Radio and TV signals are a bigger health threat than mobile phone base stations
Whatever the alarmists claim, all the major studies in Britain, America, France, the Nordic countries, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, etc, have come to the same simple conclusion... that no evidence of negative health effects exists. And the consensus view is that no negative health effect is likely to be found.
Even taking the small chance that some effect might possibly be discovered in the future, there is unanimity that it would almost certainly be related to handset use, and not to the base stations.
Despite this, you will probably continue to see claims that headaches, nausea, brain tumours, miscarriages, bad weather, ‘wrong-headed’ political views, nervous cattle, lost racing pigeons and excesses of sarcasm are all caused by the evil mobile phone base station.
The alarmists will quote studies with truly alarming results, neglecting to mention that these results were subsequently shown to be unrepeatable or were derived from flawed methodology.
You’ll probably also see continued demands that the Government set aside large sums to set up domestic studies.
Such purely Irish studies would surely benefit no-one except those people calling for them, and they are likely to want paid involvement in order to assure the ‘independence’ of the investigation.
As I said before, lots of countries are running large scale studies into this very issue, so there is no need for Irish taxpayers to waste their money repeating studies that a dozen countries are already doing. Irish mobile phones are the same as almost everyone else’s.
And here’s something that you can choose to find reassuring or terrifying, depending on your point of view, but it puts the alarmist’s panic into some context: the Australian Government estimated that 90% of their population’s exposure to radio frequency radiation came from AM radio and that digital mobile base stations contributed only 1.4%, or 65 times less, than the AM radio dose. This is from Victoria state, but the numbers in Ireland probably aren’t enormously different.
Even quite near a base station they found that radio and TV signals were still exposing people to higher doses of radio frequency radiation than the signal from the nearby mobile base station. I wonder whether our alarmists will suddenly find themselves having AM radio-induced headaches and whether I should look forward to the great anti-radio campaigns of the future.
That would be funny. If nothing else, shutting down all radio and TV stations couldn’t hurt sales of the Irish Examiner, so it might not be all bad!
Hugh Sheehy
Marina 48
Barcelona
Spain
