Guardian article: Making waves

http://www.guardian.co.uk

Making Waves

Since Ernie Wise made the UK's first call in 1985, the use of mobile
phones has risen exponentially. Now 50 million of us own them, and to
meet that demand 35,000 masts have so far been erected across the
country, with three times that number needed. But at what cost to our
health? Rachel Shabi reports

Saturday April 10 2004

The Guardian


To be honest, I don't want to hear that my mobile phone, or anything
to do with what powers it, might not be safe. This is partly because
I am sick of being told that everything is bad for me, but mostly
it's just because I like my phone.

I don't remember - OK, with the exception of overseas texting - being
significantly more sociable or employable in the days before the
phone, and I'm not exactly glued to it. Still, I don't want to
consider having to give it up. And I'm not alone in this sentiment.

In a report chirpily titled People Just Can't Live, If Living Is
Without Their Mobiles, Vodafone says that seven out of 10 phone users
aged 16-34 feel exactly as this title suggests. We might think this a
silly, puffy piece of melodrama; we might think that a more sober
analysis would declare mobiles to be little more than a consumer
culture-driven frivolity, but - well, the buts are obvious: those
phones are handy, convenient and fun. They are also habit-forming. A
bit like smoking.

It's smoking the mobile phone worry-mongers most refer to when they
set this scene. The health risks associated with mobile phones and
the network-providing masts are, they say, potentially so grave that,
in the words of one campaigner, "they make passive smoking look like
air-freshener".

The analogy is intended to impress on us that the health risks are
not immediately known and often denied by the industry peddling the
potentially risky thing. A glance at our recent history of health
scares confirms this: there's thalidomide, asbestos, BSE and, of
course, smoking.

But this tobacco reference always gets dredged up to make a
doom-laden, time bomb analogy, doesn't it? And, given our desire to
hang on to our phones, we tend to sideline the worriers and instead
go with what the government tells us. Which is that mobile phones and
masts are safe. Well within safety limits, as a plethora of reviews
and an independent report published in January have confirmed.

But the trouble is that too many people are getting sick. They live
next to mobile phone masts - also known as base stations - and claim
that it's the masts that cause the illnesses, which range from sleep
disruption and rashes to motor neurone disease and cancer. A swell of
experts around the world say that anyone who properly followed the
science would begin to doubt the official verdict on phones.

And even in official circles, there is now a hint of concern, albeit
low-key. Meanwhile, the scale of the problem may not yet be
immediately apparent, according to Alasdair Philips at Powerwatch, a
mobile phone and mast lobby group: "That will take 50 years to come
out in the health of the general population," he says. "All we get
now is symptoms in the canaries, the people who are sensitive."

What does emerge now is something that looks like a textbook case of
innocent public versus scary business: an industry that presents one
version of the truth; a body of campaigners that argues another.
And in the middle sit the rest of us, confused, still clutching our
phones, and wondering: should we be paying heed?

Mobile phones really took off in the 1990s, although the first UK
mobile phone call, made by the late comedian Ernie Wise, took place
in 1985. At first, phones were an irritatingly ostentatious display
of yuppie money, risible and rude. Then the tech got slick and the
phones got small. The lifestyle marketing rolled out, the prices
rolled down and everyone rolled on to the mobile phone bandwagon. We
were hooked. In 1997, 9.1m of us had phones; by 2000 it was 30.5m. By
May 2003, there were, according to Ofcom (the regulator for the UK's
communications industries), in excess of 50m mobile phones in the UK
- owned by 75% of the adult population.

There were, from the start, rumblings about the health risks: would
holding so close to your head an object that emits microwave
radiation fry your brain in the same way that a microwave oven cooks
your dinner? But they were routinely dismissed as unfounded.

We were reminded that we also thought TVs might be dangerous when
they came out, and look at the unmitigated nonsense that turned out
to be. However, by the mid-1990s those whose ears were already glued
to their phones were encouraged to put a headset between the two -
and, interestingly, some operators had already patented low-radiation
mobile phones during the late 1980s.

