Newman blames radio waves from his cellphone. He wants Motorola to pay more than a billion dollars. Newman's suit, currently in pre-trial hearings, is part of a new wave planned by a nationwide coalition of law firms. Since Newman filed his lawsuit last fall, similar cases have popped up in Illinois, Louisiana and Georgia. Researchers and lawyers for another Baltimore law firm coordinating the cases with Angelos say a dozen more could be filed in the next 60 days including cases in Texas and another in California that will be filed as early as this week.
Trouble is, scientific studies increasingly raise doubt that cellphones cause cancer at all.
Unless lawsuits take a back seat to lab work, the suits needlessly will scare the public and raise costs. The only winners will be lawyers looking for billion-dollar jackpots like the ones that let Angelos run a major league baseball team. In the past three months, three separate studies have concluded cellphones pose no measurable cancer risk. This month, The Journal of the National Cancer Institute published a 13-year study of 420,000 Danish cellphone users. In January, The New England Journal of Medicine published a National Institute of Health study of 789 brain-tumor patients.