3 G masts cause headaches and nausea, says Dutch study

A Dutch study on radiation from 3 G mobile phone masts, released September 30th, showed that people exposed to it reacted with headaches and nausea. Even cognitive skills were affected. The abstract of the report reads:

In this report a double blind randomized three-way crossover evaluation of general symptoms and cognitive functions with or without exposure to GSM and UNITS-like fields in subjects presenting with complaints subjectively attributed to GSM fields is presented. From our research it is concluded that our hypotheses to find no relation between presence of RF-fields and the measured parameters is rejected. We have found a statistically significant relation between UNITS-like fields with a field strength of 1 V/m and an effect on the Well Being. Further, from the cognitive tasks, it is observed that a number of significant effects is found. Each exposure frequency is associated with changes in some tasks or parameters, while other frequencies are not. In our study, it is shown that the thermal effects are negligible and therefore, an explanation based on thermal effects seems highly unlikely for effects on the cognitive parameters. Without any question, the results justify more scientific research into this area. (Zwamborn A.P.M. et al., ”Effects of Global Communication system radio-frequency fields on Well Being and Cognitive Functions of human subjects with and without subjective complaints”, Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Reasearch [TNO], 2003.)

The position of the GSM Association is that this study proves nothing: ”As the effects are small it is unclear whether they have any health significance”. And a spokesman for Ericsson says: ”Our position is that there is no scientific evidence that there are any health problems associated with radio waves from mobile communications.” See ”Global phone industry plays down Dutch study on UMTS health effects”, Telecom.paper, October 2, 2003.