TETRA :: Ecologist - October 2004
By Jay Griffiths
page 4
Some call it the Precautionary Principle. In Llanidloes, they call it common sense. If something may have risks, and has not been proved safe, it must be assumed that it may be dangerous.
Dr Hyland is explicit. If you ask "whether there is an established risk to human health from exposure to GSM/TETRA radiation: the answer is undoubtedly 'Yes'."(5) He adds: If there were the same degree of uncertainty over a food or medicine, the government would never have licensed it.
Food or drugs are subject to stringent tests over years, (although this testing regime is certainly not infallible). However other technologies, be they genetic engineering, nanotechnology or TETRA, do not have to pass through the same stringent procedures. Green MEP Jean Lambert has said: Reports of TETRA being responsible for tumours, leukaemia, motor neurone disease and other cancers must be taken seriously... With risks like these the precautionary principle must apply.
There is a clear need for tougher regulation and testing of new technologies, but the government doesn't see it that way at all, and the person they have put as head of their "Better Regulation Task Force" is David Arculus, who is also chair of MMO2. The fox is in charge of guarding the chickencoop.
When Barrie Trower finished his work for the Police Federation, his report was too hot to handle: the Police Federation sat on it for a few months, but it was leaked onto the internet. Trower, with a background in government microwave research, was a careful collator of the evidence and wrote the report in a style which would be comprehensible to a non-scientific reader; he was thus a profoundly important whistleblower - for the police and public alike.(6) When I wrote the TETRA report, I said it must never be used, and I haven't changed my mind,
he said. I believe that the government, government scientists and this industry will be responsible for more civilian deaths in peacetime than all the terrorist organisations put together.
Astonishingly, the Home Office is rolling out TETRA nationwide without proper studies being done first: an act which is in Hyland's words "totally irresponsible." The NRPB admits: No epidemiological study as yet has explored the risks associated with telecommunications systems such as TETRA which use RF radiation modulated at frequencies around 16Hz
(7) and says that Human volunteer studies should be carried out
.(8) I asked Professor Challis, (member of the NRPB's Advisory Group on Non-ionising Radiation,) if proper studies had been done. No,
he said, because you'll never be able to say that something is safe unless you have an infinity of studies, but there is no evidence of any harm and the police are happy with the system.
The Home Office last year commissioned a five million pound study from Imperial College, London, to study the effects on police officers - not volunteers - over a ten year period. But the study won't look at the effect of masts, only that of handsets, and is being done while the system is already in use nationwide.
Since many of the potential effects could take years to surface, some say any studies should run for a lifetime. But at Porton Down, the government's experiments were conducted in three and a half months and involved exposure to TETRA signals lasting twenty minutes.(9)
