Thursday, February 02, 2012

The SAR (cell phone radiation) safety warning your cell phone’s manufacturer doesn’t want you to see


The FCC requires all cell phone manufacturers to warn consumers to never carry their cell phone in their pocket or they will be exposed to radiation emission that exceeds federal safety guidelines.
The entire cell phone industry knows this dirty little secret  and they are hiding it from consumers!!  Nope, it’s not some wild conspiracy theory – it’s the ugly truth they don’t want you to know about!  Skeptical?!  I don’t blame you…. I couldn’t believe it myself.  But, here are the facts:
I discovered that the BlackBerry cell phone I purchased for my 16 year old daughter had an FCC-required consumer safety warning to never carry the phone closer than 1” from the body or radiation would exceed the FCC safety limit of 1.6 SAR (the measurement of heat absorbed during exposure to cell phone radiation).  She had been carrying it for 8 months in her pocket (as do most children, teens and young adults) receiving thousands of texts and phone calls each month with the phone directly against her body.  Because that particular phone had the highest radiation of any cell phone on the market, the amount of radiation emitted when closer than 1” from the body most certainly exceeded the 1.6 SAR safety limit.  The required safety warning which would have warned her to never carry the phone in her pocket was not in the user guide so we might have seen it; it was located on the CD that came with the phone which we had no hope of seeing as it was located in the bottom of the box; once I heard about the CD and found the silly thing, the safety warning which was supposedly on the CD could not be read on my MAC!  It required a PC to even be read.  Also, the elusive .pdf file which contained the safety warning was not referenced anywhere in the product literature.

FCC requires ALL cell phone manufacturers to warn users that the radiation level can be dangerous if carried in the pocket.  Were you warned?

After a bit of research, I discovered that ALL cell phone manufacturers are required to inform consumers of this warning although few consumers ever see it since the FCC allows this warning to be buried in fine print in an obscure place in the user guide within technical radio frequency emission jargon.  If you check every word of the user manual that came with your cell phone, you might see it.  Get out a magnifying glass, as it will be in incredibly small type font.  And, it will be buried in some FCC “compliance” section about radio frequency emissions or “separation distance”.  Go on, see if you can find it.
The FCC does little, if any oversight of cell phone manufacturers, so this industry-wide deception continues without consequence.  The CTIA (powerful cell phone industry lobbying agency) is aware of this industry-wide practice, and has done nothing to stop it.
Well… even if you did find the safety warning, you might not recognize what it implies.  Manufacturers have become really tricky about wording the warning in a way that makes no sense.  Instead of just writing,
“Don’t carry the phone in your pocket or you’ll be exposed to radiation levels that exceed the FCC-established safety limit,”
they write bizarre, misleading “suggestions”, like, “Always maintain a minimum separation distance of 1″ OR better yet… “Refer to body-worn configuration requirement”.

You are now warned.  Spread the word to children, teens and others who carry cell phones in their pockets!

Don’t let your kids carry cell phones in their pockets.  Be informed.  Find the safety warning for your phone and call your service provider and complain that the FCC-required safety warning needs to be in a prominent location in language a consumer would understand.  Better yet, write to the president of your cell phone service provider or file a formal complaint with the FCC.

Demand that the cell phone industry stop hiding the consumer safety warning!!  We have a right to know!!  What are they REALLY hiding?


“We’re all lab rats in the cell phone industry’s global experiment to prove that their products really DON’T have the negative health impacts that physicians and scientists throughout the world are warning us about.  Who do YOU believe?”  Cynthia Franklin,  Consumers for Safe Cell Phones
http://consumers4safephones.com/?p=70

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