Having spent a few summers working in epidemiology, my son has an appreciation for statistical research studies related to public health care.
A controversy over the location of a wireless communications tower in South Africa caught his eye. To start with, the tower is apparently located in a cemetery, the Fourways Memorial Park, which might have been expected to minimize complaints, since it is hard to imagine any possible deleterious impact on the permanent residents.
Nonetheless, a tower erected by iBurst was said to cause a variety of health problems.
The company attended a meeting in mid-November and its CEO agreed to turn off the tower to assess whether the health problems subsided.
At the meeting on the 16th of November 2009 a number of residents and their staff confirmed that they were still experiencing symptoms such as rashes, headaches and the like and that these symptoms disappear when they leave the vicinity of the tower.
However, according to a news story last week, iBurst had already shut off the tower a month earlier. Whatever was causing the symptoms, it wasn’t the operation of the communications equipment.
There is a balance to be managed between the needs to have more towers to meet the needs of the public to communicate and the objections of neighbours to the sight lines and architectural characteristics of most towers. There is a body of good and bad science that often clouds the issue when public consultations are conducted as we wrote two years ago.
This case out of South Africa is a classic.
Hear hear! It does our society no credit when we listen to such junk science. This case reminds me of the NIMBY reaction to solar power in East Hawkesbury, claiming the panels create 'stray voltage'. The internet is full of experts, some real, some not so much.