Over the last few weeks I've read a lot of commentary about the recent mobile phone health scares.

Much of it follows the industry line. Even on blogs, the tone seems dismissive. Case not proven, nothing to see here, move on.

But that's the wrong attitude to take. (The ostrich came from a financial planning site.) It's ignorant on how easy it would be to address valid concerns, and even improve the product at the same time.

What seems to matter is the power of the wave hitting your head, the distance between sensitive tissue and high frequency waves, and the duration of exposure. Stick a high-powered microwave brick next to an ear for 10 years or more, it seems, and something's going to fry.

But Moore's Law of Radios shows we don't need that much power. We're better off without it. Frequencies are used most efficiently when you have a lot of very low-power devices -- this lets you put more traffic in less space.

As I've said before, separating the handset from the headset can also work wonders, not just from a health standpoint but from a user interface standpoint. A close friend of mine has had a Bluetooth headset on his ear for some weeks, and now he's hot to replace his phone with something that has more functionality, more expense, that's more like a PDA. This should be good news for the industry.

But by sticking our heads in the sand, by dismissing reports of health effects out of hand, rather than addressing what we can now, the industry is setting itself up for a nasty fall, and many unhappy jury returns.

But here's what is worse.

What is worse is for bloggers to take the same attitude.

We don't really have a dog in this hunt. We're not going to be sued if there is danger here. We don't have a dog in this hunt.

We need a new attitude in the blogosphere toward this issue. We want the rights of reporters? We need to start doing the work.