WASHINGTON-The Environmental Protection Agency is expected shortly to issue a policy statement supporting a new hybrid radio frequency radiation standard, but sources say the EPA is unlikely to retreat from its previously stated position that the safety guideline fails to address potential health risks from long-term use of low-power pocket phones.
The wireless telecom industry has been lobbying for a policy clarification ever since an EPA official in October said the new RF guideline adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in August may not protect subscribers against potential health hazards from low-level, long-term RF exposure that comes from placing pocket phones against the head.
Most of the 40 million wireless users have pocket phones as opposed to car phones. Car phones do not pose a health threat because antennas are attached to the vehicle instead of the phone itself.
The industry said the EPA official’s view conflicts with EPA Director Carol Browner’s statement to FCC Chairman Reed Hundt last July that the hybrid approach addresses “our concerns about adequate protection of public health.”
Motorola Inc.’s John Welch, chairman of the Electromagnetic Energy Association, recently sent a letter to Mary T. Smith, director of the Indoor Environments Division of EPA’s Office of Radiation and Indoor Air, requesting a formal policy clarification.
In a Dec. 23 memo to EEA’s board of directors, Welch said Smith told him that she and David Wye, an aide to FCC Wireless Telecommunications Bureau Chief Michele Farquhar, are coordinating a letter of clarification and “the two agencies have agreed on the letter’s content and it is now is the process of being drafted for Assistant Administrator Nichol’s signature in January.”
Mary Nichols, who reports to Browner, heads EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. Apparently confident about the outcome, Welch said that “although EEA’s letters have been sent, it does not appear necessary (or desirable) to follow up with Jackie Chorney of the FCC.”
Chorney, a senior adviser to Hundt, is managing the RF issue for the FCC chairman.
But some observers say it is highly unlikely, indeed naive, for industry to assume EPA will abandon its long-held position, as stated in 1993 comments to the FCC, that research data “is not yet sufficient to be used as a basis for exposure criteria to protect the public against adverse human health effects.”
Indeed, congressional investigators concluded several years ago that it cannot be determined from existing RF studies whether pocket phones pose a health risk to consumers. Yet Congress and the Food and Drug Administration have declined to shut down the pocket phone industry or impose regulations on the basis of what scientific data there is.
Lawsuits that claim pocket phones cause cancer have failed to succeed in court. Several complaints remain on hold because of a state-federal jurisdictional dispute.
EPA is more likely to generally endorse the RF hybrid standard as a gesture to mollify the telecommunications industry, and will steer clear of the kind of policy interpretation that Norbert Hankin, of EPA’s Indoor Environments Division, engaged in when responding by letter Oct. 8 to David Fichtenberg, a research investigator for the Medical Assistance Administration in Washington state and a harsh critic of federal RF safety guidelines.
Environmentalists, like Fichtenberg, are being aided in the fight against the siting of personal communications services antennas by organized labor.
The Communications Workers of America are hoping to gain membership in the wireless industry, which has 40 percent annual growth in contrast to massive downsizing on the wireline side.
A five-year, $25 million research program that ends in mid-1998 is not apt to add to the body of scientific knowledge on RF bioeffects because of legal, administrative and funding problems it has encountered.
However, research continues overseas where subjective data has linked pocket phones to headaches. The European Commission has recommended that industry finance $30 million in new research.
Separately, the FCC late last month extended the implementation date of the new hybrid safety guideline from Jan. 1 to Sept. 1, 1997. Petitions challenging the RF standard are expected to be ruled on early this year.
Prospects are slim the FCC will repeal the hybrid guideline advocated by EPA and replace it with one crafted in 1992 by American National Standards Institute and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers that the FCC proposed originally in 1993. That would set the stage for a court appeal later this year.
The telecommunications industry and three of four FCC members overwhelmingly supported the 1992 ANSI-IEEE standard, but the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association’s defection late in the debate doomed the proposal and allowed the hybrid standard championed by Hundt and Browner, both Clinton-appointed Democrats, to win out.
“We would certainly appreciate a letter,” said the FCC’s Wye. “It would help us for them to clarify their (EPA’s) support.”
