John Avison: news focus on electromagnetic radiation, phone masts

Oct 27 2009 by John Avison, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

One showed conclusively that rats exposed to two hours’ mobile phone radiation, became brain-damaged.

For Kirklees Planning Department, apparently, the jury is still out.

Their concern when considering an application for a new phone mast or a significant addition to an established one, is whether or not the application would ‘materially affect the appearance’ of the proposed site.

When pressed on health issues they mention a ‘perception of risk’ not ‘risk’, which indicates that planners, in line with Government policy, are keeping an open mind on the danger or safety of telecoms equipment.

In the meantime, telecoms companies are seeking ever more ingenious ways to disguise their masts – as chimney pots, flagpoles, clock towers, weather vanes, drainpipes and even as plastic trees.

Nationally, UK planners are quietly advising a moratorium on new masts on or overlooking school premises.

This is a profound irony for parents of children at the new Hillside Primary School in Newsome.

Here objection has been over-ruled as a school has been planned and built next to eight mobile phone transmitters on the TV relay mast on the school boundary – and apparently without independent checks on emission levels.

They are objecting to the presence of eight mobile phone transmitters on the TV relay mast on the school boundary, which is The transmitters are broadcasting around the clock in the 900-2100Mhz range.

Many believe such bombardment is damaging their children’s health.

They may be right. But it’s as well to consider the following:

It’s not just mobile phones. Cordless landline phones, baby alarms and broadband-connected personal computers also pump out and receive microwave radiation.

Electromagnetic ‘fog’ surrounds electrical cables, radios and televisions in the same way a magnet influences iron filings. We’ve lived with this for many decades. In the United States of America a study has confirmed a relationship between leukaemia clusters and pole-mounted transformers.

It’s as well to bear in mind that mobile phones themselves are transceivers which means that they both pick up signals from phone masts and send signals to them.

While a phone mast may emit microwave energy much greater than the waves that come from your mobile phone, you are much nearer to your mobile phone and therefore subjected to a much greater intensity of emission.

The mast is, after all, on top of a building, not next to your head.

Crashing down all around us is wide-band radiation from the sun, cosmic gamma particles from distant exploding stars, background radiation from nuclear tests and accidents and the combined output of many high-powered terrestrial radio transmitter towers.

Far more evidence exists for cancer clusters related to ionising radiation from rocks and soil – radon gas seepage – than from mobile phones and masts.