But more interesting still was the heady realisation that mobile
phones could be used for so much more than calling. And so along came
the smart new phones: the picture messaging, video conferencing,
information services and internet access.

Many of the phones we buy today can already do all these things, if
slowly. To get them going really fast, we need to upgrade from the
second-generation network, 2G, to the brighter, sleeker 3G. It's the
difference, say the enthusiasts, between dial-up and broadband,
between using a trunk road and a motorway.

And that's why the low rumblings about mobile phones and health have
recently grown much louder. Because our spiralling use of mobile
phones and the 3G roll-out have resulted in many more masts going up
across the UK. (The 3G network is long on strength - to power all
those flashy new facilities - but very short on reach, so it relies
on greater mast density.)

Currently, there are around 35,000 masts in the UK, but telecoms
analysts Ovum roughly estimate that Britain's 3G operators will need
at least 100,000 new masts. Add to that figure the tens of thousands
of Terrestrial Trunked Radio (Tetra) masts being erected nationwide
for a new police radio system. Hundreds of masts are going up each
week.

And now they aren't just in remote fields, they are in your street,
next to your bedroom, on top of your block, on the roof of your
child's school. They are hiding in some Shell forecourt signs, church
spires and McDonald's arches.

They're masquerading as burglar alarms along Oxford Street and as
small, wall-mounted dishes in shopping centres. But across the
country, it's the people who live directly next to or beneath a mast
- exposed to its beam 24/7 - who are reporting the illnesses.

"I get a buzzing in my ears, nosebleeds, nausea and I can't get to
sleep," says Alan Brooks, a retired printer who lives 20 metres from
a mobile phone mast in Kensworth village, Bedfordshire. Brooks says
he has felt this way since the mast went up, two years ago. If he
spends a few nights elsewhere, away from a mast, he can sleep and his
headaches stop.

Faisal Khawaja, 24, used to live in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire,
where a mast went up 50 m from his house in 2002. "I immediately
started to get symptoms such as dizziness, loss of concentration,
loss of memory, and I got this clicking and high-pitched whining in
my ears," he says.

He complained of constant headaches, but two doctors gave him a clean
bill of health. Khawaja says he first became "sensitised" to radio
waves when he started using a mobile phone three years ago. "I would
only have to be on it for five seconds for the symptoms to flare up,
and I'd get an intense, physical shock to the head." He has now
moved, to get away from the mast.

Geraldine Attridge, 37, from Yew Tree, West Bromwich, was "certain
from the word go" that her tinnitus-like symptoms had something to do
with the phone masts on the roof of her high-rise block of flats. She
was told, by both the local council and by Orange, which owned the
mast, that this was impossible.

But, still concerned, Attridge put together a questionnaire and
delivered it to 800 flats on the top floors of similar blocks in the
area. She received 600 replies. "I was staggered by how many people
sent the surveys back, wrote me letters and called round to see me,"
she says. "There may be a few cranks and hypochondriacs thrown in
there, but I do feel that a lot of them are genuine."

Attridge's respondents were complaining of ringing ears, headaches
and difficulty sleeping - which, along with dizziness, nosebleeds,
rashes, nausea and loss of concentration, are typical of the problems
reported across the country. The diversity of ailments, all of which
could point to anything, are at the same time all possible symptoms
of one thing: radiation sickness.

Dr Gerard Hyland, a theoretical physicist at the International
Institute of Biophysics in Neuss, Germany, says, "They are all
consistent with the kinds of effects we know radiation has. Nobody is
reporting warts." There is no reason why anyone suffering any of
these symptoms would suspect the phone masts, and there have been no
surveys to establish any sort of link. Lisa Oldham, at the campaign
group Mast Sanity, believes that if there were, we would be
shocked: "You don't have to search very hard to find an ill-health
cluster next to a mast," she says. "It is clear that there is a huge
problem out there, waiting to be exposed."

