Mobile phone base stations do not cause any health issues because their emissions are too weak , says a leading scientist who represents the agency responsible for setting international guidelines for phone and base station safety standards.

Dr Bernard Veyret, a member of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), was in Melbourne this week to attend a seminar at Swinburne University of Technology’s Science and Wireless 2009.

Dr Veyret, at the conference and in a series of media interviews, said, based on scientific evidence, there were no reasons to be concerned about the safety of base stations.

“You have the far feed, the far away sources, such as base stations, the Wi-Fi transmitters, these do not cause any health problems because they are too far, the exporter is too weak and we do not expect anything from them, that is quite clear,” he said on ABC Radio in Perth.

Dr Veyret said exposure limits for electromagnetic emissions were very conservative and the emissions from base stations from GSM technology were 10,000 times below the limit.

However, for Wi-Fi and 3G technology, the emissions were 100,000 times below the safety limits.

“You can compare this to the light emitted by the full moon,” Dr Veyret said.

He said the exposure from mobile phone handsets was higher because they were used next to the head.

Dr Veyret said he believed the risk from mobile phone handsets to be “very negligible” although he could not exclude it.

He said if people were concerned they could use a hands-free kit, which were “extremely efficient” at reducing the amount of energy going to the head.

Dr Veyret said: “We have seen people moving very fast to use 3G phones. 3G units emit much less than GSM (2G) phones. When you are using a 3G mobile phones you are exposing your head to similar emissions to an older GSM phone with a hands-free kit.

“I’m sure the next generation will be similar to a 3G phone or even lower. When mobiles started they were big, fat and powerful. Now they are light and low-powered and the 3G phones are emitting much less radiation to the head.”

Dr Veyret said a question that mothers always asked was if children, who are using mobile phones at a much younger age, would be endangered by their longer-term use of mobiles.

He said young people were texting on their phones rather than dialing or going to the internet and as such the phones were away from their heads and their “exposure is much less”.

“Children are being exposed from a young age but their usage is changing quite a lot. Young people use messaging and they are not exposing themselves,” Dr Veyret said.

“The power of the phones is decreasing rapidly and that is another good factor. The exposure is decreasing in terms of level, however, the duration of exposure is increasing.

“It is not so much the duration but the level that is more important.”

Dr Veyret said he was not privy to what Interphone contained and he, like others, expected it to be released before the end of the year.

“In the next few months the global results interphone paper should be published,” he said..

“We will not get the full answer from Interphone, but the risk is small or we would have seen this is the published national Interphone papers already.”