No MASTS {g.r.a.m}

A mobile phone company is to remove a controversial mast from a block of flats dubbed the 'Tower of Doom', after seven residents were struck down by cancer.

Three residents have died and another four are battling the deadly disease since two masts were erected on the roof of the five-storey block.

Cancer rates on the top floor - where five of the eight flats have been struck, including the three deaths - is ten times the national average.

T-MOBILE, the mobile phone giant, has been accused of “burying” a scientific report it commissioned that concluded handsets and masts contribute to cancer and genetic damage.

The report argued that officially recommended limits on radiation exposure should be cut to 1/1000th of those in force. The suggestion has not been taken up by the company or by regulators.

Campaigners claimed T-Mobile’s handling of the report was part of a wider pattern of behaviour by the industry in its efforts to keep discussion of the health risks off the agenda.

The Ecolog Institute, which has been researching mobile phone technology since 1992, was paid by T-Mobile to evaluate evidence on its potential dangers.

But Dr Peter Neitzke, one of the authors of the report, has accused T-Mobile, which has about 17m British customers, of diluting the findings by commissioning other studies from which it knew “no critical results or recommendations were to be expected”.

Here’s the latest in industry funded cell phone studies that claim to have the final answer. When you see statements like “There’s really no biological basis for you to be concerned about radio waves,” and “people can become more reassured that these devices are safe” you can be sure the cell phone industry is paying the piper.

See George Carlo’s interesting (to say the least) comments to Robert Reidlinger on this study following the Associated Press report. - George Carlo, former head of the US WTR research project into Mobile Telephone health effects in the late 1990s had this to say: "John Boice and his colleagues have been on the cell phone industry payroll, and for big money, since the late 1990’s. The money laundering vehicle is the International Epidemiology Institute — the name sounds like a non-profit by design, but make no mistake, this is a big for-profit enterprise. When I ran the WTR, the International Epidemiology Institute, with Boice and a fellow named Joe McLaughlin, applied for funding to do this exact epidemiology study that was released this week. After much discussion within the WTR, they were refused funding because I felt they were blatantly biased and had overtly given us the notion that they would always create findings that were favorable to the industry."