Health Canada’s newly updated guide for allowable radiation levels from wireless communications dismisses a range of concerns about radiofrequency (RF) electromagnetic energy as unproven and unscientific. However, health officials have slightly adjusted recommended thresholds for human exposure in some frequency ranges to further guard against the risks of heat-related tissue damage and/or undue nerve stimulation.
Revisions to Safety Code 6 — which the provinces, municipalities and other government agencies including Industry Canada have long used as a guidance document for regulating telecommunications towers, microcells and various equipment, such as cell phones, Wi-Fi and smart meters, that emit electromagnetic energy — were released earlier this month. The finalized version comes nearly a year after an eight-member expert scientific review panel issued a related report and recommendations.
The code now calls for what Health Canada typifies as “larger safety margins” based on recent research and 2010 guidelines from the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP). However, the previous circa-2009 version of the code already factored in an added safety gap to exposure levels scientifically observed to trigger thermal or nerve response.
“Safety Code 6 has always established human exposure limits that are far below the established, scientific threshold for potentially harmful health effects,” a March 13 release from Health Canada states. “The updated Safety Code 6 makes Canada’s limits among the most rigorous science-based limits in the world.”
Meanwhile, the text of the Code itself rejects theories that link electromagnetic energy to various detrimental symptoms and environmental intolerances.
“At present, there is no scientific basis for the occurrence of acute, chronic and/or cumulative adverse health risks from RF field exposure at levels below the limits outlined in Safety Code 6,” it states. “The hypotheses of other proposed adverse health effects occurring at levels below the exposure limits outlined in Safety Code 6 suffer from a lack of evidence of causality, biological plausibility and reproducibility and do not provide a credible foundation for making science-based recommendations for limiting human exposure to low-intensity RF fields.”
Nevertheless, Health Canada’s expert scientific review panel suggests there could be other mechanisms outside Safety Code 6 that would be appropriate to explore phenomena labelled as idiopathic environmental intolerance attributed to electromagnetic fields (IEI-EMF) or electromagnetic hypersensitivity.
“During the public consultation, the Panel heard from numerous individuals who felt they are sensitive to low levels of RF energy in the environment from a variety of sources,” it recounted in its report. “This Panel feels strongly that these individuals need compassion and assistance in overcoming their symptoms.”
In 2011, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) listed radiofrequency electromagnetic fields among so-called Group 2B agents considered possibly carcinogenic to humans. These are chemicals, substances, physical materials and/or lifestyle factors for which there is insufficient evidence to conclude a definitive or highly probable connection to health outcomes in humans or experimental animals, but for which more research has been advised. In particular, IARC’s concerns focused on heavy cell phone use over a multi-year period and the possible connection to brain cancer, while it was deemed there was inadequate evidence to identify other sources of exposure or link to other types of cancers.
Both IARC and Health Canada endorse simple practices like using an ear piece and/or the speaker phone option to avoid directly pressing cell phones against the face. Similarly, concerned interest groups promote the philosophy of prudent avoidance. Terence Young, the member of parliament for Oakville, cites it as the underpinning of his recently introduced private member’s bill, Bill C-648, the proposed Warning Labels for Radio Apparatus Act, which would require RF-emitting equipment available for retail to carry a label cautioning consumers about potential health risks.
“The purpose of Bill C-648 is to protect Canadians by changing the way we think about cellular telephones, Wi-Fi, portable telephones, baby monitors and other wireless devices, by empowering them with the information they need to understand potential serious risks to their health from long-term and continuous use of these devices, and the greater risks to children,” Young asserted at a press conference earlier this year.
The same precautionary concept is the basis of the city of Toronto’s policy, which asks developers of new telecommunications towers to ensure that public exposure to emissions be at least 100 times lower than the limits in Safety Code 6 — a policy that Toronto’s Board of Health voted to retain in 2013 even after the city’s Medical Officer of Health recommended it be discontinued.
Barbara Carss is editor-in-chief of Building Strategies & Sustainability and Canadian Property Management