Police radios blamed for PC's cancer death

PC Dring's family claim his radio caused his fatal cancer

Although this is an old story from 2010, it's certainly important we follow it and the dangerous health implications of the Tetra system being used by the Police forces in the UK. The family of a police officer who died of cancer have questioned whether the force's controversial new radio system caused the disease.   Pc Neil Dring, 38, died 10 months after being diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus. His family said he was a keen sportsman who had always enjoyed excellent health.   However, he began complaining of severe headaches shortly after the Government's £2.9 billion Tetra system was introduced.   Pc Dring, who left a wife and two young children, complained to his superiors that the handset, which emits pulsing radio frequencies, was making him ill.   He told his family that he was "convinced" it caused his cancer.   A second officer, who is 40 and works for the same, force has also been diagnosed with the same cancer and is being treated.   Pc Dring's brother, Ian, said: "Neil was convinced it was the radio that was to blame for the cancer. He had raised the issue with a sergeant and a superintendent and we feel it is our duty to follow this through for his sake.   "No one seems to be sure how safe this Tetra system is. It beggars belief that the system was not tested thoroughly before it was rolled out.   "Neil was only 38, didn't smoke and was a keen triathlete. The thing that really hit me was that another officer in the same force has contracted the same cancer in the same place, just beneath where he wore his handset."   The Home Office is equipping the 53 forces in England, Scotland and Wales with the Tetra system - Terrestrial Trunked Radio - at a cost of £2.9 billion by the end of 2005. About 2,500 of the required 3,500 transmitters have been erected and 65,000 officers are using the system in 39 forces.   But the system has provoked strong protests, with claims that the radio signals cause headaches, sickness, disturbed sleep and skin rashes.   About 173 officers in Lancashire complained of health effects they attributed to using the system in questionnaires compiled by the Police Federation.   The Home Office last year announced a £5 million health study including a detailed study of 150 officers and a 15-year monitoring programme involving 100,000 users.   Sir William Stewart, the former chief scientific adviser to the Government, said in a report on mobile phone health concerns that frequencies around 16Hz - close to Tetra's 17.6Hz - should be avoided because previous research suggested they could cause potentially harmful changes in cell biology. However, Prof Colin Blakemore, of Oxford University, has dismissed the health concerns around Tetra.   And a report by the National Radiological Protection Board concluded: "Although areas of uncertainty remain about the biological effects of low level RF radiation . . . current evidence suggests that it is unlikely that the special features of the signals from Tetra mobile terminals and repeaters pose a hazard to health."   Mr Dring, whose brother served with the Leicestershire force as a police motorcyclist, is due to meet members of the force and the police federation next week.   "Neil had no preconditions for this sort of cancer and was outside the age group associated with it," he said. "For the whole of his shift his handset was strapped to his chest, where the tumour was found.   "I have a major concern that the system isn't safe. We have spoken to other officers and they are aware of it and are terrified of it."   Stan Sexton, the health and safety adviser for Leicestershire police, said he was "99 per cent certain" that Pc Dring's death had nothing to do with Tetra.   He said the other officer who had contracted cancer was of senior rank and rarely used Tetra.   Steve Edwards, the chairman of Lancashire Police Federation, said: "There is a lot of concern from officers about the system and we need to find out one way or the other whether it presents a risk to health."   A spokesman for O2 airwave, which operates Tetra, said: "We would like to express our sympathy and regret to Pc Dring's family but we would reinforce that the airwave is there as a public safety measure.   "All the handsets comply with the guidelines and there's no evidence to suggest there are any health concerns." © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/20/ntetra20.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/20/ixhome.html

A Brief Guide to TETRA Masts (in the UK) And Their Impact

In the late 1990’s the UK government under Tony Blair awarded a contract to the telecomms giant O2, for them to construct a nationwide communications network for the police and emergency services. O2 created a subsidiary company called Airwave to carry out this contract. By 2008 the government had spent in excess of £14,000,000,000 (£14 billion) with Airwave on this contract, with many thousands of masts dedicated to this network being erected across all parts of the UK except Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands.

