Professor calls for 5G moratorium over health fears; Omdia begs to differ – Urgent Comms

t’s not what mobile network operators, suppliers and go-ahead governments want to hear.

An essay by Professor John William Frank, published by the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, calls for a moratorium on further 5G rollout.

Why? He wants further investigation into the next-gen tech’s “potentially harmful biological effects from radio frequency electromagnetic field [RF-EMF] exposures.”

Frank, after evaluating copious amounts of research of what he describes as “varying scientific quality,” concludes in his essay – “Electromagnetic fields, 5G and health: what about the precautionary principle?” – that industry and health agencies should “err on the side of caution.”

The precautionary health principle championed by Frank is when “significant doubt about the safety of a new and potentially widespread human exposure should be a reason to call a moratorium on that exposure.”

The 5G moratorium should stay, he argued, “pending adequate scientific investigation of suspected adverse health effects.”

James Crawshaw, a principal analyst at research firm Omdia – a sister company to Light Reading – vehemently disputes Frank’s conclusions, but let’s hear a bit more from the professor first.

Frankly speaking

First off, Frank can hardly be dismissed as a crackpot.

An experienced epidemiologist and chair of public health research and policy at the University of Edinburgh’s Usher Institute of Population Health Sciences and Informatics, Frank rightly has no time for wild-eyed conspiracy theorists who see a link between 5G EMF exposures and COVID-19.

The concerns raised in his essay are instead related to what he sees on the one hand as an “almost total lack of high-quality epidemiological studies of adverse human health effects from 5G EMF exposure specifically,” and what he describes on the other as “rapidly emerging epidemiological evidence of such effects from past generations of RF-EMF exposure.”

To read the complete article, visit Light Reading.

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