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To: Mr Tim Loughton
9 March 2004
Mr Loughton
Many thanks for replying, and indeed for your attendance at our meeting.
I have become involved in the Worthing campaign, and on behalf of the ‘Worthing says no to Tetra’ residents committee, have created the www.worthingnotetra.org.uk website. It is very new, and is attracting wide attention. Through it, you will see that our communications are quite open (Action: letters), and our enquiries on several fronts are quite specific.
Why move the mast at Woodside Road? Someone somewhere else will then experience the same effects as us! If the interval between masts is thereby increased, greater power will have to be used at other people’s masts. This is not just a matter of the siting of mobile communications masts, this is specific to the characteristics of Tetra, and is the precursor defence on behalf of our police force who are expected to use the handsets in the future.
In the light of the flat and unwavering denials by O2 that Airwave/Tetra could possibly have any effect on people at any distance, I wonder if you can give us your support in the direction of Public Health? I can furnish you with my communications with O2 in this regard, as indeed I can over my own and others’ symptoms of sensitivity to this radiation, even at some distance from a Tetra mast. The NRPB science spokesman’s comments in this regard (see website) are also telling.
However, until some independent authority conducts a thorough epidemiological survey, O2 and anyone else will get away with causing actual bodily harm to people such as me, whilst I apparently have no legal redress. Since Worthing is mirroring Littlehampton and Bognor in this region, and many other areas nationwide, it is time someone took a stand and undertook such an indicative survey. For this reason, we called upon our Director of Public Health to intervene. The cost would not be great for the survey, nor need it take long to conduct and analyse. We do not need at this point to have a scientific explanation of how the effects on health are caused, only their source.
Have you no influence with regard to our local Department of Public Health? Or at Westminster in regard to those of similar communities? Other MPs may seem unmoved by their constituents, but I am sure you are different. Someone has to be first: in 1854, Dr John Snow removed the handle from a pump in Broad Street, London, and thereby halted the cholera epidemic. Please remove our handle, and stop this epidemic.
For O2 to admit to health risks of masts (which they still insist, as does Prof Challis, do not significantly pulse) would be to raise very considerable alarm as to the use of the unchallenged pulsing of handsets. This would undermine the credibility of the entire system and Tetra contract, with enormous financial penalties: (a) for loss of contract, (b) for loss of existing infrastructure investment and (c) claims against health damage experienced so far.
I suspect that O2 is therefore unlikely to admit any such linkage, and that it is naive to suppose that the residents of Worthing could achieve this. We need to formally identify the cause of our ill health, so that O2 can be presented with incontrovertible evidence, not just get away with an apparent tolerance of our displeasure over the siting of a particular mast. Even if they switched Woodside Road off tomorrow, we require fair civil treatment for what has already occurred here.
I look forward to hearing what transpires from your correspondence with Dr Tahzib, Director of Public Health, Adur and Arun PCT.
Regards
Andy Davidson
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