The technology that Airwave initially chose to install combined microwave frequencies with a secondary modulation frequency. However the first generation of Tetra (which stands for “Terrestrial Trunk Radio”) that Airwave put up interfered with some TV reception. This caused sufficient protest that Airwave quickly switched to another form of the dual-frequency technology. It is this “second-generation” Tetra network that has been set up across the UK since 1999. As of November 2011 when this article is being written, this is still the technology that Airwave have been erecting and installing, and it is this current “second generation” Tetra that is our subject here.In the late 1990’s the UK government under Tony Blair awarded a contract to the telecomms giant O2, for them to construct a nationwide communications network for the police and emergency services. O2 created a subsidiary company called Airwave to carry out this contract. By 2008 the government had spent in excess of £14,000,000,000 (£14 billion) with Airwave on this contract, with many thousands of masts dedicated to this network being erected across all parts of the UK except Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands.

Tetra Mast Tayinloan

Microwaves Unfortunate Technical Limitation

Microwaves have been used by the military in various countries since the late 1950’s for communication networks. It is only relatively recently that the civilian use of microwaves for this purpose has exploded across the globe in the form of our mobile phone / cellular phone networks. But as any mobile phone user will know, these phones do not work well if you are inside a building or in a tunnel. Microwaves by their very nature do not penetrate big thick solid walls.

And that is why some very clever people worked out how to get microwaves to overcome that limitation of their nature. In the current form of the UK’s Tetra network, the microwaves are combined with a very low frequency carrier wave. They do this by “modulating the power amplitude”. This is the equivalent of listening to a radio station, and turning the volume up and down as you listen. The 2nd generation Tetra masts combine microwave frequencies with a modulation of the power amplitude at 17.65 hz (1 hertz = 1 hz = 1 cycle per second).  This is indeed a clever way to enable microwaves to penetrate big thick solid walls.

Unfortunately it is also a very good way to prevent much of the UK population from getting deep and restful sleep at night. Why? Because when we go to sleep, our brainwave pattern has to get down to 3 hz or less (3 cycles per second or less); really deep sleep may be as low as 1 hz.  Our waking state brainwave pattern is roughly between 12 and 25 hz, the “beta” rhythm.

Now just what happens to the citizens of a country that decides to install masts all across the country, in or near every village and city, broadcasting a high-power and high-amplitude wave pattern which is in the middle of our waking-state brainwave rhythm? The simple answer is that a large portion of that population will suffer badly from inadequate and disturbed sleep patterns, at the very least. But there are many other symptoms that arise. As Jay Griffiths, writing in The Ecologist reported in October 2004.

“When a Tetra mast was switched on in Dursley in Gloucestershire people there complained of migraines, sleeplessness, nosebleeds and being ‘shocked awake’ up to 15 times a night. At a school in Littlehampton, Sussex, 11 children had to be sent home on the day that a nearby Tetra mast went live. The children suffered dizziness and, like the residents of Dursley, severe headaches and nosebleeds. (Interestingly, the local community did not know the mast had been switched on, so the children’s reactions could not have been psychosomatic.)  At Drumcarrow Hill in Fife a Tetra transmitter has been in operation since the late 1990s. Only about 200 people live around the mast, but there have been at least seven recent cases of cancer and five cases of motor neurone disease (MND) diagnosed in the area over the past five years. (Normally, no more than two people to every 100,000 is diagnosed with MND per year.)”

“MND is a particularly nasty and fatal degenerative disease. Last year Dr Neil Cherry, former associate professor of environmental health at Lincoln University, died from it, convinced he had contracted MND as a consequence of his long exposure to low-frequency radiation, the potential health hazards of which he researched. Cherry’s work suggests that low-level radiation, and Tetra, could also cause heart and blood problems, interference with bone marrow and tumours.”

In October 2003 Airwave erected a Tetra mast a quarter mile from the centre of the village of Tayinloan, on the Kintyre peninsula. Tayinloan (pop. 550) is where the ferry for our island departs from. The mast went live in November 2003, and by the middle of Decemember 2003 there were 5 deaths in the village. These included a couple in their late 40’s, with the wife dying of a brain haemorahage, and the husband of a heart attack. There are many other such clusters in villages across the UK following Tetra masts being erected nearby.

However, the focus of this article is not on these other health concerns, serious as they are. Most websites dealing with the subject have been far too technical for most of us to follow the key points as they affect people still living in the UK.

