Countries Warn on Children's Cell Phone Use

According to the Independent, the French government is cracking down on children's cell phone use. New legislation bans cell phone advertising targeted at children under 12. A year ago France's official Agency for Environmental and Occupational Health Safety said that parents should not give small children mobiles. So far this is the most radical recent action any government in the world has taken regarding cell phones. Other countries have posted warnings such as:

• Israel’s Health Ministry: Advises caution
• Toronto’s Department of Public Health: Children under eight should only use mobiles in emergencies; teenagers should limit calls to 10 minutes or less.
• Russian Ministry of Health: Young people under 18 should not use cell phones.

The hazards of cell phone radiation have been a controversy largely because many studies that have been presented as reliable were done by the cell phone industry itself. More recent independent studies though prove the opposite and warn of an impeding brain tumor/cancer epidemic that would take a decade or more to appear in following generations.

In the spring of 2008 scientists at universities of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Aarhus, Denmark conducted a very large study involving 13,000 children that showed a direct link between cell phone use of pregnant women and behavioral problems in children they gave birth to. It was published in the July 2008 issue of the journal of Epidemiology and is particularly significant because one of the authors has been skeptical of mobile phone risk to health.

It is also no secret that some studies conducted in previous years that made headlines in international papers warning people of long term cell phone dangers were cited in American papers with completely different conclusions that mislead the public, such as that the study was inconclusive and shows no link to health problems.

On a personal note, ditching my cell phone was the only cure that finally resolved my 8 year struggle with migraines that no doctor or specialist could tell me the reason for. So far I have been without a cell phone for 10 months and haven't had a single migraine.