A financial danger to your company?

The insurer refused to provide insurance for it, saying that it emitted a ‘poison’ or a ‘pollutant’, so when the Italian company gave it to their employee they could have been handing him a death sentence, and they did not have insurance to cover any financial loss. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t been warned. The World Health Organisation put it in the same category as lead or DDT, a class B carcinogen, years before; but it was so damn useful that they handed them out to many of their employees.

I suppose they believed they were in the clear, as scientists had been saying for decades there was no danger, all was well, everyone was fine and warnings of the hazards were just scaremongering.

You see, humans just don’t like bad news, particularly when it involves something they enjoy. Cigarette manufacturers applied this to their advertising since they knew that millions of people loved to smoke, enjoyed the taste, the buzz it gave them and the mental images it conjured; the cool guy in the Casablanca style bar with the dame, or eyes creased under a Stetson in the American Badlands. The problem was that smoking causes cancer, amongst many other unpleasant side effects, so people had to be given a glimmer of hope to enable them to smoke, whilst in their hearts knowing how dangerous it was.

That is why people were reassured to hear ‘more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette’ as surely there couldn’t be too much of a problem if their doc smoked, could there?

Big tobacco pushed fortunes into the hands of researchers, who mysteriously discovered that there was no proof cigarettes caused cancer. This was not to say that they could not cause cancer, just that there was no consensus they did, so the voices and research carried out by independent scientists was swamped by a swell of bias. You see, rigorous research is very expensive so spending time and money on proving that something is carcinogenic doesn’t keep your lab alive (though it might keep people alive) whereas a quick bit of tobacco funding does; and encourages you to do quick, shallow research into the bargain.

Big Tobacco spun the debate out for decades, it was almost as if the science was a game to be played and the longer the game lasted the more the profits rolled in. The big telecoms companies observed and learned the game well, as a leaked email from Motorola showed:

“I think we have sufficiently war-gamed the (science behind mobile phone radiation).

When a 2007 analysis of studies into the possible biological effects of microwave radiation revealed that industry funded research was 2 and a half times more likely to conclude that there was no effect on health, it became clear that the game was being very well played.

So, what was it the company gave its employee that emitted a ‘poison’ or ‘pollutant’ in the opinion of insurers? A cellphone. And it was microwave radiation emitted from the cellphone that the Italian court ruled had caused his brain cancer and was the reason they awarded damages against his employer.

Now companies who give their employees mobile phones for work may be liable for the health damage they cause and there is no way of insuring against this; have a look at a Lloyds policy and see what they think about EMF.

But what about all the research that shows there is no effect on health, surely that can be used to defend employees against lawsuits? Not according to the Italian court who refused to admit any industry funded research.

Class actions are the natural result of behaviour like Big Tobacco and sure enough, they have started in the USA and in Europe against telecoms companies. Will more employers become liable? Who knows, but they have been warned.