At a local level, such exposures occur when neighbours start talking
to each other. This was the case in Wishaw, near Sutton Coldfield,
when Eileen O'Connor, 40, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2001
and started bumping into neighbours at the hospital.

Like Attridge in Yew Tree, she started sending out letters to the
houses next to the phone mast. "Neighbours started coming forward,
saying I've got breast cancer, I've got skin rashes, I've got this,
I've got that." Of the 50 people living in Wishaw, 25 have reported
medical problems in the past two years. As well as cancers and skin
rashes, the complaints include headaches, dizziness and sleep
disturbances.

A T-Mobile mast was installed in 1994. After the failure of attempts
by the village campaign group to negotiate a mast relocation, an
environmental health officer, Gavin Tringham of Birmingham council,
surveyed the area to see what might be causing this rate of illness.
"We looked at air quality, noise, possible contaminated land, food
and water suppliers," he says. "We could not identify anything in
that area likely to be causing those illnesses." The area's primary
health trust is now evaluating whether or not the illnesses can be
attributed to the mast.

Meanwhile, the fears over masts and ill health are spreading. Sue
Webster, a nutritionist and anti-mast campaigner in Totnes, Devon,
has travelled across the country looking at trouble spots. "The
illnesses reported are all the same," she says. "Even people in
clusters don't quite believe it because the conventional view is that
the masts are fine. You think it means nothing, but then you see the
wider picture."

It certainly means enough to some people, who are taking what they
feel are protective measures. When Khawaja was living next to a base
station, he "spent thousands of pounds trying to shield my home with
the stuff that they use to shield RAF, CIA and FBI buildings", he
says. Such material might be used to safeguard communication
equipment, for instance, and protects an area from electromagnetic
radio waves.

In common with many people who choose to "protect" themselves from
radiation from base stations, Khawaja slept under a metal net. The
same material can also be used to make "headnets" to shield against
excess microwave exposure. "Many people find that wearing the headnet
at night improves their quality of sleep dramatically, " says Philips
at Powerwatch. Khawaja, meanwhile, took matters a step further and
made a metal-wire cube for himself so that he could work outdoors
without being bombarded by microwaves.

So far, so anecdotal. And that's precisely the problem, because
science does not rate anecdotes very highly. "Evidence for scientists
is epidemiological - ie, looking at people and their habits and
finding out what makes them ill," says Dr Mike Clark, scientific
spokesman for the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB),
which advises the government - and is partly funded by the mobile
phone industry.

After epidemiological studies, he adds, come animal experiments, then
experiments in Petri dishes, and then the anecdote. "That is how we
rank them. But with the media it is the other way around: the
anecdote is king." The NRPB, along with the International Commission
on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), a body that sets
microwave emission safety levels, says there is no evidence to date
to suggest that radiation at the levels coming from either masts or
phones is a health risk.

Guidelines on mobile phone radiation rely on the "thermal effects" -
they assess whether radiation from phones or masts is strong enough
to heat human cells and cause damage. It isn't - indeed, it falls
below safety levels by a factor of thousands. But some scientists
suggest that the potential health risks are nothing to do with heat.
"The guidelines protect us against something that isn't a problem,"
according to Hyland. He argues that, as well as heat, mobile phone
and mast microwaves emit a kind of pulsing white noise that
interferes with our bodies in the same way that phones interfere with
aeroplane or hospital equipment. "The alive human body is an
electromagnetic instrument, not just a bag of chemicals," he says.
"Information is transported electrically, the body chemistry is
controlled by electrical signals."

According to this theory, pulsing microwave radiation from masts and
phones causes "interference" in the body, which impairs body function
and could lead to illness. As Philips at Powerwatch puts it, "The
body has gone from being in a whispering room to living in a
singing, shouting football crowd. It can't get on with what it wants
to do because of all the noise and rollicking around it."

Philips says this kind of electromagnetic noise has increased a
million-fold in the past 20 years - mobile phones, cordless phones,
Bluetooth and radio frequency ID technology all sit on a band of the
spectrum that simply wasn't used before. He adds that you can measure
this type of noise using an Acousti-COM, his own invention, which
converts pulsing microwaves into audible noise. "If you took one down
Oxford Street, the noise [from the Acousti-COM] would be deafening."

