[LINK] Danger on the airwaves: Is the Wi-Fi revolution a health time bomb?

[rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au]

(Please 'scuse the snips!)
> Even less useful, unfortunately, is the recommendation about;
>   
>> making the erection of phone masts  subject to democratic control through the
>> planning system; 
>>     
> because the best way to lower the power output of the handsets, is to have
> many low-power cellphone base-stations everywhere (like WiFi) so that only
> low output powers are needed to cover the distance back to a base-station.
>
> If we all voted on the siting of cellphone towers, NIMBY would operate, and
> there would probably only be one on top of Sydney's Centerpoint Tower - and
> you'd need a 100 Watts of handset power to reach it and a few more GigaHertz
> of bandwidth for meaningful capacity.
>   
Indeed. Regardless of the epidemiology - even assuming the jury was 
still out - the power delivered to the human from the *tower* is trivial 
compared to that delivered by the phone. To hear people saying "phone 
towers give you cancer" while happily burbling away on the mobile makes 
me grind my teeth.

But "inverse square law" is one of those phrases that just gets a 
glaze-over in 99% of the population.

"Because we think they're ugly" is the honest reason for most opposition 
to phone towers. In a democratic sense, this is perfectly valid as a 
stand to take in the argument, because people have at least a limited 
right to a say in their immediate environment. As long as the real 
reason is in the open, I don't object to the debate.

RC
> -------
>
> The Stewart Report recommended sensible precautions.  It makes sense to
> apply some of them for at least another decade (and this hasn't been done),
> but evidence that cellphones are probably safe appears to be gradually
> accumulating.
>
> The politicians have managed to get away with, what amount to, the world's
> most convincing epidemiological study by just giving the cellphone companies
> free reign, and seeing what happens.  So far, that is 'nothing'.  However,
> it could easily have been a catastrophe.