Local residents have every right to object to proposed developments of base stations, however, concerns about alleged safety issues should be based on credible scientific studies and not rely on bogus and untested claims.

The Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association wrote to the Daily Telegraph this week pointing out that a claim in an article on Tuesday headlined: “Phone towers terror” was wrong and misleading the public about alleged health effects from mobile phone towers.

The article claimed, without citing any source, that “telecommunications giants are covertly installing mobile phone towers around kindergartens, schools and childcare centres” and research, including a study in the International Journal of Cancer Prevention, had found “the cancer risk was up to 8.5 times higher than average around towers”.

AMTA Chief Executive Officer, Chris Althaus, said in the published letter that the claim of a published study reporting an 8.5 time increase in cancer near towers was false.

The unpublished report was withdrawn after a regional court in Austria found no base station existed in the area at the time of the alleged cancer cluster.

“However, the mobile phone industry acknowledges that some people are genuinely concerned and we are committed to addressing these concerns responsibly through active community and local government consultation,” Mr Althaus said.

“This is an example of a local community expressing its concerns about the safety of the technology – which they are entitled to do. However, it is in everyone’s interests that debates over the health and safety are based on credible scientific studies and people do not rely on unfounded or untested studies to bolster their view.

“Studies must go through a rigorous process of scientific scrutiny; this includes the peer review process, which contains a series of challenges to the justification of the study to ensure the publication meets acceptable scientific standards and filter out unsubstantiated personal opinions.

“Research that is acceptable and of a high scientific standard goes on to be published in a reputable scientific journal. It is then subject to further scrutiny through efforts to repeat the results to minimise the possibility of personal and experimental bias.”

Mr Althaus said the industry relied on a “weight of science” approach where each single study is carefully considered by independent expert bodies, such as the World Health Organization (WHO).

“There is now a large body of research into the health effects of radiofrequency emission available to health and regulatory bodies around the world, which is being continually reviewed,” he said.

“Potential health impacts of radio frequency energy have been studied in great detail over the past 50 years. This has resulted in a large body of scientific literature in this field - covering laboratory, clinical and epidemiological research.”

WHO review of base stations and wireless networks (2006)

“The accumulated evidence does not establish the existence of adverse short or long term health effects from the signals produced by base station and local wireless networks. In fact, for similar RF exposure intensities (W/m2), the body absorbs about 5 times more of the RF energy from FM radio and TV frequencies (around 100 MHz) than from base station frequencies (around 1 – 2 GHz). It is reassuring to note that radio and TV broadcast stations have been in operation for more than 50 years, and health statistics have not demonstrated adverse health consequences.”