[Press Release] Phonegate: Ministerial reply not equal to the importance of the public health issues

After more than seven months of waiting, a reply was received on February 12, to the letters of June 19, 2017 and January 5, 2018 addressed to Nicolas Hulot, Minister of State and Minister of the Ecological and Inclusive Transition, and Agnès Buzyn, Minister of Solidarity and Health.  It was signed by Professor Jérôme Salomon, Director-General for Health, and Marc Mortureux, Director-General for Risk Prevention.  This letter, more technocratic than policy-related, does not at all respond to the public health emergency and the vital measures that are needed in the face of this new health and industrial scandal, Phonegate.

None of the proposals made in our letter of January 2018 has been retained, not even that of finally placing online the complete reports of the tests of the National Frequencies Agency (ANFR), requested since more than the last eighteen months.  Such a denial of transparency on the part of a political authority raises questions.

And what about the announcement of a request for scientific and technical support made in October 2017 to the National Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety (ANSES) in order to “…indicate if the high SAR values recorded by ANFR between 2012 and 2016 are likely to cause health effects, particularly the highest SAR values measured for mobile phones compliant with placing on the market…”?

An initial analysis above all shows a total lack of knowledge of the recommendations made by ANSES in its July 2016 report, “Exposure to Radiofrequencies and Child Health”.  Indeed, Dr. Marc Arazi recalled that in 2016 “the committee of experts of ANSES informed the government at the time, of several recommendations that are essential for the health of users, particularly the youngest ones.  To date, none of them has received any attention nor have they started to be implemented.  Dr. Arazi cites the Agency, which requests “ensuring under all circumstances compliance with the regulatory limit values of exposure, whatever the mobile transmission devices used and their conditions of use (positioning in contact with the body)…”. 

This is all the more worrying in the context of the release on February 2, 2018 of the American study of the National Toxicology Program (currently under peer review),  which showed the appearance of serious cancerous and non-cancerous pathologies affecting multiple organs (brain, prostate, liver, pancreas, thyroid, heart,…) in rats and mice subjected to high levels of exposure of up to 1,5 to 6 W/kg.

This study is all the more significant as it fits into the context of bringing to light a totally defective international regulatory system that allows manufacturers to voluntarily expose consumers to higher threshold levels of waves than those tested on animals in the laboratory (SAR values greater than 7 W/kg).

Thus today, we have written another letter to the two ministers, requesting them once again to act to protect the health of the French people, their inaction being likely to engage the responsibility of the French State.