ࡱ> Y[X7 fbjbjUU .z7|7|bl,   8R f 4,i " $ ? . #... "  . .. `Bґx,  "90i ".,, The price paid for blowing the whistle in the area of mobile phone safety G J Hyland September 2003 Associate Fellow Executive Member Department of Physics International Institute of Biophysics University of Warwick, UK Neuss-H olzheim, Germany My troubles started in 1999, when I blew the whistle on the totally inadequate level of protection afforded to the public by the safety guidelines published by the UK National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB) against the electromagnetic emissions of Mobile Phones (Handys) and their Base-stations. The NRPB is the UK statutory body that advises government on exposure to all kinds of radiation. It should be remembered that this was about this time that the Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones (IEGMP) was convened in the UK at the request of the Minister for Public Health, whilst the auction of the 3G licences, which earned the UK Government some 22.5 Billion, had not yet occurred. Two years later, a second wave of problems started, following the publication of a report that I had been commissioned to write for the Scientific and Technological Option Assessment Programme of the EU Directorate General for Research (STOA), at the instigation of a Green Euro MP: but more about this later. Let us first return to 1999, and recall that the NRPB Guidelines governing public exposure in the UK were then the most lenient in the civilised world, and a factor of 10 less stringent than those published by the International Commission for Non-Ionising Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), which subsequently replaced them on the recommendation of the IEGMP; indeed, the NRPB Guidelines permitted humans to be exposed to electric fields 64 times higher than the limit that is applicable to all non-transmitting electrical/electronic goods offered for sale in the EU under current legislation on ElectroMagnetic Compatibility (EMC), from which mobile phones are exempt. It may be noted, by contrast, that, at least in the UK, Safety Guidelines governing human exposure are not legally enforceable: they are only guidelines. To appreciate why I felt compelled to blow the whistle, it is first necessary to understand the basis of the NRPB Guidelines (and also those of ICNIRP), for then their total inadequacy will become startlingly apparent. The use of microwave radiation (MWR) for heating water-based food is well-known in the context of microwave ovens. Now since the human body is itself predominantly water-based, it too gets heated up if exposed to MWR, and it is an established medical fact that the human body can tolerate only a rather small temperature rise before health problems set in; the threshold temperature above which this occurs, in any particular case, depends on the physiological condition of the exposed person and on the prevailing environmental conditions. Since the magnitude of the temperature rise produced by exposure itself increases with the intensity of the radiation, it is intensity that the guidelines restrict to ensure that the increase in body temperature does not become dangerously high. To allow for a reasonable range of variations between different people and differing environmental conditions, safety factors are incorporated in the derivation of permitted exposure levels; indeed, the use of different safety factors is the principal reason for the difference between the limits permitted by the NRPB Guidelines and those of ICNIRP. As far as they go, these safety guidelines are fine it is certainly necessary to ensure that we do not get overheated: the problem is that they do not go far enough, because they leave those exposed vulnerable to any adverse health effects that might be provoked by influences of the radiation other than heating i.e. non-thermal influences. I had already known for over 10 years that such effects exist; indeed, I discovered that there is documented evidence stretching back over 30 years that MWR of an intensity even lower than that encountered during mobile phone use can exert non-thermal influences, particularly on living organisms including humans. Why then, one reasonably asks, are such effects not taken into account in the formulation of safety guidelines governing human exposure? The reason can be traced to .a consistent pattern of bias, major mistakes and deliberate misrepresentations by standard setting bodies that prejudices rejection of such effects on the basis either that they are artefacts, or because there is (in their view) no established theory of these effects, which, in any case, already appear to violate common sense! Invariably, the most negative possible spin is put on these non-thermal effects, and they are often dismissed as false positives, because, as we shall see, acceptance of them would entail the conclusion that the technology is potentially less than safe a market unfriendly situation; by contrast, the better understood heating effect of the radiation does not pose the same threat to health, since exposure levels are regulated by the safety guidelines precisely to ensure that the technology is at least thermally safe! Now it must be remembered that governments and, accordingly, their statutory advisory bodies such as the NRPB, in the case of the UK are committed to the continued growth of mobile telephony, for the financial benefits are enormous a situation that is geared to promote all kinds of vested interests, and anyone who attempts to rock the boat is seen as a potential threat. In the UK, for example, the auction of the 3G licences raised 22.5 Billion for the Exchequer. It was soon apparent to me, however, from the experience of people living near to Base-stations that, despite compliance of the emissions with Safety Guidelines (often by factors of many 1000), all was not well; for some of these people consistently reported a variety of adverse health symptoms, which could not possibly be attributed to the effects of over-heating, simply because the intensity was far too low to cause any heating! Thus, at least in this case, the Guidelines protected against what was not actually a problem! I thus began to consider whether these problems could possibly be due to the