WASHINGTON-The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association agreed last week to insure Wireless Technology Research L.L.C. scientists against lawsuit damages, while dashing speculation that it wants to dissolve WTR over the indemnification issue.
The stalemate over legal coverage threatened to shut down the already struggling research program, with WTR scientists refusing to work without protection and carriers fearful of unlimited liability.
Despite CTIA’s announcement following last week’s board meeting, it remains unclear whether a solution is at hand. There are strong indications that CTIA and WTR still have sharp differences that are being played out behind the scenes.
“It is an unfortunate reality of modern life that even scientists cannot carry out their work without the threat of lawsuits,” said Thomas Wheeler, president of CTIA.
Wheeler described as “ludicrous” a claim by a knowledgeable source that CTIA wanted to disband WTR as a result of the months-long fight between himself and Dr. George Carlo, head of WTR, over liability regarding litigation alleging that cellular phones cause cancer and other allegations that the industry and WTR are covering up potential health risks from pocket phones.
When asked if he ever approached Elizabeth Jacobson, a Food and Drug Administration official with oversight of phone safety, about restructuring RF bioeffects research, Wheeler said that-except for meeting with the FDA regulator last week prior to the board meeting-he had neither met with nor spoke by phone to Jacobson during the last four months.
Jacobson said she met with Wheeler in her office Oct. 2, and they talked about a variety of issues including her view that more research is needed. Wheeler, she said, was noncommittal about whether industry would sponsor more RF studies. Jacobson, while playing down CTIA’s alleged desire to kill WTR, said talk of revamping the research program has been around from the start.
Jacobson also said that when she appeared before CTIA’s CEO council last week she was specifically questioned about WTR and responded with general support for the research program, but declined to be pulled into any power struggle between CTIA and WTR.
No court has awarded damages against any carrier or manufacturer to date for cases involving cellular phones and health effects. Several cases are pending.
The wireless industry is funding WTR’s five-year, $25 million research program to determine whether the highly popular phones pose a public health problem. The research is in its fourth year.
“The action by the CTIA’s board is an endorsement of the WTR program and its research into possible bioeffects of wireless telecommunications products,” said Mike Volpe, spokesman for WTR. But he added that “the negotiations on secondary insurance between WTR and CTIA are still underway and no contract has been signed.”
The federal government, while saying existing scientific data is inadequate to ascertain whether phones pose a public health problem, declined to shut down the industry after the issue gained national attention in early 1993 when a Florida man alleged his wife’s fatal brain cancer was caused by cellular phone use.
The most recent revelation about pocket phones is that they may be causing or contributing to headaches, according to ongoing research in Europe.
Most of the 40 million wireless phones are handheld. Mobile phones in vehicles do not present a risk because antennas are not attached to the handsets. Antennas are built into pocket phones, which customers place against their heads to use.
Even if the indemnification issue is resolved it may not save WTR, which has been straddled with legal, funding and administrative problems from the start.
WTR is still waiting for CTIA to reimburse it for $1.2 million in wireless phone-pacemaker interference studies and for $650,000 the program has incurred in legal costs.
To date, WTR only has produced an epidemiology study. Cell culture studies and rat radio frequency radiation dosing are far behind schedule, and morale is down among scientists.
What work that may be produced in the year-and-a-half left in the program will fall way short of WTR’s original goals, even by Carlo’s admission.
Jacobson remains optimistic about WTR but acknowledged “they have a tough road to hoe.”
WTR’s failure to expand the body of scientific knowledge of potential RF bioeffects could keep carriers and manufacturers vulnerable to lawsuits and exacerbate antenna siting problems for personal communications services.
PCS antenna siting is being challenged throughout the country on health and cosmetic grounds. Carriers are having a hard enough time complying with the Federal Communications Commission’s new hybrid RF safety guideline, which is under attack by industry as being too strict and by environmentalists for being too weak.
The federal government, for its part, has been boxed into a corner on RF safety because big spectrum users like the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration and others oppose the new RF hybrid standard.
Without fresh RF research, which carriers believe would give phones a clean bill of health, industry leverage is weakened in local zoning disputes that pit licensees against environmentalists and organized labor.
The Environmental Protection Agency, which had a big hand in crafting the hybrid RF standard, has added to industry woes by saying the new standard does not protect consumers against potential health problems from long-term, low-level exposure to pocket phones.
While compliance with federal RF safety guidelines by law prevents communities from blocking antenna construction, the lack of new RF research is likely to keep fear about wireless phone hazards alive in the public eye and, on that basis alone, may well prompt cities and states to find other reasons to deny siting.
In other actions, the CTIA board voted to require that phones carry warnings about potential interference with pacemakers. Manufacturers of cardiac pacemakers have to foot the bill for shielding their products against electromagnetic interference from phones.
The board said it will resist efforts by the FBI to impose eavesdropping technical requirements that it believes are outside the 1994 digital wiretap law. The association said it is trying to put a formal structure in place by next year to assist consumers.
Allen Smith, president and chief executive officer of InterCel Inc., was elected to fill a vacant position on the board.
