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Nashville, Tennessee
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Presenters say technology shouldn’t go to market until scientifically proven safe.
According to COLDBROOK, N.S. — “It’s invisible, silent, odourless and you can’t get away from it.” This is how presenters to Kings County council’s committee of the whole meeting describe the radiofrequency electromagnetic field (EMF) radiation from wireless technology that has become a part of most people’s everyday lives.
Andrea Schwenke Wyile of Wolfville Ridge and Glenda Pavelich of Wolfville, representing Atlantic Canadians for Safe Technology, made a presentation to councillors on Jan. 19.
They called on council to exercise the precautionary principle and to join other Canadian and world municipalities in declaring a moratorium on so-called 5G or fifth generation wireless technology in the municipality until it’s scientifically proven safe.
They also called on councillors to do their own research on the topic to better educate themselves on potential negative consequences.
Schwenke Wyile said they aren’t experts, but concerned citizens who have been looking into the matter. She said EMF exposures have increased exponentially since they began raising awareness in the early 2000s.
“I now know many more people with microwave sickness, some of whom can no longer come to the Valley because of already high levels of radiation,” Schwenke Wyile said.
She said 5G raises “alarming concerns” for the health of all living beings and will further erode our privacy. She called wireless an “energy hog” that would consume more and more energy as the technology evolves.
Schwenke Wyile pointed to “tens of thousands of independent, peer-reviewed scientific studies”, some dating back more than half a century, “showing clear evidence of harm from non-native and non-ionizing electromagnetic and radio frequencies.” She said this evidence has been “suppressed and dismissed in the name of industry profit.”
She pointed to data compiled by Dr. Henry Lai at the University of Washington that indicates 70 per cent of non-industry studies demonstrate the harmful effects of EMF exposure while 68 per cent of industry studies show no effect.
Schwenke Wyile said precautionary measures should be taken, even if some cause and effect situations aren’t established scientifically.
Pavelich said 5G would require hundreds of thousands of small cell towers, one approximately every 150 metres, and pointed to studies showing that property values drop in the vicinity of cell towers.
She said a moratorium should be placed until Health Canada conducts a scientific study of the health and economic ramifications of the technology that demonstrates its safety. Pavelich said the wireless industry also has to take responsibility and prove the technology is safe before it’s released to the market. Therefore, it is important to put Kings County on the map as a municipality willing to step forward advocating for the health of its plants, insects and human residents.
She said they’re also calling for a change to legislation requiring more transparency and notification to local communities — and consent from municipal governments — when it comes to the installation of 5G. According to Pavelich, as far as they know, 5G technology has yet to roll out in Nova Scotia. Schwenke Wyile said they are aware that some small cell antennas have already been installed in Kings County but not activated. However, there are people in the community who have long been negatively impacted by wireless technology.
Schwenke said that there are people who would have presented to council this morning who cannot come into this room, and you’ve been hearing from these people for 20 years.
One such individual is Barbara Lake, who sent a letter to council regarding the 5G presentation. The Steam Mill resident said she has been disabled by wireless frequencies. This sensitivity became apparent after a cell tower was placed 1,052 feet behind her family’s Wolfville Ridge property in 2001.
Lake said her two youngest children became extremely ill within months of the tower’s activation. They had to abandon their home and moved 14 times before finding a home “safe enough to live what was left of our lives.”
She said even passing cars with active wireless technology cause her to endure physical and emotional trauma that “anyone would call torture.”
“This torture is sometimes so unbearable that I have to seek emergency medical care and call 911,” Lake said.
She said she experienced two such incidents in 2020 after a cell tower was sited not far from her home, even though she protested the location and provided a letter from her doctor in support of her concerns.
Lake has added her voice to those calling on the municipality to place a moratorium on 5G technology, which she described as “the most powerful and destructive wireless frequencies known to man” and which “have never been proven safe.”
Mayor Peter Muttart told the presenters that council would take the presentation under advisement and that they would make their own enquiries.
Following the presentation, Muttart said that communications are a federal government jurisdiction. If council were to declare a moratorium on 5G technology, “it would simply be persuasive” in terms of a position to be taken with the federal government. It would not be legally enforceable.
“While it’s clear they ask the municipality to declare a moratorium, I take the application, at the end of the day, to be an application to inspire the councillors of the day to educate themselves as to the science with respect to 5G technology,” Muttart said.
He said it seems that the issue some people have with fifth-generation wireless technology is that it could generate EMF exposures in excess of what is considered safe.
Muttart said the presenters are aware that the Municipality of Kings is actively working to provide wider fibre optic cable connectivity directly to homes and businesses. Since fibre-to-the-premises is not a wireless technology, it doesn’t present the same concerns about overexposure to EMF.
He said if the municipality were to take a position of any sort, it would have to be based upon forming the view after embarking on a great deal of education that the range for safe EMF exposure levels set by the federal government is not low enough.
However, Muttart said they, like the majority of the population, have yet to embark on that education. People tend to rely on senior government decisions and the science behind those decisions.
Health Canada’s Safety Code 6 is a document that sets out recommended safety limits for human exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (EMF) in the frequency range from three kHz to 300 GHz.
According to Health Canada, this range covers the frequencies used by communications devices and equipment that emit radiofrequency EMF, including wi-fi, cell phones, smart meters and “those using 5G technology”.
Posted in EMF-home-inspection
