WASHINGTON-A group that claims mobile phone transmitters pose a public health risk last week asked a federal appeals court in New York to stay the Federal Communications Commission’s implementation of a telecom act provision that pre-empts local regulation of antenna siting on the basis of health concerns.
The Cellular Phone Task Force, which filed the stay request, is one of several parties that appealed stricter radio-frequency radiation exposure guidelines adopted by the FCC in 1993.
Oral argument on the stay request could be held in two weeks.
The effort to stay the health-related siting provision in the telecom act comes as Congress considers legislation to repeal the provision altogether.
A Senate bill is cosponsored by Sens. Patrick Leahy (R-Vt.) and James Jeffords (R-Vt.) and a companion House bill is backed by Reps. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Christopher Shays (R-Conn.)
Industry-financed research has failed to find any link between wireless phones and base stations and cancer or other illnesses.
Separately, in a move that could complicate the FCC’s legal defense of its RF radiation-exposure standard, the Cellular Phone Task Force told the court it plans to argue that RF guidelines not only fail to guarantee protection from possible health risks from long-term exposure to mobile phones but they discriminate against people who claim to be `electro-sensitive.’
The Cellular Phone Task Force, led by Arthur Firstenberg, says it believes wireless phones and base stations can cause cancer and other maladies, and raised the electro-sensitivity issue in a complaint filed with the FCC’s handicap coordinator last year.
The FCC’s Disabilities Issues Task Force declined to act on the complaint and forwarded it to FCC chief engineer Richard Smith. Smith, on two separate occasions, refused to treat Firstenberg’s filing as a complaint.
Instead, Smith said the electro-sensitivity issue would be considered along with petitions to reconsider the 1996 RF safety standard.
The new standard, which is stricter than the previous one and is based on input from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration and other health and safety federal agencies, was affirmed on reconsideration last summer.
Firstenberg and his lawyer, John Schulz, argue the FCC, under the Rehabilitation Act, had a responsibility to address the complaint or refer it to another agency of competent jurisdiction.
If the FCC needed more information, they said, the FCC was obliged by law to ask for it. Moreover, they argue the Rehabilitation Act forbids appeals being heard by the same person who made the initial determination.
As such, unless it is removed by the judge, the electro-sensitivity issue will be incorporated into various lawsuits challenging the FCC’s RF standard. Those lawsuits have been consolidated in the U.S. Court of the Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York.
“We will be arguing in defense of the FCC’s right to issue that standard and will defend the standard’s validity,” said Tim Ayers, a spokesman for the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association.
The petitioners include the Cellular Phone Task Force, the Communications Workers of America and the Ad-Hoc Association of Parties Concerned about FCC Health & Safety Rules. Their brief is due May 22.
The FCC’s brief is to be filed June 22. Oral argument is scheduled for the week of July 13.
“I don’t want to do this. I’m fighting for the right to live,” said Firstenberg in a telephone interview last week with RCR.
Firstenberg, 47 and single, said he was forced to leave his Brooklyn apartment after digital mobile phone antennas were placed throughout the city.
“I’m so sensitive it is lethal. It almost killed me,” said Firstenberg.
Firstenberg today lives in an upstate New York motel. He said he will leave there next month. If he cannot find new housing, Firstenberg said he will be homeless. He said his family provides him with financial support. The electro-sensitivity became so severe, Firstenberg said he was forced to drop out of medical school after three years at the University of California at Irvine.
Firstenberg said electro-sensitivity symptoms include dizziness, nausea and headaches and that it is believed to affect 2 percent of the population.
There are 58 million mobile phone subscribers in the United States and the industry predicts more than 100,000 antennas will be built with the rollout of new personal communications services systems.
