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UK 'plans cell warnings'
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November 26, 2000: 9:05 a.m. ET
Report: UK govt to force cellphones to carry health warning
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LONDON (CNNfn) - The British government will force mobile-phone sellers to include a written health warning with all new handsets, a published report said Sunday, amid concern that radiation from cell-phones could endanger children.
London's Sunday Business newspaper cited an unidentified government source as saying ministers had decided to call for new phones to be sold with a warning leaflet. This would explain that research is carrying on to establish the safety of using cell-phones, and that precautions should be taken until more is known, the source said.
The warning would infuriate operators of the four competing British mobile-phone networks, Vodafone Group PLC (VOD), British Telecommunications PLC's (BT-A) BT Cellnet, the France Telecom SA-owned (PFTE) Orange, and One2One, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG (FDTE), the paper said. Together the companies this year paid the British government a total of £22.5 billion ($32 billion) for licenses to operate next-generation cell-phone services.
Any official move to cast doubt on the safety of using mobile phones could also dent share prices of the network operators. Their stocks have already declined significantly in recent months as the expected costs of offering advanced services such as fast Internet access have mounted.
The British government of Tony Blair has decided on a safety-first approach in the light of harsh criticism of the preceding administration's handling of a separate health crisis, involving the transmission to humans of `mad-cow disease', or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).
"It would be fair to say that the lessons of the BSE fiasco are uppermost in people's minds here," the Sunday Business source was quoted as saying. 
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