What are we supposed to do now, while growing numbers of younger and younger kids clamor for fashionable phones with ring-tones, themed cartoon characters, special movies and promotions? We don't have any direct evidence that cell phones damage their brains. Yet, why should this matter? After all, our bodies are truly electric. Electric impulses allow our muscles to move and our minds to think. But the sort of charges that keep us alive are completely different from those that can power microwaves or radios or cell phones. There are deeply troubling reports from nations where phones have been used longest that children may be especially vulnerable. Lennart Hardell, a distinguished Swedish oncologist, recently disclosed that in one study children and teenagers who regularly use cell phones are five times more likely to get brain cancer as young adults.

Today, major telecommunication giants sponsor some of the nation's largest stadiums — the Washington Wizards, at the Verizon Center, the San Antonio Spurs and the San Francisco Giants at AT&T Centers and the Jacksonville Jaguars at Alltel Stadium.

In an ideal world, these profitable companies would compete not just to promote sports but to design the safest sleekest phones. They would support and encourage testing and development of the lowest exposure phones for all of us — those that only work with earpieces and headsets — and offer phones to children for text messaging at a safe distance from their brains.

Instead, American children and their parents are not provided the basic protections afforded their European counterparts and are asked simply to have faith that everything is all right. Faith may move mountains, but it is not the way to protect public health. The government should work with phone companies to protect our children and to provide data to Gandhi and to other independent researchers so that we can find the safest way to use this revolutionary technology.

Devra Lee Davis, Ph.D., M.P.H., directs the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and is the author of "The Secret History of the War on Cancer." Visit her Web site at www.devradavis.com