Unlike mobile phones, which get a much higher radiation dose over
with in one short burst, masts transmit this lower beam of
interfering, pulsing microwaves nonstop. This non-thermal theory
accounts for why the masts do not adversely affect everyone. "The
most important thing here is subjective vulnerability," says Hyland.
"This is not relevant with heating effects, since anyone who put
their hand in a fire would get burnt." Hyland likens this to varying
susceptibilities to viral infections.

Clark at the NRPB says of this hypothesis, "The scientific consensus
is that there is no evidence we are affected in that way. The only
biological effect for which there is clear scientific evidence is the
heating effect."

But others dispute such a view and point to a barrage of science
suggesting the opposite. Dr Henry Lai, professor of bioengineering at
the University of Washington, Seattle, has been researching the
effects of this type of radiation for 24 years. "I have seen a lot of
effects," he says. "One is DNA damage, which is a concern because it
can lead to degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, and DNA
mutation is a cause of cancer."

Lai adds that experiments showed memory and learning problems, and
changes in brain chemistry in animals exposed to this type of
radiation. "I hope I am wrong and that all these biological effects
do not cause any harm, but I have a suspicion that this is not true."
Other scientists across the world have found other biological links:
cancer in lab rats, protein damage in worms, and dead brain cells in
rats.

Concern is mounting. In October 2002, 59 doctors signed the
Freiburger Appeal in Germany, asserting that mobile phone
transmissions were linked to a "dramatic rise in severe and chronic
diseases", including learning, concentration and behavioural
disorders, brain-degenerative diseases and cancer.

Since then, 1,000 doctors in Germany have endorsed the appeal. In
June 2000, scientists from 10 countries put together the Salzburg
Resolution, recommending that mobile phone mast emissions should be
9,000 times lower than the ICNIRP guidelines. Back in the UK, 30
doctors last year signed a petition in Liverpool over a mast located
in a residential area: "On the basis of currently available
information, the long-term biological effects of mast emissions are
unknown," the statement reads, concluding that the mast should be
removed.

Also last year, research commissioned by three Dutch ministries found
an adverse link between 3G masts and health: "From our research it
appears that people have unpleasant sensations when they are exposed
to fields generated by 3G base stations. The symptoms displayed vary
from nausea and tingling sensations to dizziness," their press
release concludes.

All in all, says Lai, "it is depressing that organisations such as
the NRPB can come out with such statements on safety." He recently
surveyed 280 papers relating to mobile phone technology and found
that half reported some biological effects. "That figure is very
alarming in my mind," he says.

The NRPB, however, states that independent bodies, such as the
Stewart report of 2000 and the Advisory Group on Non-Ionising
Radiation in January this year, have assessed all the available
research. "It is true that there is lots of biological evidence, but
when others have tried to replicate it, they either can't or get a
completely different result," says Clark.

"The independent groups have looked specifically at all the effects,
but the results are so random that you could not develop a standard
based on these effects. There is no evidence that they actually cause
a health effect." Christine Jude, at the Mobile Operators
Association, the trade group for the UK's five mobile phone companies
(O2, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange and 3), says, "Research has
consistently concluded that the evidence does not suggest exposure to
radio waves causes health problems. The balance of evidence shows
there is no health risk to people living near base stations."

Meanwhile, other countries are taking a different approach. China has
capped mobile phone radiation at less than half the levels allowed
internationally. Maximum exposure levels in Australia, Switzerland,
Italy and Belgium have been set well below ICNIRP guidelines and
below the level at which non-thermal effects are thought to occur.

Russia has banned the use of mobile phones among under-16s. France,
Austria, Spain, Italy and Australia have all extended the distance at
which masts can be mounted in residential areas. In Sweden,
meanwhile, electromagnetic sensitivity is recognised as a disability
and legally treated as such.

