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George Hooker
Radiation and Toxicology Branch
Health Protection Division
Department of Health
Skipton House
80 London Road
London
SE1 6LH
19 June 2004
Dear Mr Hooker
In your reply to my letter of 22 April, I was pleased to receive such an undismissive response. This is quite refreshing, if I may say so. The responses we have always received from the Home Office, (and initially from the DoH), the NRPB and key figures at MTHR, including its chairman, are defensive, and rather in denial of what they are being told is happening. So forgive me in thinking that you are unlikely to find objective consideration in the authorities mentioned; the situation is akin to the early days of BSE.
It is good that WHO recognises the validity of electro-sensitivity: their Director-General is a well known acute sufferer! As you say, the usual response is that correlation is poor, because the emf environment has become complex. Also, whilst I recognise that symptoms may be diverse, they are nonetheless somewhat predictable when it comes to TETRA installations. In this respect, whilst the symptoms take a while to develop around GSM, they are pretty much immediate around TETRA.
This is where the situation differs from GSM: the ability to correlate TETRA with electro-sensitivity symptoms, due to the relatively short period of installation and the immediacy of effect, coupled with key cases where active masts have been deactivated or removed. Since the communities affected in the race to install TETRA are so consistent in their reports (once aware that they share something in common) it might be not only wise, but respectful, to at least seek to document their experiences.
While people are experiencing a very characteristic loss of sleep from TETRA, for example, there is just one base station study: childhood cancers and GSM. Is this an adequate response? In fact is it a response at all? Also, you are seeking robust results, but because you think them difficult to achieve, you are not even seeking indicators. This is vital, because if the indicators are there, they present a likely future scenario of very robust legal claims, for loss of value to property, all the way up to liability for endangerment to health. I pick on sleep disorders, ‘abrupt waking’, etc. because this symptom is certainly non-trivial, being intimately connected with the body’s immune system.
All government departments now know that there are widespread reports of more immediate symptomatic responses to TETRA than to other technologies. Even if (let us just suppose irrationally for a moment!) all of it is psychosomatic, even then you are facing a socially unacceptable situation in the imposition of these transmitters in populated areas. However, it is not, as indeed you recognise, just psychosomatic. Therefore the reality is that wherever TETRA goes, some people are hurting, and it appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with ICNIRP guidelines.
Again: another illustration. If I carry what you perceive to be an offensive weapon in the street, I am culpable. The police don’t say: ‘there, there, I’m sure no harm will come of it’. No; I am hauled up for possession of an offensive weapon, whatever my intent and whatever the ‘weapon’, on the grounds of what you perceived! Many people are fearful of these TETRA masts, for good scientific reasons for doubt. It is not the job of government simply to ‘allay our fears’ without finding out first the degree of safety or risk involved.
You are in charge of health protection. So is the Health and Safety Executive, so is the Health Protection Agency. Whilst you collectively dither about what research might produce the best result, you stand by and watch the reality, masked by such statements as ‘it is unlikely that TETRA is a risk to health in the general population’. Once again, if I came to you with any other environmental concern, you would test the air, test the water, investigate local dietary trends, and find out as best you could what is wrong. But because it’s emf, you do nothing. It took 40 years to recognise the issue with power lines, and even today there are no guidelines for health and safety regarding exposure to emf, even by workers in the industries involved. You owe it to us all not to repeat that approach.
What measures are you taking, from your involvement with MTHR as well as DoH, to ensure prompt action is taken to define the early indicators that are so clearly visible out here?
Yours sincerely
Andy Davidson
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