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To: Dr James Walsh
Date: 30 March 2004
Dear Dr Walsh,
If, in your time as a GP, a family came to you with serious stomach complaints and said they had been swimming in a sea which was polluted, would you regard their related experience as anecdotal? As a responsible doctor, would you not have wanted to find the cause and treat the symptoms in the light of the likely cause, as reported by people at the scene? Would you not have accepted their version of events and perhaps related it to others who had reported similar symptoms but were not associated with the other family? And would you not have reported the facts as reported to the relevant authorities for remedial action?
If you can please consider this scenario VERY carefully and relate it to all the information about Tetra and its obvious influences on people's well being, can you honestly continue to maintain your position on anecdoatal evidence, as reported to me from the meeting last night in Felpham?
I offer you the following for further consideration:
PPG8 [Planning Policy Guidance 8: Telecommunications, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister]
Health Considerations
"It is for the decision-maker (usually the planning authority) to determine what weight to attach to such considerations in any particular case."
Comment: If health issues are emphasised strongly enough with cases quoted, the planning authority is in dereliction of its duty if it does not give the weight being suggested by the information provided.
Comment: In the next para, PPG8 goes on to say, "However, it is the Government's firm view that the planning system is not the place for determining health safeguards. It remains central Government's responsibility to decide what measures are necessary to protect public health."
In essence this is OK. The planning authority is not ICNIRP so it cannot take on its role. The Government accepts the ICNIRP guidelines to protect public health. What is missing is the health issues outside the ICNIRP guidelines and nothing in PPG8 excludes the local authority from protecting the public from influences which exist but which are not known to the Government at the time of accepting the guidelines and which are not covered by those guidelines.
Let us assume that there is a guideline to protect us from water polluted by sewage. But our drinking water is now being polluted by frogspawn. The accepted guidelines are adequate for the sewage but not related to the frogspawn menace. Has the council the responsibility to look at the threat from frogspawn, or does it deny that it can do anything and continue to allow the water to be polluted by frogspawn because there are no suitable guidelines? Woe betide a council that fails to recognise and address a new and unquantified threat.
I do not normally expect, nor request a response from you, but in these matters I hope you will do me the honour of replying.
Many thanks.
Yours,
John O'Brien
Arundel
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