Sensitive individuals react adversely when exposed to electromagnetic
fields such as mobile phone microwaves - a kind of hi-tech peanut
allergy. "It is estimated that around 3% of the population will
display such a sensitivity, with maybe another 10-15% affected in
some way," says Professor Olle Johansson at the department of
neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm. Britain's Stewart
report acknowledges such a possibility: "Populations as a whole are
not genetically homogeneous and people can vary in their
susceptibility to environmental hazards," it states.

The Stewart report's recommendations have, arguably, been heeded
rather selectively. Sir William Stewart did in 2000 make a "no risk"
assessment, but he also spoke of possible, as yet unknown effects.
"It is not possible at present," his report concludes, "to say that
exposure to RF radiation, even at levels below national guidelines,
is totally without potential adverse health effects . . . the gaps in
knowledge are sufficient to justify a precautionary approach."

Responding to Stewart's call for further research, government and
industry threw £7.4m into a pot designated for independent
research. However, part of Stewart's precautionary approach relates
to children: "If there are currently unrecognised adverse health
effects from the use of mobile phones, children may be more
vulnerable because of their developing nervous system, the greater
absorption of energy in the tissues of the head, and a longer
lifetime of exposure."

Since the report, no new masts have been sited on school grounds -
but there are still hundreds already in schools, dating back to the
early 1990s, when schools would receive up to £10,000 to host a
mobile phone mast. There is scant "precautionary" information
disseminated to the public - Stewart has said that children should be
discouraged from making non-essential calls and that his
grandchildren would not be using mobile phones.

But how many parents know that? Judging by the number of kids
babbling into their phones, not many. The Radiation Research Trust, a
campaign group, recently found that government leaflets advising
caution with children were offered in only one in five mobile phone
shops. Jude at the Mobile Operators Association says, "Leaflets are
available in the operators' stores, on their websites and on our own
website." Meanwhile, though phone operators are not permitted to
market to under-16s, the teen-hit ring tones and cuddly toy phone
covers obviously do.

The Stewart report also recommended that phone masts should go
through the same planning process as anything else - but that's
debatable, too. According to Chris Maile, planning director at the
campaign group Planning Sanity, about 50% of masts bypass planning
regulations. "If the structure doesn't go above four metres and is on
a roof, if it is on Network Rail property, if it is a small
installation inside a lamp-post or church spire, or on a high street,
it does not need planning permission," he says.

Also included in this 50% evasion figure are the masts that fall into
the 56-day loophole - unique to mast applications, if a council does
not inform operators of a planning decision within the 56-day time
frame, it is automatically assumed that permission has been granted.
"Refused" masts are going up across the country (though not in
Scotland, where this loophole does not exist) because of late letters
from councils.

In one typical scenario in Bardsey, Leeds, a mast went up in January
despite being refused by the council 18 months earlier, following a
vociferous local campaign. "We were shocked and outraged when we
realised a planning refusal could become a planning approval
overnight without any further consideration of the case ... It's
basically just very unfair," says Chris Nunn, a part-time GP and one
of the Bardsey campaigners.

This loophole may recently have been sealed by a court decision in
Swindon, where seven householders were in May last year awarded a
total of £117,000 from their local council for devaluation of
property after a 20ft mast was erected in their neighbourhood. The
mast was approved by default, because of the 56-day ruling - and it
was this "maladministration causing injustice" that swung the case.
Faced with such a precedent, Maile thinks that local authorities have
become more diligent.

But first a mast has to be refused - and scores of campaigners are
finding that their objections to masts are overruled. "Councillors
right across the country, right across the political spectrum,
privately admit to their local residents that the council cannot
refuse these applications because of fear of the cost of appeal by
the operators," says Oldham at Mast Sanity.

Ninety per cent of mast cases do go to appeal; with other planning
applications, that figure is closer to 40%. "A public inquiry
[appeal] can cost £10,000, and if the inspector says it
was unreasonable for the council to have refused application, they
may have to pay £20,000 on top of that," says Maile. Of the
2,800 appeals relating to masts that have already taken place, 35%
were lost by the councils. Maile says that, with this kind of
pressure put on local authorities, it is a wonder that any mast
applications are rejected in the first place.

