Mobiles more dangerous than wild elephants

Another mobile madness round-up

By Kieren McCarthy • Get more from this author

Posted in Data Networking, 19th April 2001 15:44 GMT

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If you hadn't realised yet, mobiles are the modern scourge. God would have sent down a plague of mobiles if Moses were alive today. Great for communication, not so good for survival.

Using a mobile phone is as dangerous as drink driving apparently. Driving with hands-free mobiles increases your chance of crashing by four - the same as drunk driving. The research, bizarrely, comes from Australia - where many think nothing of driving for 20 miles while bladdered, mostly because many people live 20 miles away from their nearest pub. There is also the fact that far fewer people on the roads when drunk people are driving i.e. late at night.

Then there's the case of the Romanian footballer who got the red card for halting a match because he was due to take a corner but decided to take a call instead. Iulica Traznea may have got away with it as well except that he spent five minutes chatting on the phone trying to sell one of his lambs. His reasoning was that he wasn't paid enough and so he had to have other business interests. Incredible.

Another close death came when a surgeon in Hong Kong accidentally perforated a patient's bowel because he was too busy talking to a man about buying his car. Incredibly, he has been cleared of misconduct because he didn't make the call deliberately. And we thought that mobiles were banned in hospitals because they interfered with sensitive equipment.

We would tell you more tales but quite frankly it's all too scary. ®

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