Cell towers likely sources of radiation, disease: Report

Times of India - 7 Dec 2010 ; MUMBAI: Cellphone operators have long denied their transmitting towers atop buildings or on highways have any adverse bearing on the health of humans or animals, despite several studies across the world concluding the contrary. Now a report for the Department of Telecommunication by a faculty of the Indian Institute of Technology, Powai, reinforces what scientists have long held—that areas around cellphone towers are high-radiation and consequently high-risk zones. Moreover, it recommends that India, which has very "relaxed radiation norms", must raise the safety bar.

Girish Kumar, professor, electrical engineering department of the Powai institute, who visited rooftops of several buildings and measured radiation on places with cell towers mounted, said: "These towers transmit radiation 24x7, so people living nearby will receive 10,000 to 10,000,000 times stronger signal than required for mobile communication. In India, crores of people reside in these high radiation zones."

Kumar noted the cell phone industry was becoming "another cigarette industry, which for long kept claiming smoking is not harmful. In fact, cellphone/tower radiation is worse than smoking as one cannot see it or smell it, and its effect on health is noted after a long period of exposure. Unfortunately, all of us are absorbing this slow poison unknowingly."

For instance, Kumar visited the apartment of a lady detected with cancer a year after a cellphone tower was installed in the vicinity. A hand-held broadband radiation monitoring device, taken near the windows, detected radiation levels were around 0.007069 W/m2. India has adopted a radiation norm of 4.7 W/m2, but the study noted serious health effects at as low a level of 0.0001 W/m2. Though India adheres to the radiation density limit set by the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), Kumar observed Indians faced an added threat: radiation from multiple towers. "One should know the actual radiation pattern (unfortunately not made public) to calculate exact radiation density at a point," he noted. One of the first steps he recommended was tightening radiation norms and reducing number of towers. Many countries in the world have adopted much stricter maximum radiation density values of 0.001 to 0.24 W/m2.

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