non-thermal influences that NRPB Guidelines (and also those of ICNIRP) did not address; I should say again that I was no stranger to such effects, having known about them, in a much more general context than mobile telephony, for the preceding 10 years. Upon investigation, it soon became apparent that the kinds of health problems reported (also by users of Mobile Phone Handsets) were indeed consistent with the kinds of non-thermal influences that the radiation was known to exert, on the basis of numerous scientific studies from many laboratories from around the world that had been published in peer-reviewed journals during the preceding 30 years. For example, one of the commonest reports from people living near Base-stations is that of sleep problems, the occurrence of which is certainly consistent with the way in which the radiation is known (from EEG studies) to affect REM sleep, and to severely reduce the amount of melatonin secreted by the pineal gland. Particularly significant to me was the fact that, unlike the heating effect of the radiation, most non-thermal effects were actually contingent on the aliveness of the organism irradiated. Thus not only did the Safety Guidelines protect against what was not a problem, but they actually neglected the most discriminating factor of all namely the aliveness of the people exposed! One is, of course, entitled to ask why the NRPB itself had not come to the same conclusion, given that the same information had been available to them as to me. One answer could be that they simply hadnt kept up to date. Rather than continuing to inform themselves appropriately, they instead resembled the ancien regime, learning nothing and forgetting nothing. For it could be argued that their (and also ICNIRPs) simplistic linear approach to a problem that is inherently non-linear only exacerbates things: outdated knowledge is worse than ignorance - at least the ignorant know what they do not know! Those with a more suspicious frame of mind might argue, however, that by continuing to base their safety guidelines solely on the well-established heating effect of exposure to MWR that occurs also in inanimate matter there was no danger of undermining market growth, which their masters, the Government, were so keen to promote. For it was known how to ensure that the amount of heating never becomes dangerously high simply keep the intensity of the radiation below the Guideline levels! Indeed, one could not help but suspect that the NRPB was being manipulated both by the Government and the very industry whose products it was (on behalf of the Government) supposed to be regulating to ensure that they did not pose a threat to public health. For a spokesperson of the NRPB had admitted around this time thatWe are instructed not to admit to any adverse effects. One could only speculate what failure to comply with this instruction would mean, but it occurred to me that the Public Interest Disclosure Act (Whistleblowers Charter), which had come it force in the UK in January 1999, should afford NRPB employees a measure of protection not hitherto available to them. But by whom was the NRPB itself so instructed? Again one can only speculate, but it was clear that before the Government could benefit from the increased revenue generated by burgeoning mobile phone market not to mention the then impending auction of the 3G licences the products must themselves be seen to comply with the safety guidelines drawn up by the Governments own advisory body (the NRPB!) - a situation guaranteed to promote hidden (and not so hidden) agendas and vested interests of all kinds, and one that invites comparison with the police investigating the police! I thus felt obliged to make this public and to blow the whistle on the scandalous inadequacy of the NRPB Guidelines governing public exposure to the pulsed microwaves used in Mobile Telephony, on account of their neglect of non-thermal influences to which we are vulnerable when alive. This I did, in no uncertain terms, firstly at a meeting in Liverpool in March 1999, convened by the City Council to discuss whether exposure to Mobile Phone Base-stations constituted a health hazard, and, somewhat later, at another meeting in London in the April. One of the other speakers in Liverpool was the then head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) International Electromagnetic Field Project. Subsequently, in order to allay any fears that my talk might have provoked, he wrote to the City Council in an attempt to distort, via a litany of ill-informed and biased comments, my criticism of the adequacy of existing safety guidelines, not only those of the NRPB, but also those of ICNIRP, which the WHO espoused, and continues to do so. His letter subsequently got into the hands of the mobile phone operators who now use it at every possible opportunity to smear my name and discredit my work. Somewhat later, the reason for the WHOs reaction to my criticism became apparent: it was engaged in a programme of global harmonisation of exposure standards, aimed at persuading (more sensible) nations, such as Russia and China, whose safety standards were then a 1000 times more stringent than in the West, to relax them in favour of the more lenient Western ones. But why, if not to expand Western market growth, should the harmonisation be towards higher, rather than towards lower, safer (and more precautionary) levels of exposure one might reasonably have expected the WHO to support? Indeed, the WHO takes a very dim view of countries such as Italy, Luxembourg, Switzerland and parts of Belgium who have opted to reject the ICNIRP Guidelines in favour of more stringent national limits, and even more so of those countries such as France and Spain - where individual regions, and even cities, have - sometimes in collaboration with the mobile phone operators - set their own exposure limits, such as has happened recently in Paris. Present at the London Meeting were members of the NRPB, including its Deputy Director, who shortly after wrote to the Head of the Physics Department in my university, asking whether the university endorsed my work. He was politely told that it did not, but also that it was not usual for a university either to endorse or refute the research findings of a member