San Francisco tentatively OKs cellphone radiation law

San Francisco is close to enacting a law that would require retailers to post signs stating how much radiation is emitted from cellphones.

The city’s Board of Supervisors voted 10 to 1 on Tuesday to approve the ordinance, which would require stores to provide each phone’s “specific absorption rate” — a measurement of radiation absorbed by a phone user’s body tissue that each manufacturer is required to register with the Federal Communications Commission.

The law, the first of its kind in the United States, would apply only to stores in San Francisco.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, who proposed the ordinance, is expected to quickly sign it into law after a 10-day comment period and a final vote by the Board of Supervisors.

“We think this is a modest and very reasonable measure that provides greater transparency and information for consumers to whom this is a concern,” said Tony Winnicker, a spokesman for the mayor’s office.

But cellphone industry advocates, such as CTIA — The Wireless Association, staunchly oppose the measure and say it could mislead consumers into believing that some cellphones are safer than others.

FOR THE RECORD:
A previous version of this article misspelled the last name of CTIA spokesman John Walls as Wells in some references.

Currently there no laws that require phones to be labeled as safe or unsafe, but a consumer is likely to make that inference themselves just by looking a phone’s specific radiation absorption rate if posted in a store, said John Walls, a spokesman for the trade group.

Every mobile phone sold in the U.S. is required to have a specific absorption rate, commonly referred to as a SAR rate, of no more than 1.6 watts per kilogram, according to the FCC.

The SAR rate for each phone sold in the U.S. is already available in the user manual of each phone sold and on manufacturer websites, Walls said. There are about 276.6 million people in the U.S. who use cellphones, he said.

“If you’re in the store and you’re looking at two cellphones and one has a SAR of 1.1 and another has a SAR of 1.4, it’s not far-fetched to say you’d think that the lower the SAR number, the safer the phone is,” Walls said. “But the problem is that that is simply not the truth. There is no safe, safer, safest in cellphones — they’re all safe or else the FCC wouldn’t allow them to be sold.”

Such SAR rates vary from phone to phone and scientific studies on cellphone radiation have made conflicting conclusions, with some showing there are no health problems linked to mobile phones and others finding the opposite.

San Francisco is not the first to consider such an ordnance. Earlier this month, the state Senate killed a similar bill for the state, and in March, Maine considered requiring cigarette-pack style warning labels on cellphone packaging, Walls said.

nathan.olivarezgiles@latimes.com