Simply on the face of it, there would be appear to be grave concerns about subjecting the entire population of a country to such radiation, and that could be described on two main points.

First of all, it is accepted amongst the medical and scientific community that some 5% of the population are what they describe as “electro-magnetically hypersensitive”. For one person in every 20, being subjected to any form of powerful electromagnetic radiation can be very difficult. For example, an English school found that one of their highly regarded History teachers would become immediately ill with headaches etc. as soon as the wireless networking equipment was turned on in his classroom. This case led to the National Union of Teachers raising concerns with the government about the safety of wifi technology.

Not everyone is so badly affected by the technology of course. But this 5% of the general population may be best regarded as akin the canaries that miners used to take down into the mines. The canaries were more sensitive to toxic gases then the men, so if the miners saw that a canary had died, they would quickly get out of the mine, as it was a signal that dangerous levels of gases were building up. We are living in a time when outrageous levels of electromagnetic “pollution” or “electrosmog” are wreaking havoc with the health of the most electro-sensitive people in our midst. We should be giving their concerns and responses to the technology far more attention.

Their responses deserve greater attention for two reasons. First of all, the 5% “electro-magnetically hypersensitive” portion of the population are not actually a different race of homo sapiens: they and we are one people, and what causes illness very quickly in this section of the population, is also likely to cause illness more slowly in the rest of the population.

The second reason we should heed their concerns has to do with a fundamental aspect of the impact of this radiation on our bodies. The key statement to understand is this: that the effects of microwave radiation on tissue are cumulative. That is to say, getting a low-level dose of microwaves constantly over many years, is the equivalent (as far as your body is concerned) of getting that same dose in one short high-level burst. Governments and scientists have known this fact for over 60 years, ever since the first microwave masts went up for the military communications. The engineers performing maintenance on those early masts had a very strong tendency to go blind within the first year of doing their work on those masts. In effect their eyeballs had been slowly cooked by their exposure to the microwaves of the masts they were maintaining. It was these early experiences of the military engineers with this technology that has led to our understanding today that the effects of microwaves on tissue accumulate.

The second main point of grave concern about subjecting the entire population of a country to the Tetra radiation is very simple. If we broadcast a high-amplitude wave pattern across the entire country which has its frequency set right in the middle of our waking-state brainwave pattern, then it stands to reason that some portion of the population are going to have their sleep patterns adversely effected by such exposure. Bear in mind that the Tetra masts do not operate only by day, but are active 24 hours a day throughout the year. It is reasonable to expect that at the very least the 5% who are most sensitive to electro-magnetic radiation are going to feel the impact of this fairly severely; and the evidence points to far more than 5% of the UK population being seriously adversely effected by the Tetra network as implemented by Airwave.

We run a traditional mail order business here, and in this way we not only hear from people all across the UK throughout the year, but we also hear from therapists, who report that the great majority of their clients are constantly exhausted.

By using the govenernment-run website

http://www.sitefinder.ofcom.org.uk/

you can enter your post code, and find out (with some effort and difficulty) where your nearby Tetra masts are located. I do this search on a regular basis for people who call. I am usually able to describe their sleep pattern to them, on the basis of how close they are to a Tetra mast. The typical Tetra-induced disturbed sleep pattern is as follows: first they will sleep for about 90 minutes, then wake up. After a short while they get back to sleep again, for roughly another hour, and then wake up. Then after a further interval they get maybe 30 miore minutes of sleep, wake up exhausted but unable to get any further sleep.

Tetra Masts and Lines Argyll

This pattern becomes more pronounced if the individual is closer to a mast, or is more susceptible to the radiation.

We run our premises as a B&B during half the year. In 2007 we had a guest who works as a nurse at a hospital in Oxfordshire. As we talked, she described how almost everyone coming to the hospital these days was suffering from anxiety and panic attacks. She also told me that the doctors fill in a form by hand for every patient when they arrive, the information of which which later gets entered onto the computer system. However, she explained that there is an acronym “TATT” which she sees written in the margins of almost every form, and this acronym never gets put onto the computer records. What does TATT stand for? Tired All The Time.

