As 5G technology begins to roll out across the country, it is being met by a massive wave of resistance over concerns that it can cause health problems. One city in California, reacting to an overwhelming outpouring of concern has taken an extreme step and blocked the technology from being implemented.
This week, the city of Mill Valley, CA, a wealthy city just north of San Francisco, voted unanimously to effectively halt the installation of new small cell towers which carry the 5G technology.
The city enacted an “urgency ordinance” after it received over a hundred letters from concerned citizens expressing their worries over the new 5G towers.
As Tech Crunch reports:
Through an urgency ordinance, which allows the city council to immediately enact regulations that affect the health and safety of the community, the restrictions and prohibitions will be put into force immediately for all future applications to site 5G telecommunications equipment in the city. Applications for commercial districts are permitted under the passed ordinance. The ordinance was driven by community concerns over the health effects of 5G wireless antennas. According to the city, it received 145 pieces of correspondence from citizens voicing opposition to the technology, compared to just five letters in support of it — a ratio of 29 to 1. While that may not sound like much, the city’s population is roughly 14,000, indicating that about 1% of the population had voiced an opinion on the matter.
Mill Valley residents cited multiple studies which claim that experts have found evidence that cell phone radiation can cause cancer.
The town of 14,000 now joins several other towns who’ve blocked the installation of 5G over health concerns. Before Mill Valley blocked 5G, other municipalities in California, such as Marin County and San Anselmo, passed similar ordinances.
Similar movements to block 5G have taken place across the country as well.
“The cell towers are called small cell towers, but they are not so small when they are in your front yard, this will cause cancer.” said Donna Baron, a resident of Montgomery County, Maryland who is actively protesting the installation of 5G in her town.
How would 5G network look like in your neighborhood:
Concerns over cell phone radiation are nothing new. It is a fact that cell phones emit radiation. It is also a fact that this radiation can be absorbed by the human body from prolonged exposure.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified radio frequency fields from cell phones as possibly carcinogenic to humans. IARC interprets the classification as meaning there is limited evidence showing radiofrequency carcinogenicity in humans and less than sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals.
For perspective, IARC has classified the following other agents as “possibly carcinogenic to humans”: Coffee, Extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields (power line frequency), and Talc-based body powder.
Because cell phone radiation exposure is relatively new and constantly evolving, long term studies are still ongoing.
The International Cohort Study on Mobile Phone Users (COSMOS) is conducting a study which aims to conduct long-term health monitoring of a large group of people to determine if there are any health issues linked with long-term exposure to radio frequency energy from cell phone use. The COSMOS study will follow approximately 300,000 adult cell phone users in Europe for 20 to 30 years.
As 5G has yet to be fully implemented, the data on its radiation is even less extensive. However, California’s Department of Public Health has issued warnings about potential health effects of personal cell phone antennas.
As TFTP previously reported, this information was just released, after years of being hidden from the public. Last year, California Department of Public Health officials finally released a draft document outlining health concerns stemming from cellphone radiation — including multiple cancers and infertility.
Joel Moskowitz of U.C. Berkeley’s School of Public Health, who sued the state in 2016 under the California Public Records Act to obtain the information, explained
“We have evidence of brain tumors and other head and neck tumors. We also have evidence of sperm damage in males, infertility in females”