By Mustapha Sesay
The rapid increase in the use of mobile telephone in the last over two decades has led to an increasing number of cell phone transmission masts. These masts, erected in strategic locations on rooftops and high rise structures, are the point of transmission of signals within and from one network to another.
While these masts, also known as base-stations, have made how we communicate effective, they also have a dire health effect on people, especially those who live close to their locations. They discharge radio magnetic waves which may be hazardous to human health when excessively exposed to it.
This is should be of even greater concern for a country like Sierra Leone where these masts are erected indiscriminately on roof tops of both residential and commercial buildings often congested with people. Aware of the implication of their actions, telecommunications companies have chosen not to inform owners of lands and other landed properties hosting their masts about the potential dangers associated with them.
Allieu Mansaray, in charge of a four-storied building hosting one of Africell’s masts on Liverpool Street in Freetown, said they were never informed about the possible health risk involved.
“This Africell pole has been here for over 10 years and I only came to know about the danger true friends during a privileged conversation,” Mansaray told Politico.
“We were also not sensitized by any government institution concerning this pole,” he added.
Non compliance
Sierra Leone presently has three functional mobile operators – Airtel, Africell and Smart. According to unofficial sources, some people receive between Le10M and Le15M for the service.
Although Mansaray could not tell us how much his family receives from Africell, he said they had decided to ask the company to pull down its mast from their property after learning about the health danger.
Both Africell and Airtel declined to comment on the dangers of their mast or how they were addressing the issue when approached by Politico.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of Sierra Leone, which regulates emission and other environmental related issues, said it had severally raised concern over this issue of masts with the operators whom he accused of refusing to comply. Cyril Kamara, Deputy Director of Operations at EPA, while denying accusations that they have not been doing something about the issue, acknowledged the fact that people needed to be enlightened.
“Since 2010 we have been engaging both Airtel and Africell but they failed to comply with regulations. Even NATCOM has mediated between us but still they are not complying and until now they don’t have permit to erect mast within residential areas,” Kamara said in an interview.
Like all businesses of this nature, mobile operators are supposed to undertake an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) as a requirement in the EPA Act of 2008. This is even required before commencement of operation. But the environmental protection agency said none of the operators have complied with that requirement either.
EPA says it has developed a guideline in 2015 which needs to go through parliamentary approval, and it seeks to empower the agency to take action against GSM operators who would fail to comply with the procedures that have to do with the environment and people’s health.
The agency will shutdown telephone masts that were within residential areas if the GSM operators do nothing about them, said Kamara.
“We have right to shutdown the masts or if we want we can take them [GSM operators] to court,” he said.
“They should conduct environmental impact assessment study and make the report public so that the people know the impact of masts on the environment.”
Kamara added that the operators should also have licenses for the mast so that they can assess and monitor how they deal with their oil spillage from the generators they use at mast stations as well as the level of their fumes.
Researches
But this debate around the health risk of these telephone masts is still inconclusive as there is no general scientific agreement on the issue.
While vast majority of health experts and the World Health Organization (WHO) are battling to ascertain any adverse health effect of base-stations, some other researches conducted in Europe and other parts of the world indicate increased risks of cancer among residents living near mobile phone masts and other range of symptoms associated with living near a base-station. These latter researches are what the EPA is basing its position on over the issue.
But what has remained indisputable is the fact that mobile phones communicate with these masts through radio frequency Radiation (RFR) waves, and that medical doctors have proven that radio frequency waves or electromagnetic fields are capable of damaging human tissues at high intensity.
For example, a study conducted in France, published in the French journal ‘PATHOLOGY BIOLOGIE’, found significant ill-health effects in those living in the vicinity of mobile phone base stations. This study was first of its kind to be undertaken primarily looking at the “non-specific health symptoms of people living near cellular phone base stations.”
530 people were examined and they listed up to 18 symptoms which decreased with distance from base station.
The report additionally describes a number of health effects including “tiredness, headache, nausea, sleep disruption, depression, loss of memory, loss of appetite and libido decrease.”
Among the respondents, the report indicates that women showed significantly more often symptoms than men, in terms of the highlighted effects.
Another study conducted in Egypt revealed that the proportion of newly developing cancer cases were significantly higher among patients who had lived during the past ten years at a distance of up to 400 metres from the cellular transmitter site, as compared to those patients living further away.
Among the various researches conducted on the subject, the most common symptoms that correlate were: depressive tendency, fatigue, sleeping disorder, difficulty in concentration and cardiovascular problems.
Based on the revelation of this study, it was thus suggested: “It is advisable that mobile phone base stations are not sited closer than 300m to populations.”
This is highly unlikely to hold in Sierra Leone, admitted EPA’s Kamara. He said because of the highly congested nature of the population in the city, operators can hardly have a viable spot if they want to abide by this recommendation.
The government’s desire for foreign investment and its mindfulness not to hurt investors appears to be costing the citizens dearly.
Health experts in the country believe that the rate of cancer cases among Sierra Leoneans is becoming briskly alarming, though it has not been connected to the proliferation of GSM base-stations within residential areas. But the possibility cannot also be rule out because no survey has been done in that regard.
Globally cancer is a difficult ailment to deal with but it is even grimmer, the chances of surviving it in Sierra Leone because the country lacks the basic requisite to handle the disease. Even when some facilities exist it is very expensive for the ordinary man to afford.
“Chemotherapy, for instance, can be done with certain drugs which only wealthy people can lay hands on” the country’s only pathologist, Dr. Owizz Koroma, told Politico in an interview last year.
(C) Politico 20/01/16