A customer of ours called one day, wanting a few of our essences to give her more energy. I asked what her sleep pattern was like, and she said that when she was back in Florida visiting her family, she slept great and had plenty of energy. But as soon as she was back home in Kent, she was constantly exhausted and yet could not get a good night’s sleep. She had a Tetra mast one mile down the road from her.

Tetra Mast above Loch Lomond

What is a Safe Distance from a Tetra Mast?

This of course raises the obvious question, and unfortunately there is no happy answer. Even 3 miles is certainly not a sufficient distance to allow undisturbed sleep. And on the UK mainland, the odds are that 90% of the population are living within 2 miles of at least 2 or 3 Tetra Masts.

The situation is exacerbated by the way in which the impact of the Tetra masts is increased if you live near the line which could be drawn between two masts. Draw lines on a map of all the Tetra masts in your area, and it ends up looking like a spider’s web, and one which is very difficult to escape from.

Useful equipment (such as electro-smog meters, as well as protective bed canopies) may be found at this website:

http://www.emfields.org/

What can you do about it?

• The most important thing is to take the first step and become informed. Ignorance in this instance is definitely not bliss!
• Secondly, write to your local MP about the matter. They need to hear our concerns.
• Take the occasional holiday break outside of the UK. France is far far better regarding microwave pollution. The UK authorities are the worst in Europe for the risks they allow us to be exposed to, whether we want it or not.
• Examine the options presented by the people at the above website. They know what they are talking about, and they offer very good products, as well as advice.

Beyond that, there is little more I can say on the matter in this article. But it is now more than 12 years since the 2nd generation Tetra masts first started going up across the UK, and there is sadly no prospect of them being removed in the near future.

A good friend of ours was attending a course in the south of England a few years ago, and the participants had to pair off with one another. The woman that my friend paired up with turned out to be an engineer who worked at O2. Her work was specifically in the research division working on the Tetra mast network. She said to my friend, “Oh yes, with the first generation of the Tetra masts, there was interference with TV reception, but we addressed that with the second-generation Tetra. And with the 3rd generation Tetra masts, we’ll address the biological effects.”

To date there is no sign at all of the 3rd generation technology (whatever that may be!) being rolled out. Given the economic times we are in now, there can be little prospect of O2 / Airwave being paid further billions of Pounds Sterling to introduce the next generation, and so it looks like we are stuck with the Tetra masts as they currently stand.

For much more information please visit this website:

http://www.tetrawatch.net

article written by:

Don Dennis
Living Tree Orchid Essences

What is Tetra?

TETRA is a modern standard for digital Private Mobile Radio (PMR) and Public Access Mobile Radio (PAMR). It offers many advantages including flexibility, security, ease of use and offers fast call set-up times. This makes it an ideal choice for many business radio communications requirements.

The name TETRA stands for TErrestrial Trunked RAdio. It is aimed at a variety of mobile radio communications users including the police, ambulance and fire services, it is equally applicable for utilities, public access, fleet management, transport services, and many other users. It offers the advantages of digital radio whilst still maintaining the advantages of a PMR system.

TETRA radio beginnings

Work started on the development of the TETRA standards in 1990 and has relied on the support of the European Commission and the ETSI members. Experience gained in the development of the highly successful GSM cellular radio standard, as well as experience from the development and use of trunked radio systems has also been used to fashion the TETRA standard. In addition to this the process has gained from the co-operation of manufacturers, users, operators and industry experts. With this combined expertise the first standards for the new private mobile radio communications system were ready in 1995 to enable manufacturers to design their radio communications equipment to interoperate successfully.

TETRA Association

The industry organisation for TETRA radio is the TETRA Association (www.tetramou.org). The association was originally known as the TETRA MoU - Memorandum of Understanding and was formed in December 1994. The aim of the TETRA MoU was to create a forum that would act on behalf of all interested parties, i.e. users, manufacturers, application providers, integrators, operators, test houses and telecommunications agencies.

The TETRA Association represents more than 150 organisations and is continually growing as the TETRA standard is evolved and the uptake has increased..

The basic aims of the TETRA Association remain the same as that of the original TETRA MoU - providing a forum for all those interested in TETRA; to encourage adoption of the standard; and to support initiatives to obtain appropriate levels of spectrum to meet the growth in TETRA radio usage.

In view of its aims, the TETRA Association works closely with ETSI to maintain and advance the standards.

