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Josh Berle
Head of Regional PR
O2 Airwave
1N 12
O2 Building
Wellington Street
Slough
SL1 1YP
15 May 2004
Dear Mr Berle
Thank you for your reply of 13 May regarding our letter to Peter Erskine as the executive responsible for mmO2 Corporate Responsibility. Quite why you have been delegated the task I cannot imagine. This was not a personal letter, and was certainly not addressed by all those concerned, to Airwave Public Relations. Despite the fact that you are keeping a very efficient file on my correspondence, we shall be responding to Mr Erskine with whom the responsibility truly lies. Corporate Responsibility, if it means anything like Business in the Community [of which mmO2 is a member, and shares Chief Executive] understands it to be, is most certainly not a PR exercise.
Nor am I comforted by the fact that O2 is in part paying for research on behalf of the Home Office. Such funding relations always fall under suspicion, and you should be more distanced from investigation into controversy surrounding products you sell and install.
However, since you did construct an answer, let me reply to you. In two points you are completely incorrect.
Our letter to you all was in relation to adverse health effects reported from TETRA base stations.
- There is no MTHR, Home Office, or any other funded research, current or planned, into the epidemiology of adverse health reports attributed to TETRA base stations. In fact TETRA base stations do not figure in the equation at all.
- There is no public active encouragement by the NRPB to report anything to anyone. The NRPB website is quite devoid of any such invitation, and if there were any such, that is where it would be. There is no unit, group or programme to receive such information and no funding to process it. As regards the MTHR Secretariat, this comprises members of the Department for Health, and the DoH appears not to want to know. Indeed you can see my earlier correspondence with Dr Hooker who is on the MTHR Secretariat, on our website.
From what I recollect, and from my own notes, Mike Clark representing the NRPB at the meeting in Bognor to which you refer, dismissed all reports of adverse health as 'anecdotal', and Supt Ross Hollister representing Sussex Police Authority on Airwave, used the word 'supposition' to convey the same opinion. If the NRPB had any interest at all in investigating the epidemiology of TETRA base stations, they would do it quite openly and properly, and not just as a suggestion in a local meeting in a seaside town. Besides that, Dr Clark does not have the authority to introduce such a programme on behalf of the NRPB.
In terms of following Dr Clark's supposed advice, I have indeed long ago corresponded with King's College London, with Imperial College, London, and with Essex University, regarding their mobile phone and TETRA research. They indeed confirm that research into TETRA base stations and reported adverse health, does not feature in their research.
As you do know, I have reported all my own health concerns in full to the Surrey Sussex Health protection Agency, to Prof. Fox at Essex University. I encourage anyone else I encounter with similar problems to do the same.
Hence, and back to, our original letter to Government departments and Peter Erskine.
Yours sincerely,
Andy Davidson
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