The contrast between protests against the new emergency services mobile communications system (TETRA) masts in the South East and the local silence around those on top of Brighton police station and Theobald House in Blackman Street that are due to be activated this summer couldn't be more marked.
Green MEPs Caroline Lucas and Jean Lambert recently called for an EU ban on TETRA and an immediate moratorium on it in the UK.
They are concerned at children's increased vulnerability to TETRA and alarmed at increased anecdotal evidence - from Durnsley in Gloucestershire, Shanklin on the Isle of Wight, Worthing, Littlehampton and Bognor Regis, the 170-plus police officers ill after using handsets in Lancashire - and reports that its signals can cause cancer and motor neurone disease when the Government is planning to erect 3,000 TETRA masts across the UK.
The protectsussexfromtetra web site details high incidences of massive nosebleeds, disorientation, confusion and lack of concentration, dizziness, skin heating and rashes, severe headaches, migraines, nausea and lassitude in children, causing absenteeism in local schools, epileptic fits and people waking abruptly every two hours since masts were recently switched on near them.
The Government's own Stewart Report, campaign groups Mast Sanity and Powerwatch and physicists such as Dr Gerald Hyland and Ian Sharp all reject TETRA in its entirety.
While Government and industry spokespeople say the radiation from these masts is thousands of times below the best known safety standards, their guidelines take no account of the pulsed microwave frequencies that are believed to be responsible for the widespread ill health being observed in populations living near even conventional phone masts and in people using mobile and digital cordless phones.
Dr Leif Salford, heading a long term Swedish study into mobile phones, recently rated brain damage from regular cell phone use "a probability rather than a possibility".
Researchers have concluded that "mild" symptoms such as sleeplessness, headaches and nausea will progress to more serious conditions, especially cancer, if the exposure to microwaves is not stopped.
And TETRA is far worse than even this, according to the scientists. It just mustn't happen.
-Graham Parfitt, Brighton
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