Radio waves, wireless signals, and public health: Is this the next silent spring?

Abstract Dr. George Carlo is a public‐health practitioner and a . As chairman of Health Risk Management Group, he oversees work assessing the public‐health impact of consumer products, drugs, workplaces, and the environment. Dr. Carlos serves on the faculty of The George Washington University. While at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, he chaired the research committee of the Department of Family and Community Medicine and designed the acute and chronic clinical work performed by that department. Dr. Carlo has served in many scientific advisory capacities, including sitting on the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment Agent Orange Advisory Panel, and chairing Wireless Technology Research, L.L. C. He also wrote the enabling legislation for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (A TSDR), the government authority responsible for the public‐health aspects of hazardous‐waste contamination and has been an advisor to that group since its inception. He has participated in numerous government expert panels and workshops. He has testified before Congressional and Parliamentary government and regulatory committees around the world. It is rare that a single book actually changes the course of history, but the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did just that, and portended a new paradigm for societal views of chemicals in the environment. At that time, environmental chemicals derived from both consumer products and industrial production, were for the most part invisible to most of society and, consequently, were not viewed as a danger to either public health or the environment. In the four decades that have followed, the clarification of environmental chemical impact on public health, and the technological and public health remedial steps undertaken by society, have been both remarkable and of considerable benefit to public health and the environment. Nonetheless, the movement fostered by Rachel Carson's work also ushered in a new era of mass tort litigation, unprecedented legal liability concerns for business, and a rethinking by society of the balance of responsibility for harm resulting from the use of a wide range of consumer products and services. Today, the immense popularity of the wireless phone, the prodigious worldwide growth of the wireless industry, and the likelihood that radio waves are not without biological effects have created yet another unique challenge for government regulators, public‐health professionals, and society as a whole. Despite scientific information currently ambiguous about the safety of radio frequency radiation, in the United States there are currently more than 90 million wireless‐phone subscribers, with thousands more people each day taking them up. Worldwide there are an estimated 450 million users of wireless‐phone technology. Over the next two years, it is predicted that the number of people exposed daily to wireless signals will double, as the wireless Internet takes hold. Wireless signals and the radio frequency radiation that derives from them are invisible to the senses as Rachel Carson's chemicals of 1962 were to society. As new data become available, our understanding of this complex problem will improve; however, the explosion of this technology in society creates a unique necessity for ongoing interpretation of the science and the communication of intervention options to those who are may be affected and concerned. Consumers should be given the opportunity to know what risks they may likely incur with the use of this technology, and have the opportunity to make informed judgements about the assumption of that risk. But what of the ramifications for the wireless‐phone industry, the wireless Internet industry, and their insurance carriers? As Rachel Carson's Silent Spring portended a social revolution in the issues surrounding environmental chemicals, are these new data and their ramifications prophetic as well? More important, will the hard lessons of environmental chemical liability be applied as society grapples with radio‐wave exposure?