If you read part one of this story, you know by now that citizens and local governments don’t have much say over the installation of new wireless towers and antennas. The Federal Communications Commission is running the show. And the FCC is paying more attention to the meeting the growing demand wireless services than it is to questions about possible health problems.
That’s a problem for people like Anne Trudeau of RespectPDX.org, the group fighting a proposed Clearwire wireless internet and phone antenna in Northeast Portland. They can talk all they want about how they think the antenna could harm their health. They can present all sorts of studies linking low levels radiofrequency energy to increased cancer rates. But it doesn’t matter. Federal law says when it comes to placing wireless towers, you’re not allowed to even consider health questions.
What are the dangers of wireless towers? I’m not enough of an expert to weigh the conflicting information. So I went in search of someone who is.
Two years ago, the National Academies formed a committee that spent three days going over research and hearing from experts around the world. The work was done at the request of the Food and Drug Administration and was released in January of 2008.
What the committee reported is that we know little about the effects of long term exposure to wireless signals, and that no one is doing much research into answering the questions.
Nor do we know how this exposure affects children. Unlike us adults, kids today are growing up with cell phones and wi-fi. They’re being exposed at an earlier age and by the time they’re adults will have received far more exposure than we did.
There’s reason to believe that kids might be more susceptible to radiofrequency exposure than adults. Children have thinner skulls, raising the possibility that its easier for RF energy from cell phones to reach their brains.
If it can be shown that exposure to wireless signals causes gene mutations (which some studies suggest), then children and teens could be at greater risk because they’re growing so quickly. This is a time of life where cells grow and divide rapidly. Defective cells caused by exposure could be growing and dividing rapidly too, setting the stage for tumors down the road.
But as the committee reports, much more research needs to be done to know if these are real dangers or not.
Since the information is more than two years old, I called the committee’s chairman to see if the report is still relevant. Frank Barnes of the University of Colorado at Boulder is an engineering professor who was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2004.
Barnes says little has changed since the report came out. The issue, he says, is incredibly complex. Most of the research done so far has focused on short-term effects to healthy adults. But he adds, “The ability of the body to handle long term, low level signals is not well understood.”
Here’s an example of the kinds of problems facing researchers. Barnes says brain tumors take 10 – 40 years to fully develop. So a decade long study of the effects of cell phones on the brain would probably conclude they don’t cause brain cancer. But it could easily be wrong if only because the study didn’t last long enough.
Barnes believes we’ll never be able to show that RF exposure is harmless. Just like driving a car to work involves risks, he thinks wireless technology does too.
But until more research is done, we’ll never know how much risk we may be facing.