TETRA radio features

TETRA radio offers many new and valuable features and in this way it is a major step forwards over previous private mobile radio communications systems. These include a fast call set-up time, which is a particularly important requirement for the emergency services. It also has excellent group communication support, direct mode operation between individual radios, packet data and circuit data transfer services, better economy of frequency spectrum use than the previous PMR radio systems and in addition to this it provides advanced security features. The system also supports a number of other features including call hold, call barring, call diversion, and ambience listening.

The TETRA radio standard has undergone an evolutionary development to ensure that it is able to keep up with the needs of the users. There have been two releases of the TETRA radio standard.

• TETRA Release 1:   As would be envisaged this was the first release of the TETRA radio standard which occurred
• TETRA Release 2:   This release of the TETRA radio standard occurred in 2005 as a result of work dating back to 1999. It introduced a number of new features into the TETRA radio standard:
  • TETRA Enhanced Data Service (TEDS)
  • Mixed Excitation Liner Predictive, enhanced (MELPe) Voice Codec
  • Adaptive Multiple Rate (AMR) Voice Codec
  • Trunked Mode Operation (TMO) Range Extension
  Of these enhancements, it is the TETRA TEDS that has caught the headlines as the main enhanced feature, although the others all add to the overall package.

The negative health effects of Tetra

Tetra appears to have the same negative health effects as other radio frequency radiations like mobile phones and wi-fi.  Below are a number of accounts from police officers who use Tetra on a daily basis and speak candidly about their experiences.

"I am a serving officer using Sepura Airwave. In January 07 I got an infection in my mouth which then became an ulcer. The ulcer would not clear and a biopsy showed oral cancer. I have undergone an operation and had it removed. The site is adjacent to where the aerial of the radio sits when I am wearing it. None of my consultants or doctors has discounted Airwave as a possible cause of my cancer."PM, Lancs

"[A friend of mine] has had a visit from a police officer, as the house next door had been kicked in. He made her face burn with his TETRA handset, and had to switch it off. A nurse who was visiting at the time witnessed this and spoke to me on the phone to tell me what she had seen. [My friend] has asked for the police report about this. She was a radar operator who took ill while staying at the last house at the runway at Leuchers [Scottish RAF base] and nearly died.When she goes near a TETRA mast her blood pressure goes up to over 220 from a normal reading. She has a medical implant. Just think of the effect on someone with a pacemaker in the same situation."CG, Fife

"I have been using police TETRA radio system for several years. I have suffered burning hot ears (the ear that I have my radio earpiece in) and hotness to that side of my face. I have also suffered headaches and dizziness and fatigue, usually after a long shift using my radio. I am very concerned, but I have to pay the bills. I fear we are heading to an epidemic of health problem related to TETRA."Dominic, Bristol

"I am a Health & Safety rep. for my Police Force and we are apparently seeing a significant rise in the number of our officers suffering from various forms of cancer. I am obviously concerned about this and would like to know what current information you may have on this subject (maybe contact from other officers?)"H&S rep., Sussex

"I am a Police officer of 22 years with Derbyshire Constabulary. We were one of the first forces to be supplied with the new TETRA Airwave communications system. Shortly after the system was implimented (everything changed to Tetra at once, all analogue communications from UHF/VHF), myself and a CONSIDERABLE number of colleagues, suffered, and continue to suffer, adverse affects, namely headaches, depression, and ringing (pulsing) in the ear.Unfortunately, the health risks are no stranger to the average bobby on the street, we are just not encouraged to talk about it. On a closing note, you may be interested to look at Police Officer Attendance records, and sicknesses since Tetra was implemented in various constabularies."ANON Detective Constable, Derbyshire Constabulary

"Unfortunately, the health risks are no stranger to the average bobby on the street, we are just not encouraged to talk about it. On a closing note, you may be interested to look at Police Officer Attendance records, and sicknesses since Tetra was implemented in various constabularies."ANON Detective Constable, Derbyshire Constabulary

"I am a Crime Scene Examiner for Lancashire Police - who as you will know were the first to use Tetra. We are concerned about the health risks since implementation but getting anything done about it is extremely difficult. We believe we are even more vulnerable to the effects as we use our own vehicles and not police vehicles - no hands-free or external aerial. There are [...] of us based in [...] and (all but one) of us are suffering from symptoms ranging from headaches/toothache/neuralgia to high blood pressure, and even a cancerous tumour in the throat. It is the tumour which has finally been the last straw and today we have refused to use them in our vehicles and at scenes (we use metallic fingerprint powders). We are a group of people who love our job and we are not ‘trouble-makers’ - but we are genuine in our belief that these radios are killing us."Anon, Lancashire

Special thanks to tetrawatch.net for the quotes used in this article. 

