TRAI SAYS MOBILE TOWERS DON’T AFFECT HEALTH

Electromagnetic field (EMF) exposures from mobile towers and their consequent health hazards have been the point of debate in the scientific community for a long time now. A 13-member committee constituted by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), cleared the air in a report on Monday.

TRAI stated that after a detailed examination of 25,000-plus studies, ‘no conclusive evidence of adverse effect of EMF radiation’ on human health had been proven. Sunil Kumar Gupta, principal advisor, said, “Mobile towers do not cause any harm as they also fall in the same category as other waves like electricity, radio and TV. But people in high rise within 1 km of TV towers or 500 meters of FM towers, have to put metallic wire mesh, plants, trees, water curtains to absorb radiation, which is the same with the mobile tower.”

He added that the government had implemented stringent norms to ensure that there was ‘no adverse effect on health’. The limits adopted in India account for all biological effects of radiation and are much lower than the internationally-adopted recommendations of the International Commission on Non-Ionising Radiation Protection (ICNIRP).

Since 2011, TRAI received around 120 complaints from Bengaluru urban and subsequent penalties were levied when EMF limits exceeded the benchmark, which officials cleared didn’t necessarily indicate they were harmful. Out of 120 complaints, 10 remained unchecked and would be looked into soon, they assured.

World Health Organization (WHO), has in the past, reported that there was ‘no convincing scientific evidence that the weak radio frequency (RF) signals from base stations and wireless networks, caused adverse health effects.’

Convenient Argument on sparrows
An argument that the population of sparrows reduced due to the rise of mobile towers, was discussed at the meeting.
Meanwhile, Agneshwar Sen, advisor at TRAI, citing a British University study said, “Researchers found that birds living in quiet barns and woodland were fed more than those in the noisier environment, meaning that they were heavier when they fledged and consequently better prepared for survival.”

The article was published in Bangalore Mirror, you can read it here.

Image Source: VNL

Telcos add over 2,000 towers in Delhi to check call drops

Telecom operators have added over 2,000 mobile towers in Delhi in the last three months to check the menace of call drops.

According to an official in Department of Telecom (DoT), as many as 2,092 mobile sites (2G and 3G) have been added in Delhi service area in the past 12 weeks which has resulted in the call drop rate to come down considerably.

Sharing data, the official said that Bharti Airtel, whose call drop rate was in the range of 2.92-17.77 per cent earlier has come down to 0.08-2.98 percent whereas that of Vodafone has dropped to 0.3-2.97 percent from 1.53-6.63 per cent in Delhi.

Reliance Communications, which had earlier a call drop rate in the range of 1.53-24.83 per cent has come down to 0.02-5.15 per cent and that of Idea Cellular has decreased to 0.14-2.65 percent from 3.34-10.90 per cent.

Across the country, the telecom operators have added 22,279 mobile sites in the last three months.

Apart from addition of mobile sites, operators are also deploying in-building solutions to check the problem.

The operators, however, are complaining about sealing of sites by local bodies like MCD, which hampers their efforts to reduce call drops.

An operator on condition of anonymity, said that if MCD seals, one mobile site in an area, it affects the remaining sites, which also makes it difficult for them to provide good quality services to customers.

The problem of call drops had become acute in the past months, though now it has started to improve. Telecom Secretary Rakesh Garg had spoken to owners of telecom companies including Sunil Bharti Mittal and Anil Ambani to address the problem.

Even the telecom operators are accepting that their current service is not up to the mark and they are making serious efforts to improve in providing the best experience to their customers.

You can watch the news from World Wide News here:

Article Source: PTI

Image Source: iGovernment

What is radiation?

Mobile phones have a life changing impact on our lives today. The mobile ecosystem has helped us stay connected with everyone and everything that matters to us. What makes this possible is a complex yet sophisticated and advanced technology and mobile infrastructure.

Mobile towers have been under fire in the recent years. Various individuals and lobbies have alleged that they are the cause of serious ailments and impact our mental and emotional health. There are allegations that radiation from mobile towers can mutate our DNA. Not only are these information pieces misleading, they are far from scientific reality.

When we hear the word radiation, we immediately think of complicated waves and diagrams. Radiation is simply energy emitted as electromagnetic waves or as miniscule sub-atomic particles. Radiation is of two types:

1. Ionising Radiation, e.g. X Rays and Gamma rays
2. Non Ionising Radiation, e.g. TVs, radios, mobile towers

Now let’s break this down a little.

