Mobile
Phones - And How They Affect Children
This Is Leeds
Journalist: Tony Harney
January 28, 2002
A TASK force which will investigate the health threat of mobile telephones is being urged by a campaigning Yorkshire MP to focus on children.
There are 40 million mobile phones now in use in the UK – population 55 million people.
Harrogate and Knaresborough MP and former headmaster Phil Willis has spoken out often over the past 10 years about the possible health dangers of both mobile telephones and the masts which receive and send the microwave signals.
Responding to a Government announcement that a task force will soon be set up to investigate the safety of mobile telephones, he said: "There is a safety case to answer about mobile phone technology."
Funding of £7.4million is now being put in place to study effects on the blood pressure of users, links with brain cancer and leukaemia.
Welcoming the health investigation, amid fears the telephones could cause brain damage, Mr Willis said it came after years of campaigning by groups in the country.
Mr Willis has reservations about the part the telecommunications industry may play in the research.