A top expert on Monday berated the Israeli public for not internalizing warnings about the possible dangers of cellphone use.

Prof. Elihu Richter, a senior expert in electromagnetic radiation and retired head of the occupational and environmental medicine unit of the Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Public Health and Community Medicine, was speaking a day after the Health Ministry posted guidelines on cellphone use on its Web site.

Richter, who does not use a cellphone, has been cautioning against the excessive usage of the devices for years. When asked to comment eight years ago on a study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association claiming no connection between the use of cellular phones and brain cancer, Richter told The Jerusalem Post that the study’s follow-up period of four years was too short and did not take into account the thinner skulls of children. He went on to add that had a similar protocol been applied to testing the effects of cigarette smoking, such a study would have erroneously yielded no correlation with cancer.

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