Prolonged exposure to ionising radiation can lead to health problems. Have you noticed how every time you go for an X-ray, women are asked if they are pregnant? That is because we don’t want to expose developing fetuses to ionising radiation. X Rays used to detect bone abnormalities or fractures are therefore given in miniscule bursts, not nearly enough to cause harm. However the reality is that ionising radiation can be harmful because they carry with them enough energy to eject an electron from the cell, thus altering the structure of these cells.

On the other hand, your everyday gadgets like LED and Plasma televisions, radio transistors, microwave ovens, overhead high-tension power cables and mobile telephone towers emit non-ionising radiation. These are very weak! Non-ionising radiations don’t carry enough energy to be able to make any impact on our cell structures or DNA, it simply induces the movement of atoms. Examples of non-ionizing radiation include infrared, microwaves, and light along the visible spectrum.

There have been innumerable studies undertaken across the globe and in India, which demonstrate that low energy non-ionising radiation does not have any impact on our health or lives. Besides, the acceptable non-ionising or mobile tower emission standards of India are 10 times more stringent than what is followed in most of the countries. But more on that, in my next blog post!

For now, let me assure you that radiation from mobile towers are of the non-ionising kind, and do not impact you and your family’s health. We really have no reason to worry after all!

Source: WHO, IARC, ICNIRP

TRAI Chairman on Mobile Tower Radiation

The subject of mobile towers and EMF (electromagnetic field) radiation continues to generate debate among people. Unscientific allegations are being spread about mobile phones and mobile towers, that they cause negative health impacts on human beings, especially children.

If we consider the vast body of scientific research on EMFs available today, one will have to take into consideration close to 30,000 studies from the last three decades. Although conducted by various independent organisations across the globe, these studies are vetted by the credible World Health Organisation (WHO) and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). All these studies have one thing in common: they conclude that there is no evidence to suggest that mobile towers have any adverse impact on health.

To help dispel false claims and create awareness about types of radiation, and their impact,  RS Sharma, Chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has issued a statement. You can watch it here:

Wi-Fi Is Not A Danger To You Or Your Kids

Is it safe to have Wi-Fi in the classroom? The short answer is: yes. For the long answer you will have to read the rest of this post.

Let’s start with a common misconception. Wi-Fi is not a new technology; rather, Wi-Fi is a new twist on an old technology: transmitting information via the radio frequency (RF). Humans have been broadcasting radio and microwave transmissions across the planet for over a century.

As for health studies, according to the World Health Organization, approximately 25,000 articles have been published over the past 30 years on the biological effects and medical applications of non-ionizing radiation. RF is just another form of non-ionizing radiation.

Anti-Wi-Fi activists will point out that the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) investigated radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans. The IARC Monograph on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans provides a comprehensive examination of the topic and the IARC classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as a Group 2B possible carcinogen. The critical thing to understand is that Group 2B compounds are, by their very definition, not known to be carcinogens.

Group 2B is a category used when a causal association looks like it might be possible, but when other factors cannot be ruled out with reasonable confidence.

Group 2B is, thus, a placeholder for compounds that haven’t been shown to cause cancer, but are of further interest for study. Some of these compounds, like acetaldehyde and benz[a]anthracene, will likely be determined to cause cancer, but others like coffee, pickled vegetables and talc-based body powder, are much less likely to do so.

It’s a known fact that scientific research uses as its gold standard the 95 percent confidence interval (p<0.05). What this means is that if you replicate a study 100 times, about five times you will get a false positive (i.e. saying that a compound causes cancer when it really does not). So given the approximately 25,000 articles published on the topic, the absence of any toxicologically problematic outcomes would be statistically improbable.

What is important is to look at the number and types of positive studies when compared to negative ones. A careful examination of the handful of positive studies shows that almost everyone involved a particularly rare type of cancer and a minimal effect. This is the ideal scenario for a false positive. Population statistics break down when sample sizes are small and, in the cases of most of these studies, the number of affected individuals is infinitesimal with respect to the population exposed to RF.

In addition to the copious body of literature that says that Wi-Fi is safe, consider that in the last 70+ years billions of humans worldwide have been exposed to varying concentrations and doses of microwave and radio wave radiation.

Just look at your cell phone right now: almost anywhere you go, you are in range of a Wi-Fi router and you are almost always in range of a radio signal. The fact is, we have not seen spikes in any of those rare cancers purportedly related, via these questionable studies, to exposure to RF.

The results are categorical: RF is not a serious human health risk.

The article was written by Blair King, who  is a resident of the Township of Langley, B.C. and a practicing environmental scientist. He has an academic background in chemistry, biology and environmental studies and an interest in the use of scientific data in environmental decision-making. Blair blogs about topics that cross the interface between science and decision-making at A Chemist in Langley.

You can read the original article on Huffington Post.

Image Source: DNA India