WASHINGTON-Peter Angelos, the powerful Baltimore lawyer who has successfully litigated against the tobacco industry, asbestos manufacturers and others in personal injury cases, is looking into the mobile phone health issue.
“We have some people we represent and we’re looking at that,” Angelos told RCR last week.
Angelos confirmed his law firm is looking into whether mobile phone technology poses an occupational hazard to wireless workers. “We’re taking a look into the matter,” said Angelos, owner of the Baltimore Orioles baseball team and a heavyweight Democratic donor.
Angelos said if mobile phones raise enough health questions, “We’ll take a good look.”
John Pica, an associate of Angelos, said the firm already is involved in a class-action lawsuit in Anne Arundel County Circuit court in Maryland in which two National Security Agency employees allege that the electromagnetic field from an audio tape erasing machine caused their brain tumors.
The lawsuit, according to a March 6, 1998, article in The Baltimore Sun, seeks $10 million in damages.
Pica was more cautious than Angelos in talking about the law firm’s possible interest in pursuing health-related mobile phone litigation.
The wireless industry claims scientific data supports its view that mobile phones do not pose any danger to the 84 million people who subscribe to wireless services.
Environmental activists and some scientists here and abroad point to positive results in recent studies that suggest phones could be linked to cancer and other maladies. They assert, among other things, that federal radio-frequency radiation exposure guidelines do not address possible `nonthermal’ health effects from mobile phone emissions.
The Federal Communications Commission RF guidelines have been challenged in a New York federal appeals court. A ruling is expected later this year.
The Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency say they believe mobile phones are safe, but believe more research is needed before they definitively rule out any possible health danger.
Most mobile phone research activity is occurring overseas, particularly within the World Health Organization.
While mobile phone firms have fared well in mobile phone-cancer lawsuits in recent years, the industry has never faced a lawyer as pugnacious, as influential and as politically connected as Angelos. He has a history of winning the big cases. Moreover, he’s a philanthropist with a track record of representing workers and children.
On a related front, a job-related RF health dispute is unfolding in Northern California that could have major implications for the wireless industry.
Sharesa Price, a mobile phone and two-way radio programmer who worked for a United States Cellular Corp. agent, is fighting for workers compensation benefits that to date have been denied her.
Price, a 40-year-old single mother with two young teenage daughters, said she believes her brain tumor was caused by mobile phones and two-way radios she programmed on a daily basis the past two-and-a-half years.
Price, who joined Advance Communications Systems in July 1996, before leaving last February after being diagnosed with a brain tumor, has retained legal counsel in Washington, D.C., to assist her in her worker’s compensation claim.
ADS is located about 150 miles north of San Francisco.
Part of Price’s brain tumor was removed last April, but surgeons could not remove it all because it was so close to the main vein on the brain.
“I’m just trying to fight for my life … There’s other people like me out there,” said Price. Price was interviewed by a CBS investigative reporter in San Francisco on Friday.
Price said she got passed around when seeking information on mobile phones from the federal regulatory agencies and the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association.
Price said every time she called CTIA President Thomas Wheeler, the call was routed to Ron Barnes, senior manager of external and industry affairs at CTIA.
Price said every time she asked Barnes a question, he repeatedly answered that he had no information at the time.
Barnes did not return calls for comment.
