People in my area are campaigning against mobile phone transmitting towers being erected near schools / nursing homes / residential areas etc.
Are there any objective studies that have been made regarding any dangers they have on people? A link to a website or a reference to a study would be nice. Also, why do people not worry about TV and radio transmissions being detrimental to people’s heath?
Because it’s something to bitch about, and society has become such a little group of whiny lawsuit-filing peons that they fear anything in their life that has any remote possibility of causing cancer 3,923 years from now.
You have a better chance of getting cancer standing in front of your microwave waiting for your tv dinner to cook, then a cell tower.
Remember, cell towers only transmit, only need to transmit, maybe a 5 mile radius. TV towers… 10, 20, 30 times that.
Now, while I don’t advise going and putting your head 2 feet from the transmitter, and while I am not a communications expert (tho I have installed a few), the risk is low, and, well, people just like to complain.
It’s NIMBY syndrome. “Not In My Back Yard”.
The only legitimate reason I’ve seen is aesthetics. As jrishaw pointed out, a cell tower only has a range of a few miles, thus you need them all over the place, creating (to some) an unsightly mess. There’s been some interest in “diguising” towers as trees, or even in church steeples. I can’t recall where it was, but one church got a new steeple paid for by the cell company in exchange for putting a tower inside.
Arjuna34
Aesthetics are the the only reasons we don’t want a cell tower near my little plot of land. They’d like to put one up on our local mountain top, but it would stick out like a sore thumb. Plus, they’d have to install a road (of sorts). While I’d love for my cell phone to work at my own house, I don’t need the phone company ruining any more of our pristine woods.
There’s been preliminary work done on the effect of radiation from mobile phones (our terminology) and mobile phone towers here, particularly by Dr Bruce Hocking. My understanding is that his work supports the hypothesis of physiological effect from radiation from those sources. Confirmatory (or negatory) experimentation by Hocking or others awaits funding.
Try a google search on ‘mobile phone leukaemia’ or ‘Hocking phone’.
At the very least, these people’s concerns are misguided. If there is any harm done to a person by the RF radiation of a cellular network the biggest culprit would be the cell phone itself. Putting that antenna next to your head all the time should have a greater effect than walking around under the tower antennas that are 30 to 80 ft in the air (in a residential area). In the end, it is usually about visual impact.
There are no studies showing conclusively that cellular network radiation harms you. In fact, US regulations recognize this and have instructed local zoning boards that they cannot halt the construction of a cell tower for health reasons. (Again, the US government believes that the “health” reasons in the past were really “visual” reasons.)
That being said, there have been some successful lawsuits based on cell phone radiation causing cancer. I think that most people believe that this evidence is also inconclusive, but that more study needs to be done.
Tangentially, I have seen people argue against putting a tower near their home due to health reasons and then argue that the cellular company should have tried harder to locate the tower at a school that was a mile away. These people were pretty much trying anything to keep this tower from being built their homes and a newspaper reporter called them on it. (Like a power line tower, when it is next your house it moves from “useful and necessary public service” to “unsightly blight on the landscape”.)
Drive down the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey, between Exits 160 and at least 145. Most, if not all of the towers you can see are cammo’d to appear as trees. It kind of works, you know they’re cammo’d but it does ease the mental anguish a bit.