Health advocates invade Verizon store

As dialogue grows louder regarding health risks associated with cell phone radiation, legislation is being pushed across the country to include warning labels on mobile devices.

No such law is yet to pass anywhere, but that didn’t stop a few San Francisco health advocates from taking the controversial issue into their own hands.

Health advocates from the California Brain Tumor Association and Stop Smart Meters! took to Verizon’s Market Street store in San Francisco, attaching warning labels on in-store products as a protest of what they claim to be legal bullying by phone companies against cellphone safety, according to Indybay.

No arrests were made as the police were not summoned, and the store reacted by simply removing the labels.

Not all the employees were on board for the removal process however, as one Verizon employee stuck a label to his own phone in opposition to his employers attempt to suppress health information.

According to the Indybay article, advocates cite health effects correlated with cellphone radiation like brain tumors, breast cancer and an increase in autism among other consequences.

This, though, is in stark contrast to information provided by the World Health Organization, which states that electromagnetic fields produced by mobile phones are only possibly carcinogenic and that:

“… to date, no adverse health effects have been established as being caused by mobile phone use.”

In 2011, the SF Board of Supervisors passed a “right to know” law in 2011 that required a point of sale fact sheet to be issued to consumers that included “hidden” owners manual information from the manufacturers themselves.

The fact sheets instructed users to keep their phones 5/8 of an inch away from their body at all times. The law was swiftly repealed after a lawsuit from the cellphone companies cited infringement of their first amendment rights.

Similar cell phone legislation has been pushed in Maine, Hawaii and California, though no legislation requiring cellphone warning labels has been passed in the United States.