Chris Newman was a successful neurologist with three young children when he first met Joanne Suder, a lawyer based in Baltimore, on the east coast of the United States. The tall, handsome, blue-eyed doctor loved running and was regarded by colleagues as a gifted physician. He started out as Suder's client and then became her friend, but now he's dead and she is left to mourn his memory with a mixture of sadness and anger.
'Dr Newman died of a brain tumour and his cellphone use caused the cancer,' says Suder, who has now reviewed more than 200 similar cases in the US. 'Chris had nine years of documented heavy cellphone use and the tumour that killed him was located in the exact anatomical location where the radiation from his cellphone entered his skull.'
Unlike Hong Kong, the US has aggressive product liability legislation and Suder has taken on six more clients like Newman. Their cases are being heard in the District of Columbia, where the US Congress sits and the mobile-phone industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to battle similar cases, as well as any attempt to put health warnings on the devices. Suder knows she faces overwhelming odds but she has taken the cases in part to honour Newman's memory.
'Chris had young children and he knew he was going to die before they came of age,' she says. 'But he accepted his terminal illness with good grace. His gift to the world was to file his case [against Motorola]. He wanted people to know that he and his colleagues in neurology believed that there was a problem with mobile phones.'
Newman died in May 2006 after battling his debilitating tumour for six years. His case is visceral and heartbreaking but Motorola consistently denied any liability and suits like his have not won a cent in damages, largely because, as yet, there has been no conclusive evidence that mobile-phone use causes brain cancer.
Yes, Newman did use his phone a lot. As a sole practitioner he used it in his office, in his car, at home and on the golf course. But there are millions of others who have done the same thing and are perfectly healthy. And given that there are more than four billion registered mobile-phone users worldwide, it's likely the majority of people who get brain cancer use a handset - but that does not establish cause and effect.
Hong Kong has one of the highest cellphone usage rates in the world and the city's population density ensures that most residents live close to a transmission tower, which, unlike the phones themselves, pump out a constant stream of non-ionising radiation (electromagnetic [EM] radiation that does not carry enough energy to remove an electron from an atom or molecule). And yet the city's phone retailers seem largely unaware of any potential risk.