TETRA - Is Your Health at Risk?

This was published in the Police Federation March 2001 ‘POLICE’ Newsletter

TETRA - Is Your Health at Risk? by Alasdair Philips

Are you being asked to use a system that may cause you long-term adverse health problems?
In March 2000 BT announced a £2.5bn contract to roll out TETRA in England for the new Police mobile radio service, chosen and paid for by the Home Office. TErrestrial Trunked RAdio, is a new system designed to provide secure and fast radio communications for the emergency services and corporate users. With the support of the European Commission, the TETRA standard has been developed over a number of years by European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) members to meet the future needs of emergency services throughout Europe and beyond. TETRA builds upon the experience gained with previous radio systems including the successful development of the GSM digital mobile phone system during the 1980s. The work started in 1990 and the first standards were ready in 1995. TETRA offers fast call set-up time, excellent group communication support with remote or local call centres, direct operation between handsets, data handling for maps and documents, and excellent security features.

It sounds wonderful. So why are we already hearing about interference problems? Radios needing to be turned off when near life-support equipment (difficult at many RTAs, etc.) or even when near breathalysers or vehicle speed check equipment. Worries about possible adverse health effects have also been raised.

Existing Police radio equipment is mainly ‘single carrier FM’. What this means is that each radio uses all of the radio-frequency carrier whenever it is transmitting, just like VHF FM radio stations. This kind of signal has been around for many years and is generally thought not to be dangerous below levels at which it causes tissue heating - which are higher than those to which officers are exposed from their handsets and vehicle radios.

Having just one user per radio signal is not an efficient way to use radio frequencies. The simplest way to add extra users is to compress and encode their speech (etc) into a small ‘packet’, and then to fit a series of these, one after another, on to the carrier signal. This is called TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access). Newer systems such as the G3 phones will be using CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) modulation and will be inherently safer as they do not pulse regularly. The GSM phone system uses 8 user slots per radio signal, repeated 217 times every second. TETRA has only 4 user slots per carrier, and could pulse at the same rate, or even faster, but instead the committees chose to use 17.6 Hertz (17.6 pulses each second). For a number of reasons this seems an unwise choice.

Firstly, electronic equipment operation is interfered with by pulsing signals, and the slower they pulse, the harder it is to filter them out. Hold a GSM mobile phone next to an ordinary radio and dial out. You will hear the characteristic pulsing interfering with radio reception. When they were first brought out there were some extraordinary examples of interference problems. On one make of coach, the electronically controlled automatic gearbox would change gear at the wrong time when passengers in certain seats used a GSM phone. This sort of incident led to mobile-phone bans in hospitals and on aircraft.

You would have thought that this would have made the TETRA committees careful about their choice of pulsing frequency. Apparently not, for they chose 17.6 Hz, a much worse pulse rate for interference effects, not only with equipment but also with people. It can only be that there were no experts on bioelectromagnetics on these committees.

Concern about ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) pulsed radiation effects goes right back to the 1960s when Eastern Bloc countries started experimenting with ‘mind-control’ non-lethal weapons. By 1976, a US Department of Defense document [DST-1810S-074-76] was reporting: “The potential for the development of a number of antipersonnel weapons is suggested by the research. ... Sounds and possibly even words which appear to be originating inside the targets head can be induced by signal modulation at very low average power densities. ... Animal experiments have demonstrated the use of low-level microwave signals to produce death by heart seizure or by neurological pathologies resulting from breaching the blood-brain barrier.” Work in these areas continued as confirmed by a talk on the “Application of ELF Electromagnetic Fields to Non-Lethal Weapons” at a classified Los Alamos Conference in November 1993 during the period when the TETRA Standard was being developed.