There is also some confusion among local authorities over whether
they can reject a mast application on the grounds of health concerns.
Obliquely, government guidelines state both that they can and can't,
and councils are reportedly opting for the latter.

But even planning officers are worried about mast applications. When
Graham Jones, chief planning officer at Harrow council, surveyed 158
planning authorities, 86% of those officers thought there was a major
problem with the mast planning application process, 95% thought it an
important planning issue and 73% thought it an important health
issue. "MPs across the county get more letters about this than about
anything else," says Oldham, adding that most anti-mast campaigners
are "people who have never objected to anything before".

These campaigns do not seem likely to fade; indeed, in eight recent
instances across the UK, including at Wishaw in the Midlands, matters
have moved into the realms of direct action and masts have
mysteriously "fallen down".

Each time anyone makes a mobile phone call or sends or receives a
text, it is registered so that companies can plan where to site extra
masts. These base stations cost between £20,000 and
£80,000. "The companies can only afford to put up more base
stations because so many people are using their phones so much," says
Philips at Powerwatch. Lured by the incentive of free minutes, we are
using these phones as landlines - accelerating the drive for more
masts in residential areas.

A financial illiteracy among the public, plus confusing mobile phone
tariffs, may in part account for that. A recent Which? report
concluded that mobile phone shops often give poor tariff advice,
while 43% of contract customers surveyed didn't know what tariff they
were on or couldn't estimate their monthly bill.

That's particularly true of young phone users, suggests Jessica
Bridges Palmer at the New Economics Foundation thinktank: "They might
move into a new home and decide they aren't going to have two forms
of communication.They don't have a way of comparing costs and so it
seems a better deal to have a mobile rather than spend on installing
a landline."

Meanwhile, 3G is likely to be pushed to the public with some
intensity. In 2000, the government sold the licences for the 3G
spectrum to five phone operators for £22.5bn - 600% above the
expected amount. "They must have been smoking something when they bid
for those licences," says Jeremy Green of Ovum.

Indeed, the operators did try to get their money back, to which a
government spokesman, according to the New Scientist, responded:
"It's not like taking clothes back to Marks & Spencer ... The
government is not in the business of giving refunds." But, as Green
points out, those licences have shelf lives - 15 to 20 years - and
the sooner the network is in place the better. (At the moment, the 3G
signal reverts to the old network outside big cities.)

Commentators predict that, once the networks are up and the handsets
up to speed, all that remains is for the public to be "educated and
encouraged to buy", as Alan Hadden, of the Global Mobile Suppliers
Association, puts it. But buying 3G necessitates more masts outside
more homes - possibly yours. No mast campaigner is suggesting we all
throw our mobile phones on to a collective scrapheap, but there are
clearly issues surrounding our spiralling and increasingly gimmicky
use of this technology.

It's tempting, given our obvious love affair with mobiles, to dismiss
mast-related illness as a crackpot theory held by neurotics and
nimbyists. But how does that square with so many accounts of
illnesses all falling into the same pattern, and so many scientists
suspecting a link? Are we to accept that these illnesses are pure
bluff or psychosomatic? And why would we accept such a verdict when
there appears to be disagreement even within official circles?

Now that the NRPB is chaired by Sir William Stewart, who also directs
the government's Health Protection Agency, it looks as though there
is someone in a position of power with grave reservations about
phones and masts. In an NRPB press release issued last week, Stewart
reiterates "a need for a precautionary approach when there are
genuine uncertainties in our knowledge". Whether this will result in
any reduction in the number of masts going up remains to be seen.

Even accepting the government's current verdict on the issue is to
accept an element of the unknown. As Mark Cooper, a father of two
living under a mast in Plymouth, puts it, "I don't know what it is
doing to my little ones. But in 20 years' time I might find out."

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited

 

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