People living near to mobile phone masts often report symptoms of EMF hypersensitivity such as dizziness, headaches, skin conditions, allergies and many others.

Contrary to the mobile phone industry claims that their base stations are safe because the radiation rapidly falls as you move away from them, there is also growing anecdotal evidence for cancer clusters forming around them.

The phone industy research is based on the heating effect of mobile phone radiation, and this is pretty small from a phone mast and not the correct metric to measure to ascertain its impact. Living organisms rely on very sophisticated electro-biological systems and it is their interaction with the high frequency radiation (which is far more complex than just heating) that causes the health effects that are reported.

There are hundreds of scientific papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals showing biological effects from non-ionising radiation that may be hundreds or thousands of times below the levels that cause significant heating (see Bioinitiative). Furthermore, these non-thermal effects include many independent and well-replicated studies showing that the radiation from mobile phone handsets can cause serious damage to the DNA of living cells in less than 24 hours, so we cannot regard these handsets as being safe for anything other than short-term use.

Because of the extreme sensitivity of at least some cells to mobile phone radiation, it is likely that the much weaker radiation reaching people living or working close to base stations will also suffer adverse effects. Claims by the mobile phone industry that the base stations are safe because the radiation falls off rapidly with distance are flawed. Although the radiation level does indeed fall off as they say, the biological response will remain more or less constant over a wide range of signal strengths due to the ways in which living cells routinely use ‘negative feedback’ to compensate for changes in their environment.