A week before the 8 March election an application was lodged at Mepa for a mobile phone antenna to be fixed on top of the Labour Party’s Centru Nazzjonali Laburista (CNL) in Hamrun.
This was quite surprising given the number of people who work at CNL and that there is a secondary school just in front of it, especially when there is increasing concern worldwide regarding the safety implications of such mobile phones antennae.
But what made the application even more surprising is the fact that the application was signed by a PN candidate, architect Robert Musumeci.
The application, signed by Roger Davies Barrett, was validated on Friday 7 March, on the eve of the election and appeared in local papers only yesterday.
Representations expire on 13 April. Reports in the past months said Europe’s top environmental watchdog is calling for immediate action to reduce exposure to radiation from Wi-Fi, mobile phones and their masts.
It suggests that delay could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking and lead in petrol.
The warning, from the EU’s European Environment Agency follows an international scientific review, which concluded that safety limits set for the radiation are “thousands of times too lenient”, and a recent official British report that said it could not rule out the development of cancers from using mobile phones.
Professor Jacqueline McGlade, the EEA’s executive director, said: “Recent research and reviews on the long-term effects of radiations from mobile telecommunications suggest that it would be prudent for health authorities to recommend actions to reduce exposures, especially to vulnerable groups, such as children.”
The EEA’s initiative will increase pressure on governments and public health bodies to take precautionary action over the electromagnetic radiation from rapidly expanding new technologies.
The German government is already advising its citizens to use wired Internet connections instead of Wi-Fi and landlines instead of mobile phones.
The scientific review, produced by the international BioInitiative Working Group of leading scientists and public health and policy experts, says the “explosion of new sources has created unprecedented levels of artificial electromagnetic fields that now cover all but remote areas of the habitable space on earth”, causing “long-term and cumulative exposure” to “massively increased” radiation that “has no precedent in human history”.
It says “corrections are needed in the way we accept, test and deploy” the technologies “in order to avert public health problems of a global nature”.