of its academic staff, there being, after all, such a thing as academic freedom! A little later, my university was again contacted by the Deputy Director of the NRPB, following his receipt of copies of letters of support that I had written on behalf of people threatened with the installation of a Base-station in their vicinity. For, in these letters, I again criticised the NRPB Safety Guidelines for not affording any protection against the more subtle non-thermal effects of exposure to the emitted radiation. In their letter to the university, the NRPB claimed that my criticism had no basis in fact, and that they would be forwarding a copy of my letter to the solicitor in the legal section of the Department of Health. To free itself of any liability, the university then forbade me to use university-headed notepaper for any future correspondence of this nature. In addition, I was instructed to make sure that the name of the university did not appear in any captions featuring in the numerous television interviews that I was giving at the time about mobile phone safety; they were particularly insistent that in any interviews that were filmed in the Physics Department, there should be no clues as to the identity of the location. Following numerous representations from the public to the NRPB, I was invited to present my views both in person and in writing to the IEGMP in December 1999, two of whose members turned out to be the two gentlemen already to above. Before commencing my presentation, I accordingly took the opportunity to blow a second whistle, calling into question the very independence of the IEGMP, not only in view of my experiences with two of its members, but also because its Chairman was an ex-Government Chief Scientist, another two of its members already belonged to the NRPBs Advisory Group on Non-Ionising Radiation, whilst the NRPB itself (along with its Deputy Director) was providing the Secretariat! Not surprisingly, my views were cast in a most negative light in their final report (the so-called Stewart Report). Undeterred, I continued - at every available opportunity - to draw attention to the total inadequacy of the NRPB and ICNIRP Guidelines, and early in 2000 was invited to write an article for the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, which was published in December that year. There, I was able, not only to elaborate further on my criticism of the existing purely thermally-based safety guidelines, but also to comment on certain aspects of the Stewart Report, which had been published in April 2000 - in particular how some of its greyer areas were being exploited by the mobile phone industry to further their own ends and to obfuscate the real issue: the Report contained something for everyone. On one hand, it claimed (Para.1.17) that: The balance of evidence to date suggests that exposures to RF radiation below NRPB and ICNIRP Guidelines do not cause adverse health effects to the general population Elsewhere (Para.1.19), on the other hand, we find: We conclude therefore that it is not possible at present to say that exposure to RF radiation, even at levels below national guidelines, is totally without potential adverse health effects, and that gaps in knowledge are sufficient to justify a precautionary approach In Para. 1.33, we find, in connection with exposure to Base-station radiation, the following statement: We conclude that the balance indicates that there is no general risk to the health of people living near base stations on the basis that exposures are expected to be small fractions of guidelines. However, there can be indirect effects on their well-being in some cases. [My underlining] This was probably the origin of the following statement that appeared in Para.30 of the revised version of the Governments Planning Policy Guidance (PPG8), which was published in August 2001: In the Governments view, if a proposed mobile phone base station meets the ICNIRP guidelines for public exposure it should not be necessary for a local planning authority, in processing an application for planning permission or prior approval, to consider further the health aspects and concerns about them. To be so confident that compliance with existing safety guidelines be they those of the NRPB or of ICNIRP affords an adequately comprehensive degree of protection is appallingly irresponsible, for it effectively denies that when alive our sensitivity to the electromagnetic fields used in mobile telephony is no greater than when we are dead - when all that can happen to us is to get burned! My article in The Lancet article provoked a rather hostile response in the report of the French Expert Group, which was published soon after, in which they even expressed surprise that a scientific journal such as The Lancet should have published my work in the first place! In the meanwhile, in a paper that I was subsequently invited to write for the Scientific and Technological Option Assessment Programme of the EU Directorate General for Research entitled The Physiological & Environmental Effects of Non-ionising Radiation I took the opportunity to again severely criticised the establishment and the (mobile phone) industry view that existing safety guidelines afford adequate protection against exposure to such radiation, commenting that Quite justifiably, the public remains sceptical of attempts by governments and industry to reassure them that all is well, particularly given the unethical way in which they often operate symbiotically so as to promote their own vested interests, usually under the brokerage of the very statutory regulatory bodies (the NRPB in the UK) whose function it supposedly is to ensure that the security of the public is not compromised by electromagnetic exposure. Judging by the furore that my STOA Report provoked, it had evidently struck more than one raw nerve - in particular, amongst the members of COST281, a group established by the European Parliament to evaluate the Potential Health Implications from Mobile Communication Systems. Their response - which can only be described as a panic, rear-guard reaction to attempt to maintain the industry-beneficial status quo - was published on the Internet, and, regrettably, is now being used by Appellants in Public Enquiries (against refusal of planning applications by the Mobile Phone Industry) in an attempt to undermine the credibility of my evidence. Clearly, it is hoped that the verdict of such an official body, however non-independent it might be and one only has to look at the membership of COST to find out - is more reliable and believable than the views of an individual, however independent. It is surely not coincidental that since the publication of my report for STOA, invitations to speak at industry-sponsored conferences on health implications of mobile telephony have ceased! Around this time, my university Physics Department was preparing to be quality assessed by a national review panel, and despite the achievement of having publications in prestigious, international, peer-reviewed journals, it was decided to exclude me from the assessment exercise, on the ground that my publications were not regular physics journals, a fact that was considered a potential liability as far as the assessment exercise was concerned, particularly given the contentious nature of their contents! A more enlightened attitude would surely have been to applaud the achievement of such interdisciplinary publications in which physics is applied to an important topical problem in this case, a public health issue - by interfacing the physics with other relevant fields, such as medicine; for at present, this is the only way to assess the potential danger to public health posed by mobile telephony. In the face of such treatment and marginalisation, I took early retirement in March 2001, to enable me to continue my activities in a less fettered way. It must be said that my own experience is by no means unique, for there is now an increasing number of researchers both in universities and elsewhere, who have paid a price for whistleblowing. For example, in Germany, Dr. Lebrecht von Klitzing resigned from the University of Lbeck in March 2002, following the universitys ban on him accepting an invitation from the Bundestag to address its Environmental Committee, on the grounds that the reputation of the university might be damaged. In France, Dr Roger Santini, following the publication, in 2001, of a Paper reporting the effects on public health of exposure to the radiation emitted by mobile phone Base-stations, was forbidden by the Director of his Institute to continue this line of research, despite the fact that he had worked for the preceding 22 years in the Institute on other (presumably less contentious/sensitive) areas of bioelectromagnetics. Faced with this situation, he appealed to the Minister of National Education, and, in March 2002, appeared before the Parliamentary Office for the Evaluation of Science and Technology Choices. His address included the following extract: We are witnessing today, the development of pressures aimed at discrediting, within their Institutions, certain researchers and their findings. These campaigns of moral and professional harassment are orchestrated, in particular, by certain cell-phone providers, public health bodies and elected officials. Some scientists who work on the problem of the biological effects of cell-phones and relay stations have recently been made the object, following these pressures, of discriminatory measures on the part of their Institutions: firings, profession change, change of research topic, blockage of career, loss of collaborators, ban on speaking, etc. Santini went on to identify some other scientists who had suffered in this way, such as Dr. Gmez-Perretta, from a hospital in Valencia, Spain, who was silenced, following a letter he had sent to the President of the Medical Association of Valencia, criticising the national Spanish Medical College for its silence and inactivity in the controversy regarding mobile phone safety, which left the telecommunication companies to enjoy a monopoly in the debate. He went on the say: The College should not run the risk of giving its absolute blessings to standards that are so questionable, without taking into account a more independent and realistic analysis (than that offered by various official bodies, such as the IEGMP in the UK, or the Royal Society of Canada) of the international literature, which is opposed to the present standard; let us remember that there were once commissions that denied the dangers of tobacco, asbestos, and therapeutic X-rays. Four days later Dr. Gmez-Perretta received a letter from his hospital threatening a severe penalty if he did not cease his research on electromagnetic fields, which, according to the hospital authorities, was outside his activities as Head of the Addiction Unit. He has appealed against this decision, reminding hospital authorities of the known connection between drug addiction and exposure to radio-frequency electromagnetic fields. Perhaps the best known whistleblower in the health debate surrounding mobile phones is Dr. George Carlo, who for 6 years headed the research programme of Wireless Technology Research (WTR), which was funded by the mobile phone companies in the USA. In a letter to the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the AT & T Corporation, dated 7th October 1999, which he sent as his period at WTR was coming to an end, he effectively blew the whistle on the mobile phone industry for ignoring scientific findings suggesting potential health effects from mobile phones, and for falsely claiming that these phones are safe for all consumer, including children. He went on to say: I am especially concerned about what appears to be actions by a segment of the industry to conscript the FCC, the FDA and the World Health Organisation with them in following a non-effectual course that will likely result in a regulatory and consumer backlash. ..The current popular backlash we are witnessing in the United States today against the tobacco industry is derived in large part from perceived dishonesty on the part of the Industry in not being forthright about health effects. I urge you to help your industry not to repeat that mistake. In conclusion, it is gratifying to put on record the fact that, in most cases, whatever have been their fates, whistleblowers continue undeterred to proclaim their brave messages. Ad multos annos! 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