Are mobile phone masts a secret killer or is it all just nimbyism and tabloid scare stories?
Its ‘grains of rice’
There have been instances where two people in the same locality develop a rare kind of cancer. When something like that happens theres the temptation to look at the environment around you for a ’cause’ – if they see a phone mast they suspect that – if they plot all the occurrences of their rare cancer – theres alway a mast in the vicinity. The problem though with rare events is they are randomly distributed, not evenly distributed. The analogy would be to take a handful of rice, scatter it across a map and presume anywhere that two or more grains were grouped together was significant.
Where mobile phone masts come into play is…. anywhere there are people / homes there are mobile phone masts, so whenever anyone is looking for a bogie man to blame for a random occurrence there always a phone mast nearby. So if you plotted any kind of event on a map – occurrences of any kind of illness – the distribution would always match the distribution of phone masts. But it would also match the distribution of post boxes, grit bins and lottery terminals.
I have 48 hours to reach an informed position on the safety aspects of mobile phone masts after which time the petitio
This is the problem with petitions – they mean nothing. If your neighbour gets 99 signatures does it mean he asked 100 people and all but you signed? Or does it mean he asked 10,000 people and 9901 people told him to get bent?