WASHINGTON—Consumers went shopping for clothes, furniture and electronics products last month, helping give a modest boost to retail sales despite continued weakness in the demand for new cars.

The reported Monday that retail sales edged up 0.3 percent in July after having plunged by 0.7 percent in June, the worst showing in 16 months.

Consumer spending, which accounts for two-thirds of total economic activity, is being watched carefully now. The fear is that the recent turmoil in financial markets combined with slumping home prices will make Americans more hesitant to spend in the months ahead, raising the threat of a possible recession.

suffered through some stomach-churning days last week because of worries about how credit problems that began in the market for subprime mortgages might spread to other types of loans. The and other central banks around the world sought to calm investor fears by injecting billions of dollars into the banking system in an effort to keep short-term interest rates from rising.

The 0.3 percent rise in overall retail sales last month was slightly better than the 0.2 percent gain that had been expected. It was driven by increased demand for electronics gear and appliances, furniture and clothing. These increases helped to offset a 0.3 percent slump in sales at auto dealerships which followed an even bigger 2.9 percent drop in June.

Mobile phone masts do not cause harmful short-term health effects, according to a study of people who say they experience symptoms when they are close to them. The study deals another blow to the notion that low-level electromagnetic fields from cellphones or base stations are dangerous.

The researchers looked at 2G and 3G phone masts in a lab setting where both the participants and researchers did not know whether the equipment was turned on. The set-up was designed to mimic the output from a phone mast at 20-30 metres from the subject. “It looks like there was pretty good evidence that people couldn’t detect the signals,” said Elaine Fox at Essex University, who led the study, published yesterday in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

Of the 159 people who took part in the experiment, 44 said they were sensitive to electronic equipment. At first the participants were told when the electric field was turned on while being tested. Under these conditions, the electrosensitive participants reported unpleasant symptoms such as headaches and nausea. In three further tests the researchers subjected them to 2G radiation, 3G radiation or no radiation under “double blind” conditions, meaning that no one involved knew whether the equipment was switched on. Under these conditions two of the electrosensitive group and five of the control group correctly identified whether the electricity was on every time - no better than you would expect by chance alone.

The team also measured heart rate, blood volume pulse (a measure of pressure) and the sweatiness of the subject’s skin. All of these should go up when the participants are experiencing unpleasant symptoms or anxiety. The electrosensitive individuals had generally higher scores than the control group for all three, but they did not change when the 2G or 3G radiation was switched on.

Anti-phone mast campaigners said the results were skewed by the fact that 12 volunteers who claimed to be sensitive to electronic equipment dropped out. “Even a child can see that by eliminating 12 of the original 56 electrosensitive volunteers - over 20% of the group - the study integrity has been completely breached,” the campaign group Mast Sanity said in a statement. It argues that these people were presumably the ones most sensitive to the radiation.

Professor Fox counters that her team was still able to test 44 people, and of the dropouts none was able to identify correctly when the radiation was on or off in the first double blind test. The reduced numbers do mean that the statistical power of the experiment was compromised, though. Prof Fox estimates that there is a 30% chance that the experiment missed a real effect because of the smaller numbers.

Some anti-mast campaigners have been impressed by the study. “The Essex team have carried out one of the best-designed and executed studies to date,” the campaign group Powerwatch said.

Prof Fox said that scientists and sufferers should now concentrate on finding the real cause of the symptoms. “If people are convinced that they are suffering because of mobile phone masts they don’t investigate other causes,” she said.

One survey found that 4% of people in the UK claim to be sensitive to electronic equipment. Many experience flu-like symptoms such as headache, streaming eyes or a burning sensation and for some these are so bad they opt to shield their homes with foil-lined wallpaper or even move to the country.

Corporate America has made big strides toward the smoke-free workplace. Its next goal: the smoke-free worker.

Many businesses are seeking to reduce their medical bills by paying for programs to help employees stop smoking. A decade ago, such programs were rare. But recent surveys indicate that one-third of companies with at least 200 workers now offer smoking cessation as part of their employee benefits package. Among the biggest U.S. companies, the number may be nearly two-thirds of employers.

“Tobacco cessation has been the hot topic for the last year,” said Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health, which includes more than 200 large employers.

The programs are yet another example, along with various other corporate wellness efforts like weight management and diabetes control, of how private employers are taking health care reform into their own hands, even as politicians continue to debate proposals and tactics in Washington and on the campaign trail.

For businesses, it is a bottom-line calculus. Spending as much as $900 to give a participant free nicotine patches and drugs to ease withdrawal, as well as phone sessions with smoking addiction counselors, can more than offset the estimated $16,000 or more in additional lifetime medical bills that a typical smoker generates, according to federal health data.

That federal figure does not count the costs of absenteeism or the drain on productivity when smokers periodically duck outside for a cigarette.

Smokings toll goes well beyond the financial, of course. Even though the percentage of adult smokers has dropped to just above 20 percent, compared with more than 40 percent in 1965, there are more than 44 million smokers in the United States.

The habit is blamed for 435,000 premature deaths in this country each year, and it adds more than $75 billion to annual spending on health care, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

With business employers accounting for about $650 billion of the $2 trillion annual U.S. medical bill, companies have a big monetary incentive to get workers to kick the tobacco habit.

Research has shown that smoking cessation programs, when they include counseling, have long-term success rates of 15 percent to 35 percent, said Dr. Michael Fiore, a University of Wisconsin professor of medicine who is also chairman of the federal Public Health Services guidelines panel on smoking cessation.

“For a number of smokers, it takes multiple tries before they can achieve long-term remission,” he said.

The delivery company UPS, which has a work force of nearly 428,000 and spent $2.6 billion on employee health care last year, began offering a smoking cessation program in February to the estimated 13 percent of its employees who use tobacco.

“We decided this was the time to do this,” said Judy Pirnie Smith, a registered nurse who is a health and productivity manager at UPS.

Another employer, Union Pacific Railroad, which has 50,000 workers, credits a smoking cessation program it adopted two years ago with helping cut the smoking rate to about 17 percent of its work force, compared with 40 percent as recently as the 1990s.

Participants often say they need the help an employer program can provide.

“The day my dad passed away, I started praying for a solution, a way to quit smoking,” said Monte Hall, a 43-year-old cargo handler with UPS in Louisville, Kentucky. His father, who smoked a pack and a half a day, died from lung disease a few years ago.

The solution came in the form of the companys program. Hall got advice and encouragement from counselors, read articles they suggested and used nicotine patches. He says he has not had a cigarette since Feb. 24.

UPS belongs to the National Business Group on Health, which surveyed 58 of its biggest members and found that nearly two-thirds offer smoking cessation programs as part of their health plans. That was a sharp contrast with the mid-1990s, when companies rarely covered smoking cessation, according to Darling.

A survey by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation found that smoking programs are offered by 1 in 3 companies with more than 200 workers. Among smaller firms, that was 1 in 12.

The number of employers sponsoring the programs “is going up even while firms are cutting back on medical benefits” in general to limit costs, said Dr. Steven Schroeder, director of the Smoking Cessation Leadership Center at the University of California, San Francisco, which promotes stop-smoking programs nationally.

The number of people who enroll in the programs and then slip back into smoking in the first three months is high, said Bruce Kelley, a senior executive with the Watson Wyatt Worldwide benefits consulting firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But “for people who quit for 12 months,” he said, “the recidivism rate is very low.”