The inexplicable volte face...

The 'Stewart Report' stated that frequencies around 16Hz should be avoided, if possible. This was penned by Professor Colin Blakemore, Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council. Mysteriously, Blakemore (member of the NRPB's Advisory Group on Non-ionising Radiation,) now says: on reflection (there is) absolutely no cause for alarm at all(28) Why? Blakemore says My mind hasn't changed. I still hold to both of my previous statements. In principle, it would have been better if 16Hz pulsing could have been avoided. But that was said in the context of the quite strict precautionary approach adopted by the Stewart report.

The NRPB's AGNIR report

The NRPB's report from their Advisory Group on Non-ionising Radiation includes worrying statements such as this: studies do not exclude the possibility of a risk of cancer that appears only after many years of exposure, nor of a hazard from RF radiation modulated specifically at around 16 Hz.(29)

Yet if you phone the NRPB as a member of the press you will be told that: AGNIR concluded that it was unlikely that special features of the TETRA system posed a risk to health.(30) The TETRA Industry Group's website cheerfully say they noted AGNIR's conclusion that research published since the Stewart Report does not give cause for concern.

Why? The Police Information Technology Organisation candidly says of this report that the research was commissioned to reassure users of systems like Airwave that they do not pose a risk. The report itself echoes this: one study could be of crucial importance in helping to reassure users of the safety of amplitude-modulated and pulse-modulated communication systems.(31)

Call me old-fashioned, but I rather thought the job of a National Radiological Protection Board might be to protect the nation from hazardous radiation; instead it seems its job is to protect the industry from a hazard to their profits.