Adapted from an article by By Paul Ben Ishai, Feb 26, 2021 | Original post here.
On the 25th of January, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) stood up (figuratively) in the D.C. Circuit of Appeals and blithely claimed that the safety standards governing the exposure of the public to electromagnetic radiation originating from cellphones and wireless infrastructure were fine. The court did not buy it.
The petition, lead by the and the Children’s Health Defense ("CHD") attorney W. Scott McCollough arguing for both CHD and the Environmental Health Trust, challenged the right of the FCC to set into regulation the current pulsed, data-modulated, Radiofrequency Electromagnetic Microwave Radiation (RF-EMR) exposure limits for the additional frequencies being deployed in the USA for densified 4G/5G infrastructure (600 MHz to 90,000 MHz). The petition also demanded that the current limits also be reassessed.
The current limits were selected by the FCC in 1996 from existing industrial RF-EMR standards from the IEEE, ANSI and NCPRP only designed for protecting against short-term acute burns — the guidelines did not address at all the scientifically-proven adverse biological effects from chronic, long-term exposure. This is why the industrial guideline been constantly challenged as insufficient in the scientific literature.
The FCC is attemptint to apply the same industrial guideline to wireless infrastructure atennans and devices that did not even exist back in 1996. Worse still, there is now a solid record of scientific evidence that wireless radiation from infastructure and devices at the levels allowed, does indeed have a negative impact on health of all living organisms.
However, rather than challenge the industry and make them work at biologically acceptable levels, the FCC is attempting to dismis the evidence. The DC Circuit judges now have an opportunity to call out the FCC for that arbitrary and capricious action.
Although the court has not handed down its decision yet, it is clear where the wind is blowing. An excellent Editorial piece by Dr. Devra Davis in the Washington Post sums it up :
“In reviewing our case, CHD/EHT et al v. FCC, the judges asked the agency to show what expert advice it had relied on to dismiss the NTP study and thousands of pages of peer-reviewed science. The FCC had invoked the Interagency Radiofrequency Radiation Work Group, but could provide no evidence that this loosely affiliated, unfunded informal federal Work Group has either met or offered the FCC any advice in the past two years.”
The study she is referring to is by the National Toxicology Program (NTP), an independent body of the American National Institute of Health, charged specifically with the identification and investigation of toxigenic materials and elements. It is probably the most eminent authority in the world for this kind of research.
In short, the FCC commissioned the FDA who commissioned the NTP. The study was extensive and expensive.
- The NTP took two populations of rats and mice, isolated them from all radio signals and let them live their lives, eat, breed and sleep.
- One of the populations was exposed for 10 minutes a day to wireless cellular transmissions like GSM and LTE at levels similar to those allowed by those same FCC rules.
- Now the unpleasant bit. At the end of 2 years, the populations were culled.
- In the animals exposed to the radiation, they found clear evidence of DNA damage and cancer.
Anything that causes cancer in rats and mice causes cancer in people. That’s why we use them in animal studies.
I read those reports with the eye of a scientist and they convinced me. The experiments were excellent and professionally done. So much so that two sets of reviews by independent experts could find no faults. Yet the FCC and the FDA rejected them out of hand.
The Washington Post piece continues:
“The court then asked specifically whether the FDA had sought advice from its own Technical Electronic Product Radiation Safety Standards Committee, The FCC was forced to concede that that technical advisory committee has not met since 2016, is next scheduled to meet in fiscal 2021, and has never considered cellphone safety. In fact, that committee chiefly focuses on ensuring that electronic products do not interfere with each other. So you can be pretty sure that your phone will not block your tablet from working, but you have no idea whether either of them might interfere with your heart or cause damage to your DNA.”
Not only did the FCC ignore the scientific evidence to the contrary, including its own, but failed totally to use any advice at all.
Yet that didn’t stop the FCC from selecting an irrelevant, industrial RF-EMR exposure guideline — a poor choise that has had far-reaching implications. The current FCC RF-EMR exposure guideline enables current dangerous exposure levels for all RF-EMR frequencies; that makes the densified 4G/5G infrastructure rollout in the States is a disaster. Big money is involved here, in the range of trillions of dollars and that is now in danger if the court follows its earlier direction and punishes the FCC for its arbitrary and capricious actions.
The Washington Post piece continues:
“The judge noted that agencies get a lot of discretion: “You get a long leash. But, at some point that leash goes too far and becomes unreasonable without a little bit of followup by the FCC — to make… to verify… just to pin down that the information is responsive.”*
In my opinion, it doesn’t look good for the FCC.
You can read the full transcript here and watch it on video here.
What happens in the United States has a direct impact on what happens in Europe and Israel. Already there are a number of European states who have effectively stopped the rollout of densified 4G/5G, pending a comprehensive health assessment. For instance, in Switzerland, the special advisory expert group BERENIS to the Swiss Environmental agency has just issued a report that states that Electromagnetic radiation from cellphones and wireless infrastructure leads to reactive oxidation species in the blood leading to oxidative stress. And this has been linked to illness and to cancers. The ruling of the US court case may accelerate this.