Cell towers aren’t hurting you

While CBC may attract lots of visits to its website through articles warning of wireless radiation, it neglected coverage of an important release from a public health official. Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health has recommended that the City of Toronto eliminate its policy of Prudent Avoidance, a 5-year old policy of asking wireless carriers to keep RF emission levels 100 times below Health Canada’s public exposure guideline, Safety Code 6.

The summary from the Medical Officer of Health says:

From its review of recent health evidence, TPH [Toronto Public Health] notes that the majority scientific opinion indicates that the health risk to the public from cell towers and other telecommunications sources of RFs is low.
…
Based on a review of evidence and TPH’s experience implementing the policy, continued application of the [Prudent Avoidance] policy in the form of a stricter exposure guideline is no longer necessary as it does not confer a health benefit to the residents of Toronto.

In a more detailed report, Toronto Public Health sharply criticized the opposing viewpoints.

The most vocal opposing view has been put forward by scientists contributing to the BioInitiative Report. This report has been evaluated by a number of health scientists and public health agencies as being characterized by biased and selective interpretation of scientific data, leading to unscientific and alarming conclusions about a range of health conditions.

Among the most damning critiques of the Bio-Initiative Report, incorporated in the Toronto Public Health report by footnote, was an article in Science-Based Medicine that refers to the BioInitiative Report as “an egregiously slanted review of health and biological effects of electromagnetic fields (EMF) of the sort that are produced by power lines, cellular telephones, Wi-Fi, and other mainstays of modern life.”

Toronto Public Health addressed the question of non-specific symptoms – symptoms that some have called environmental sensitivity to RF and other electromagnetic fields.

There is, however, growing evidence that the perception of exposure is associated with experiencing symptoms and as such, that a nocebo effect with respect to cell towers is likely contributing to individuals‟ reporting of such health complaints. (This conclusion in no way diminishes the serious nature of these complaints which some individuals experience as severe and debilitating.) The nocebo effect refers to the observation that people may experience adverse symptoms because of their negative expectations or concerns about cell towers. In particular, people tend to feel more at risk from environmental health hazards when they lack control over their exposure or have little perceived benefit from exposure.

While CBC chose to give unwarranted attention to some well meaning but ill-informed junk science, Toronto Public Health noted that broadcast antennas, not cell towers, were the major contributors to RF levels in Toronto. It is unclear whether the authors of the CBC articles understood that CBC’s own radio and TV transmitters have been beaming radio frequency energy for decades before the cell phone was introduced. Indeed, Industry Canada’s evaluation of EMF Intensity in the City of Toronto found that the CBC Broadcast Centre is Toronto’s hottest location, still less than 6% of limits.

The Toronto Public Health report cites a review by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control and National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health for a helpful explanation for why RF levels would not increase over time:

Although intuitively, one may assume that an increase in base stations means higher ambient exposure, mobile phones do not need to use as much power (due to adaptive control) to communicate with the base stations due to shorter distances. As a good connection translates into lower output power levels, urban centres with higher base station densities often experience lower RF than rural centres.

I wrote about that effect last year in a blog post called “We need more towers.” CBC did a disservice to Canadians in promoting purveyors of junk science while failing to cover the important report from Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health that recommends the elimination of its prudent avoidance policy. The full report is worth reading.