People who believe that cell phones cause cancer and other illnesses just lost one of their most ardent scientific supporters.
Dr. Neil Cherry, a New Zealand biophysicist who spent much of his career collecting research papers that showed radiation emitted from cell phones is harmful to users, and who testified on behalf of a cancer patient in a high-profile lawsuit against the industry, died on Saturday of motor neuron disease. He was 57 years old.
His supporters, including environmental health advocates and ordinary citizens who believed they got sick from using devices that emitted electromagnetic radiation, mourned his death on the Internet.
"Despite his illness he has been working hard on his EMR research and also, despite his handicaps caused by the illness, assisting as much as he can to help people like me who have been badly affected by the emissions of RF (radio frequencies)," said one reader of the EMF-Omega-News newsletter.
"The world has been a better place for his living with such integrity and courage and fighting for the health of the people regardless of the communications industry trying to discredit him," the reader said.
Cherry and his colleagues were dealt a blow last year when a Baltimore judge threw out a closely watched $800 million lawsuit against the cell-phone industry. Judge Catherine Blake said that Dr. Christopher Newman -- who claimed his brain cancer was caused by frequent use of his cell phone -- did not have sufficient evidence to receive a trial. If the case had been allowed to move forward, it would have opened up the industry to more lawsuits.
The outcome of the Newman case, however, did not discourage Cherry, an associate professor of environmental health at Lincoln University in New Zealand, from continuing his research and proselytizing about the dangers of EMR waves around the world.
In 1994, Cherry was invited by a local primary school to present information he had gathered on the possible health effects a proposed cell-phone tower would have on the children at the school. He found that the tower emitted radiation at a frequency that would be harmful to a small child.
His recommendation that the school kill the proposal was adopted by parents and officials who voted to reject construction of the tower on campus.
Cherry spent many years and a great deal of his own money traveling the world collecting university papers on EMR research. He attended numerous meetings of environmental activists and presented research showing that almost all radio-wave-emitting technologies -- radar, power lines, microwave ovens, radio- and television-station towers, cell towers and cell phones -- pose some kind of risk to people.
His position was that ideally, people would not use cell phones but would rely on only land-line communications.
"We (humans) are very good conductors (of cellular transmissions), so most of the cell-phone signal goes through us, and very little actually goes to the cell site," Cherry said at a microwave-radiation conference.
While the long-term effects of cell-phone use are not known, the New England Journal of Medicine and Journal of the American Medical Association both ruled out infrequent and short-term cell-phone use -- up to five years -- as a cause of brain cancer. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization have said no evidence exists that cell-phone use is harmful or beneficial to a user's health.
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3.5G in the works: Its high-speed 3G mobile Internet service has barely taken off -- but Japan's NTT DoCoMo is already considering ways to release 3.5G services to the public.
The company is tinkering with a technology called high-speed downlink packet access, which would let customers receive data on their cell phones at speeds up to 14.4 megabits per second -- seven times as fast as the company's current 3G Foma service, the International Herald Tribune reported on Monday.
DoCoMo, which is Japan's No. 1 cell-phone service provider, admitted it has signed up only 1.5 million 3G customers after a couple of rocky years of offering the service, which has been plagued by glitches. The 3G service lets users retrieve Internet content on their cell phones at speeds of up to 2 megabits per second.
With the HSDPA technology, users would be able to browse Web pages faster on their cell phones than on a desktop computer using a broadband connection.
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Vodafone flexes muscle in Japan: In perhaps a message to DoCoMo, Vodafone, the world's largest cell-phone service provider, has decided to market itself more heavily in Japan.
The company, which owns J-Phone, the third-largest cell-phone company in Japan, has decided to replace the J-Phone brand with its own name. "By adopting the Vodafone brand, J-Phone aims to create an even stronger brand presence in the Japanese market by combining Vodafone's association with reliability and global services," a J-Phone -- or Vodafone -- representative said in a released statement.
By the end of October, the company will change the name of its J-Phone retail stores and service in favor of the Vodafone brand.
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A wireless editor departs: Bill Menezes, editor-in-chief of Wireless Week, has left the publication to become an assistant business news editor at the Denver Post.
Wireless Week editor Monica Alleven will replace him, Menezes said in an e-mail to his colleagues.
While staffing at Wireless Week, a bimonthly publication frequently distributed at wireless tech tradeshows, was shaken up by management last year, Menezes said his departure "results from a long-held wish to take my career in a different direction."
Last November, when Wireless Week laid off almost half its editorial staff and reduced its publishing cycle to twice a month, Menezes defended the magazine and the wireless industry it covers, saying it was all "financially very healthy."
