Dialing "P" For Panic

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

It was the buzz of boardrooms, power lunches and anxious phone calls from the freeway. It was debated by stockbrokers, real estate agents, Hollywood producers and media Bigfeet. Mid-level executives who wouldn't leave home without a phone in their pocket -- or at their ear -- were putting off calls or finding other ways to make them. Sales of cellular radio telephones -- which had been growing at a sizzling 20% to 70% a year for the past decade -- were temporarily put on hold.

Do cellular phones really cause brain tumors? The safety of the ultimate yuppie accessory was called into question by the news that two prominent executives had been stricken by brain cancer (though the connection to phone use is unclear) and by a well-publicized lawsuit in which a Florida man charged that his wife's fatal brain tumor was caused by her cellular phone.

It was not the kind of evidence that would be accepted by the New England Journal of Medicine, but it struck a nerve. Viewers tuned in to hear David Reynard, the Florida widower, tell the story of his wife's death to Larry King, Bryant Gumbel, Faith Daniels and dozens of radio talk-show hosts. Sally Atwater, the widow of late Republican political guru Lee Atwater, got half a dozen calls from reporters asking whether her husband's brain tumor was linked to his constant cellular-phone use (she could not say). "It seems like yet another technology that is out to get us," said NBC's chief White House correspondent, Andrea Mitchell, who became addicted to her cellular phone while covering the 1992 election.

Even Wall Street took notice, knocking a couple of points off McCaw Cellular, Contel Cellular and Motorola the day after Reynard's appearance on the Larry King Live show, and then extending the sell-off through much of last week. The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association was finally forced to respond, announcing last Friday that it would fund new studies and ask the government to review the findings.

The phone flap is the latest in a series of scares linking everyday electrical objects (hair dryers, electric razors, electric blankets, home computers) to one dread disease or another. Most of the concern has focused on the low-frequency end of the spectrum: the electromagnetic fields surrounding power lines, electric motors and video-display terminals. Cellular phones occupy another part of the spectrum. They send their signals using very small bursts of high-frequency electromagnetic waves, or microwaves, favored for most over-the-air telecommunications.

The low- and high-frequency controversies have one thing in common: in each case the electromagnetic waves or fields are too weak to affect human tissue by any well-understood mechanism. They are not known to disrupt living cells or alter DNA the way X-rays and ultraviolet radiation do. If these fields do indeed cause cancer, it is by a mechanism yet to be uncovered.

Despite the panic, the case against cellular phones is nowhere near as strong as the ones mounted against electric power lines, electric blankets or even hand-held police radars. Dozens of highway patrolmen have come forward to complain of tumors of the eye, the cheek or the testicles (from jamming radar guns between their legs). And there is a growing body of evidence showing that living near power lines can quadruple the risk of contracting childhood leukemia.

Since 1982, 10 million cellular phones have been sold in the U.S., and so far there have been only a few anecdotal reports of brain cancers among users. Given the gestation period for most cancers, it may be some time before the true effects emerge.

No one really understands the long-term health consequences of holding a microwave transmitter next to your brain because nobody has thoroughly studied them. To ease fears, Motorola held a press conference last week and claimed that "thousands of studies" had proved their cellular telephones safe. But when asked to name three studies that showed the phones do not cause tumors, a company spokesman could cite only one 10-year-old report and two others with ambiguous results. "If that's the best they can do, they're in deep trouble," said Louis Slesin, publisher of Microwave News, a newsletter that has devoted extensive coverage to the risks of electromagnetic radiation.

Slesin recommends that cellular-telephone owners practice what he calls prudent avoidance. "If you can use an ordinary phone, do." If mobility is required, he suggests either a trunk-mounted car phone or a two-piece cellular model that separates the hand-held receiver from the microwave transmitter. (So-called cordless portable phones use a different frequency and far less power, and they have not been associated with any adverse health effects.)

The cellular-phone controversy could put a crimp in the industry's plans for growth. Motorola wants to build more powerful phones that can bounce their signals off low-flying satellites. Apple and AT&T plan to connect pocket phones, laptop computers and electronic notepads through a "wireless world" of microwaves. But before consumers buy into a pervasive network of cellular devices, they might well demand some answers about the one that is already in place.

With reporting by Janice M. Horowitz/New York