On June 8, 2018, the site “Le Lanceur” published a new article on the industrial and health scandal of Phonegate. It is the seventh article in 18 months that it has devoted to this public health issue. In December 2016, it was the first media to relay the alert launched by Dr. Marc Arazi.
A big thank you to the editorial team and the journalist Antoine Sillières for their investigative work. It is also the only media for the moment to have made the link to our action following the withdrawal and updates of four new mobile phones.
It must also be noted that public broadcasting has been totally absent for months with regard to this affair. Why? In any case, certainly not for not having received our press releases regularly and trying to contact them so that the newsrooms (France2, France3, FranceInfo, France5, RadioFrance, …) inform the tens of millions of users of mobile phones of the danger to their health.
In this new article, our attention was particularly drawn to a quotation attributed to Olivier Merckel, Head of the Unit for assessment of risks related to physical agents at ANSES (French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety): “When the SARs of the tested phones show values lower than the limits, the health effects considered as proven by ICNIRP [International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection] are dismissed. For the general public, the safety factor applied by ICNIRP is 50. Thus the first effects considered by ICNIRP should not be observed at 2 W/kg but rather at 100 W/kg for an “average” that is representative of the general population. Beyond these well-known effects, the question is whether other effects could be observed at lower exposure levels”.
We strongly contest this figure of 100 W kg, which is purely and simply an invention that, to our knowledge, has never been included in any ICNIRP document or in any scientific document.
So we will write, in the next few days, to ANSES, to ask for clarification of this statement by Mr. Merckel. This is all the more worrying when we know that in October 2017, the Directorate General of Health (DGS) and the Directorate General for Risk Prevention (DPR) entrusted a mission to ANSES to assess the health risks to users of mobile phones whose SAR levels exceed the regulatory thresholds of 2 W/kg and may be greater than 7 W/kg.
In this regard, despite several requests, both the Minister for the Ecological and Inclusive Transition, Mr. Nicolas Hulot, and the Minister for Solidarity and Health, Mrs. Agnès Buzyn, have not yet transmitted to us the letter entrusting the mission to ANSES. In this matter, we can make the sad observation of a blatant lack of transparency.
We will come back to this in more detail in an article devoted to this key issue.
Read the article on the site of « Le Lanceur ».
« Series of recalls of dangerous mobile phones » by Le Lanceur
