Are mobile phones the new cigarettes? Each crosses the boundaries of class, gender, age and nationality. Each has generated a great deal of revenue for governments: cigarettes through high sales taxes, mobile phones through the granting of licences and sales taxes. Each costs most users more money than they want to pay. Each has tremendous potential to annoy those who don't use them. Whether they have a more important similarity - that they are capable of killing their users - is going to be the subject of an American lawsuit announced at the very end of last year.
Peter Angelos, a Baltimore attorney famous for winning $4.2bn (£2.8bn) for lung cancer sufferers from the tobacco industry, will in March commence the first in a series of test cases in California, against Vodafone. The actions will be brought on behalf of frequent mobile users who have suffered brain tumours and the main issue will be whether a link between mobile use and the condition can be established.
Much will depend upon the views of the experts each side will line up. Doctors, statisticians, physicists and engineers will all have a role to play. So far, the mobile phone industry has fought off all claims against it made on this basis. The fact that Mr Angelos has now put his reputation and his firm's tremendous resources behind the claims adds greatly to the credibility of the arguments.
The case will cost tens of millions of dollars to present and he will only be paid if he wins. Theoretically, findings in American courts have no force in Britain. On a strictly legalistic analysis it could be said that a decision made in any case brought by an individual has no bearing on anyone else's case. The law involved in deciding the issue is not complicated and will not set any formal precedent.
In practice, though, once a respected court, having heard detailed scientific evidence, decided there was a link the impact would be enormous. Thousands of "passive smoking" cases were settled after Australian litigation in the late 80s led to a finding such smoking could lead to lung cancer.
The industry may have done itself no favours by its failure to recognise the risks. In 1999 Orange published an article in its customer magazine asking whether media speculation on the association between mobile phone use and "headaches, dizziness and even cancers" was "fact or fiction". It concluded it was fiction. But no one knows for sure yet. In 10 years' time, if, say, brain tumours are twice as frequent among mobile phone users as among the general population, the consequences for the industry, facing tens of thousands of substantial claims, will be dire.
The tobacco industry was extraordinarily stubborn in its refusal to recognise that cigarettes cause lung cancer. Well into the 80s it was denying that a link had been proved. It was this position that contributed to the willingness of American courts to award massive exemplary damages against cigarette manufacturers: their deliber ate deception of the public was punished as much as its selling of a lethal product.
There may not yet be enough evidence to persuade many mobile users to give up their phones. If a link is proved, the companies with the best prospects of surviving are those which have warned users of possible risks, not those who have dismissed them. The present head-in-the-sand approach may increase short-term sales and profits, but until this issue is resolved it is, perhaps, not an industry into which shrewd investors will be putting their money.
