From
http://www.networkrailmasts.co.uk/services/latest-news26th March
Have a letter from N.R. to say the mast has never been switched on therefore it can't be the cause of my ill health.Seems odd as I have had tests done on the mast and a graph printed showing the output.
Good news as I can now have tests at home with no mast switched on.
I have no idea how the mast was supposedly tested, and in the absence of any information detailing how the "tests" were conducted and showing the data it's impossible to tell if they have any validity or meaning.
31st March 2011
At last Network Rail admit that their masts can cause mild or serious health problems in some people living close to the base stations.
They sent a World Health Organization letter detailing evidence from around the world showing that some people like myself are affected by the EMF given off by the mast base stations.Something I knew already.
Why then do they place them close to the habitation if there is a concern worldwide about the effects ?
Something my solicitor would like an answer to.
The "WHO letter" is neither reproduced nor cited. However the WHO has an extensive online resourse on this issue which does not really say what the
OP▸ claims it does; the link to the full article is
http://www.who.int/peh-emf/about/WhatisEMF/en/index1.html.
The balance of the article is that there has been extensive research on the issue (they quote 25,000 scientific publications) and no-one has proven any health consequences. As any scientist will tell you it is of course exceedingly difficult to prove a negative, but I'll quote a couple of paragraphs here:
From
http://www.who.int/peh-emf/about/WhatisEMF/en/index1.html:
Conclusions from scientific research
In the area of biological effects and medical applications of non-ionizing radiation approximately 25,000 articles have been published over the past 30 years. Despite the feeling of some people that more research needs to be done, scientific knowledge in this area is now more extensive than for most chemicals. Based on a recent in-depth review of the scientific literature, the WHO concluded that current evidence does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low level electromagnetic fields. However, some gaps in knowledge about biological effects exist and need further research.
Effects on general health
Some members of the public have attributed a diffuse collection of symptoms to low levels of exposure to electromagnetic fields at home. Reported symptoms include headaches, anxiety, suicide and depression, nausea, fatigue and loss of libido. To date, scientific evidence does not support a link between these symptoms and exposure to electromagnetic fields. At least some of these health problems may be caused by noise or other factors in the environment, or by anxiety related to the presence of new technologies.
(my emphasis)
Electromagnetic hypersensitivity and depression
Some individuals report "hypersensitivity" to electric or magnetic fields. They ask whether aches and pains, headaches, depression, lethargy, sleeping disorders, and even convulsions and epileptic seizures could be associated with electromagnetic field exposure.
There is little scientific evidence to support the idea of electromagnetic hypersensitivity. Recent Scandinavian studies found that individuals do not show consistent reactions under properly controlled conditions of electromagnetic field exposure. Nor is there any accepted biological mechanism to explain hypersensitivity. Research on this subject is difficult because many other subjective responses may be involved, apart from direct effects of fields themselves. More studies are continuing on the subject.
See also Ben Goldacre's excellent article linked by TerminalJunkie above. Essentially the state of the art is that there is no proven link at all between EM radiation and health problems (let's remember that we're not necessarily talking about "scary" ionizing radiation from nuclaer power stations here, light is a type of EM radiation). Whilst people may experience symptoms that are undoubtedly real, the current evidence from the scientific literature is that they are unlikely to be caused by the EMF but more likely a more nebulous collection of environmental/social/psychlogical/other factors that are exceedingly difficult to pin down.
The clincher for me was the articles cited by Goldacre in what I, as a scientist, would call a properly controlled experiment. The basic principle of the method is that someone who claims hypersentivitity to EMF is exposed to a field but in such a way that they have no idea when it is on or when it is off. At risk of over-simplifying by summarizing the results in a few words, these studies apparently show that the test subject can't tell if the EMF is present or not.
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