Other Countries Are Taking the Health Risks of 5G and Wireless Radiation Seriously. Why Isn’t the U.K.?
Momentum is building in the campaign to try to protect children from harmful smartphone use. Earlier this year, Miriam Cates MP led a lively debate on this subject, while the Education Committee led an inquiry entitled, ‘Screen Time – Impacts on Education and Wellbeing’. The grassroots movement, including Smartphone Free Childhood, Safe Screens and others is gathering pace. The latter organisation is in fact actively supporting MP Josh MacAlister’s Safer Phones Bill launched earlier this month, which aims to “make smartphones less addictive for children and empower families and teachers to cut down on children’s daily smartphone screen time”.
The dangers of smartphone use are clearly serious and encompass addiction, harmful content, exposure to sexual abuse and bullying, disruption of learning, behavioural changes through the habits adopted and the loss of previously normal childhood activities and social interactions. The movement hails Jonathan Haidt as the “world’s leading voice” on the damage caused to children by a phone-based childhood. Haidt identifies the damage as an “adolescent mental health crisis”.
The diagnosis, therefore, is overwhelmingly one of psychological damage. What I find astounding, however, is that with the exception of Safe Screens, no-one has mentioned the effects on children’s health of the wireless radiation signals emitted by smart devices, Wi-Fi or phone masts. All appear to assume that the only issue is the way children interact with screens along with the harmful social media content.
Why are we not hearing the other side of the story? The belief that wireless or radio-frequency radiation (RFR) is safe is promoted in the media too. A case in point is the recent Guardian article about the WHO systematic review concluding that mobile phone use is not linked to cancer, but not mentioning other reviews, which reached the opposite conclusion. A previous Guardian article promoted the view that 5G is safe, though it relied only on the naturally biased statements of telecoms’ chiefs from EE and Vodafone. Another one belittled the problems suffered by those with electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) and in 2019, the BBC Reality Check Team concluded that 5G would be safe, quoting the U.K. Government, the WHO and the International Commission on Non-Ionising Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), whose safety exposure guidelines are followed in the U.K.
Yet, a little longer ago, the risks of wireless radiation were taken more seriously. In 2007, a Panorama programme looked at the health risks of Wi-Fi in schools with electronics expert Alasdair Philips. A Government leaflet from 2011 stated: “The U.K. Chief Medical Officers advise that children and young people under 16 should be encouraged to use mobile phones for essential purposes only, and to keep calls short.” And on another page the Government recommends that “excessive use of mobile phones by children should be discouraged”. This was based on the recommendations of the Stewart Report produced in 2000 by the Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones.