One of the first voices in the West to raise concern was Professor Ross Adey. Although interested in radio and the development of radar from an early age, he qualified in medicine in Australia during the war and then came to Oxford to study brain physiology. He was appointed as a professor at University of California in 1954 and in 1961 joined their newly formed Brain Research Institute. In 1965 he was appointed as Director of the new Space Biology Laboratory. The projects his teams worked on were related to brain activity of service personnel, including the effects of pulsed ELF and microwave radiation, and were funded by NASA, ARPA, NSF, USAF and USN. Since then he has remained at the forefront of research into these matters. He commented to me recently “I would be very concerned about a 4-watt Tetra hand-held radio against my head day after day”.

So what is the cause of this concern? Back in the mid-1960s Adey and colleagues revolutionised our understanding of the way brains cell operate. During the next twenty years many papers were published showing that ELF electromagnetic fields affected the way calcium ions move in brain tissue and the way this affects the inner working of the cells. Living cells are enclosed by a strong protective membrane (skin) and communicate with the outside world through electrically charged protein strands that stick out from their surface. These carry signals into the cell interior where they regulate growth, development and cell division. By 1976 low level electromagnetic field effects had been shown to occur across the ELF range, peaking between about 12 and 20 Hz. The effects were seen most clearly with the ELF signals amplitude modulated on to microwaves, such as those that TETRA handsets use. The microwaves penetrate brain tissue and effectively ‘carry’ the ELF pulsing deep into the brain. There is also considerable evidence that low levels of pulsed microwaves can cause the blood-brain barrier to allow toxins to reach the brain.

The current safety guidelines are entirely based on preventing human tissue heating, and are not concerned with these pulsing effects. These ELF signals interfere with cell communication probably in a similar way to a GSM mobile phone interfering with radio reception, described earlier. This interference can cause ‘noise overload’ (eg loud buzzing) or mislead the living organism into thinking something unusual is happening by simulating normal internal signals. Both could cause adverse health effects. That is why it is sensible to avoid signals that pulse in the biological range, primarily between 1 and 100 Hz.

Some of this work was considered by the UK Independent Expert Group on Mobiole Phones in the “Stewart Report” in paras 5.53 to 5.59, although they excluded TETRA from consideration (4.19) as it was not intended for general public use. They concluded (5.59) “As a precautionary measure, amplitude modulation around 16 Hz should be avoided, if possible, in future developments of signal coding”. They say “around 16 Hz” because effects can be seen to occur over quite a wide range of ELF frequencies, and in some cases the peak frequency is dependent on the strength of the Earth’s local magnetic field. TETRA uses a pulsing frequency close to 16 Hz.

Given the relevant published scientific background information it would be reasonable to assume that TETRA transmitters (handsets and base-stations) would have been extensively tested for biological effects in living organisms, including humans. However, in an October 2000 letter, Health Minister Yvette Cooper, admits: “I am informed that there have been several studies into the possible biological effects of the TETRA signal and although none of these were on humans, the results do not indicate any adverse health effects. In addition, there is now a substantial body of evidence relating to the possible health effects of radio signals at many frequencies, including pulsed signals”.

In total, around the world, there appear to be six small studies into TETRA signal bio-effects, five using cell cultures, and one using live hamsters. Only one of these studies is published in a scientific journal.

No human safety work has so far been done using TETRA signals. The COST244bis report on the “Possible Health Effects Related to the Use of Radiotelephones”, funded by DGXIII of the European Commission, merely mentions TETRA in a list of systems and makes no comments about it.

I believe that some proper human testing should be done before exposing police personnel to potential long-term health problems from their use of TETRA phones.

Originally qualifying in both electronics and agriculture in the 1970s, Alasdair Philips has been studying and writing on the subject of the biological effects of non-ionising electromagnetic radiation since 1986. He is now recognised as an independent UK expert on these matters. He has given Expert Evidence on EMF-bioeffects to High Court Judicial Reviews, Public Inquiries, Wayleave Hearings and Lands Tribunals. He has been a platform speaker at many technical conferences on these matters. He is a member of Scientists for Global Responsibility and a founder member of Powerwatch, a consumer information service, providing information on the possible adverse health effects of non-ionising radiation. http://www.powerwatch.org.uk

Source: http://www.powerwatch.org.uk/pdfs/20070829_tetra_gaga.pdf