as friends in cities like my San Francisco hometown, who are concerned about safety when the power is out.

“My mama,” says my friend Brian, “will shoot me if I give up my landline. When the earthquake hit? She was a hot mess until I got to my landline to assure her we were all okay.”

But apparently landline profit margins are thinner than the AT&T people prefer. They came up with a solution.

Several months ago, without so much as a heads-up — let alone an apology — my landline bill quietly rose from $60/month to something over $100. Because I have it on auto-pay, along with the confusing bills for cellphone and internet service I have had with AT&T for lo these many years, I managed not to notice the first month of astronomical charges. But not even right-brained I can overlook, for long, a bill that almost doubles without warning.

For $60/month I could gulp, but in light of the blessings above which I have long enjoyed, just pay up. A hundred simoleons? Nahh.

So off I went to the Verizon place. Josh the store manager, who was quickly called in because some little old lady was asking ridiculous questions, came up with the answers. I may be in love with Josh.

My trusty landline number will now go to a new iPhone 16e — like I needed another iPhone 16e — which the Verizon people threw in for free. It’s blue. Unlike my white phone, which I generally keep nearby and on which I actually take calls from the few who have its number, the blue phone will sit in the corner formerly occupied by the landline phone. Eventually I’ll come up with an explanatory message for it to offer. Then I’ll try to train myself to check for messages left by friends and the occasional scammer.

Meanwhile, because I may not be techonologically smart enough to unplug the old router and plug in the new without messing up my internet service, the Verizon people will send a technician over to do it. And rather than the three confusing bills AT&T somehow never let me combine into one, the Verizon people are combining all three services into one fathomable bill for me to auto-pay. Take that, AT&T.

All of the above might seem like much ado about nothing to you, but that’s because I’m older than you are.

Your messages will be welcome on the blue phone. Just please remember that it doesn’t blink at me.

OK, if you think it’s all just a lot of hysterical hooey about cell phones & radiation, you can click on to another page. But this op ed piece by public health expert Joel Moskowitz (with Diana McDonnell and Gene Kazinets) in the San Francisco Chronicle got my attention. Moskowitz is the Director of U.C. Berkeley’s Center for Family and Community Health.

A huge, 30-year study called COSMOS has been launched in Europe to determine whether cell phones cause cancer and other health problems. Meanwhile, policymakers in Sacramento are considering legislation to ensure people know how much radiation their cell phones emit. The wireless industry vigorously opposes such legislation. It argues that its phones comply with regulations, and there is no consensus about risks so people don’t need to know this. Our research review published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found alarming results to the contrary.

We reviewed 23 case-control studies that examined tumor risk due to cell phone use. Although as a whole the data varied, among the 10 higher quality studies, we found a harmful association between phone use and tumor risk. The lower quality studies, which failed to meet scientific best practices, were primarily industry funded.

The 13 studies that investigated cell phone use for 10 or more years found a significant harmful association with tumor risk, especially for brain tumors, giving us ample reason for concern about long-term use.

Do federal regulations adequately protect the public? The 1996 Federal Communications Commission regulations are based upon the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR), a measure of heat generated by six minutes of cell phone exposure in an artificial model that represents a 200-pound man’s brain. Although every cell phone model has a SAR, the industry doesn’t make it easy to find it. Moreover, children, and adults who weigh less than 200 pounds, are exposed to more radiation than our government deems “safe.”

So just for fun, I got out the 107-page User Guide that came with my cell phone. Full disclosure: my cell phone is turned off unless I’m out walking or traveling; it takes pictures but it doesn’t do apps. Still, those 107 pages say it can do all the fancy Stuff.

On page 81 I found the SAR data. Even if I wanted to decipher the very small print, there is no way any of it would be meaningful to a lay reader. It does say that “Your wireless phone is a radio transmitter and receiver. It is designed and manufactured not to exceed limits for exposure to radio frequency (RF) energy set by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of the U.S. Government.”

I do try to trust the U.S. Government. But since they once sent my then-Marine husband double-timing out of a foxhole toward an A-bomb blast with a radiation tag hung around his neck in the ’50s, it would appear we have long been open to experimentation about radiation damage. (He survived. The animals positioned closer to the blast site did not. No one will ever be certain how much damage was sustained by those Marines wearing radiation tags… but then, who knew we’d keep right on storing bombs and fighting senseless wars anyway?)

Another what-can-you-believe? comes from CNN’s medical guru Sanjay Gupta in this line from a two-year-old commentary on potential cell phone radiation damage still up on his blog:

Over the last year, I have reviewed nearly a hundred studies on this topic, including the 19 large epidemiological studies. I urge you to do the same and read carefully to see what you think. Here is an example from a Swedish paper showing no increased risk of a brain tumor, known as acoustic neuroma. (see study) As you read the paper, you will find they defined a “regular” cell phone user as someone who uses a cell phone once per week during six months or more.

Once a week? Hello? Even in Sweden, even a decade ago, did anyone with a cell phone not use it at least once an hour? This very old study did have a timeless conclusion: “Our findings do not indicate an increased risk of acoustic neuroma related to short-term mobile phone use after a short latency period. However, our data suggest an increased risk of acoustic neuroma associated with mobile phone use of at least 10 years’ duration.”

Moskowitz argues that it’s time to revamp FCC regulations, pointing out that it is not just heat transfer but also variations in frequencies emitted that could cause damage.

Most of us know something about potential damage lurking in our Stuff. But we tend to be slow learners, and our regulatory agencies tend to be even slower. Having just lost a greatly loved sister, a long-time smoker, to pulmonary failure, Moskowitz’ concluding paragraphs hit home:

We should address this issue proactively even if we do not fully understand its magnitude. Our government has faced similar public health threats in the past. In 1965, although there was no scientific consensus about the harmful effects of cigarettes, Congress required a precautionary warning label on cigarette packages: “Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health.” More specific warnings were not required until 1984: “Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, And May Complicate Pregnancy.”

Should we have waited 19 years until absolutely certain before we informed the public about these risks?

Although more research on cell phone radiation is needed, we cannot afford to wait. There are 285 million cell phones in use in this country, and two-thirds of children over the age of seven use them. Manufacturers bury the SAR within their owner’s manuals, along with safety instructions to keep your phone up to an inch away from your body.

Nine nations have issued precautionary warnings. It is time for our government to require health warnings and publicize simple steps to reduce the health risks of cell phone use.

Why not?

Government must inform us of cell phone risk.

Tag: cellphone

Saying Goodbye to the Landline

Is your cell phone frying your brain?