Was phone-mast report diluted?

Halifax.

T-Mobile, the mobile phone giant, has been accused of “burying” a scientific report it commissioned that concluded handsets and masts contribute to cancer and genetic damage.

The report argued that officially recommended limits on radi ation exposure should be cut to 1/1000th of those in force. The suggestion has not been taken up by the company or by regulators.

Campaigners claimed T-Mobile’s handling of the report was part of a wider pattern of behaviour by the industry in its effort to keep discussion of the health risks off the agenda.

The Ecological Institute, which has been researching mobile phone technology since 1992, was paid by T-Mobile to evaluate evidence on its potential dangers. But Dr Peter Neitzke, one of the authors of the report, has accused T-Mobile, which has 17 million British customers, of diluting the findings by commissioning other studies from which it knew “no critical results or recommendations” were to be expected.

Jean-Luc Guilmot, a French bio-engineer, has made public a PDF slide from a presentation he made in Louvain-la-Neuve University during a conference on health concerns regarding mobile phone masts.

In the slide he summarises the results of the effects found on all published epidemiological research papers on Pub Med and the World Heatlh Organisation that look into phone masts.

Despite the small number of returned papers, the results are staggering, eight of 10 of the papers showing a statistically significant health effect from mobile phone masts.

As long ago at the spring of 1993 the American Food and Drug Administration biologists concluded that the available data “strongly suggest” that microwaves can “accelerate the development of cancer.”

I would like to leave you with some final words from an ex-Government military scientist. Barry Trower who said: “This Government, some of the government scientists and the telecommunications industry, will be held responsible for more deaths in peace time than any terrorist group in the world ever.”

Dennis Sullivan