Dear All,

As 2009 draws to a close and 2010 gets underway, it is time to look back
at the last 12 months and the significant developments this year on the
issues relating to electromagnetic fields and health:

Mobile Phones

Back in January the French government looked at adopting legislation

restricting both the usage and marketing of mobile phones towards child
and young people, and have followed with a ban on usage of mobile
phones in primary schools. Despite this, Samsung and Firefly have both
marketed phones very specifically at the pre-teen market. This seems
inexplicable when the government advice is still that children and young
people under 16 should restrict their use of mobile phones to
emergencies. It seems that this information has not been circulated
through to mobile phone outlets, and it seems that most children and
parents are also unaware of the government guidance. It seems the
Department of Health should be more proactive in ensuring both that the
information is disseminated widely and that public awareness of the
potential risks is increased.

Mobile phone base stations

For the first time since the boom of the mobile telecommunications
industry, legal precedents have been set requiring mobile phone network
operators to provide evidence that they have gone to lengths to
minimise public exposure to their base stations because of the "fear" of
harm to health. Starting with the Versailles Court of Appeal and
continuing into the rulings of a district mayor in France, these actions
have been followed by a similar ruling in Belgium and another in France
showing that it there is enough evidence to consider the situation
uncertain.

WiFi

Early in the year France managed to cause quite a stir when Paris
University declared a WiFi moratorium following up on their legislation
regarding phones, showing that they are taking concerns about
radiofrequency electromagnetic fields very seriously. The Health
Protection Agency produced their research on WiFi, bizarrely only
assessing already understood exposure levels and not the actual effects
WiFi installations may have had on public health, spending £300,000 of
the UK taxpayer's money without progressing the issue. Swindon are
apparently the first town to try to implement WiFi across the whole town,
despite fears of potential risks to health that a town-wide ubiquitous
exposure could bring with it.

Legislation overseas

A positive step has been taken by Belgium, where the constitutional

court has confirmed a statutory limit for radiofrequency electric field
exposure of 3 V/m. Sadly, elsewhere in Europe, the decision in
Leichtenstein to drop exposure limits to 0.6 V/m has been overturned by
referendum following a large outcry by the mobile phone operators that
the network would not be tenable and that they would have to withdraw
from the principality. Recently there has also been a very poor quality
update to official US FDA advice with information that is full of out-of-
date science and unjustifiable claims, including an apparent blanket
ignorance of the latest mobile phone and brain tumour data.

SAGE

This year has also seen a very disappointing government responseto the
interim assessment of the first stage of the SAGE process. At the
beginning of 2008, the UK Health Protection Agency published a rather
surprising response to the health minister, with a one-sided and
scientifically unsupportable position that made a mockery of some of the
discussions that had taken place in the stakeholder group work that
SAGE had laboured over for two years. This was particularly
disappointing when the HPA were already a stakeholder within the SAGE
group, and had made their position statement clear enough already
within the text of the assessment. However, we had not expected the
government to go even further away from the precautionary
considerations discussed by SAGE than the HPA, with a response that
effectively managed to turn down, or sidestep, almost all of the practical
advice produced by SAGE. It is very clear that there is no intention to
adopt any of the measures suggested by SAGE in any form of
governmental policy, and the decision to look at adopting ICNIRP as the
driving standard for planning was never recommended by SAGE.

Published research

2009 has seen a vast number of published papers into health effects
from electromagnetic fields, and the research that we still have to draw
attention to from this period is approaching 100 papers. For the papers
we have covered in our scientific updates across 2009, please see the
following:

JanuaryFebruaryAprilAugustOctober