Support Massachusetts Wireless Safety Legislative Bills With Five-Second Action Item
Use engaged empathy and informed activism to protect your health, environment and privacy.
Artwork courtesy Brian Narelle
Many communities in Massachusetts are currently at risk due to increasing exposures to electrosmog. Evidence-based decision making requires data collection, access, and transparency. Currently, no data about RF/EMF-related health damages (or environmental harm) is being systematically collected.
Legislative bills to safeguard residents of Massachusetts from wireless risks are due to be voted on by various committees in the Massachusetts legislature by February 7.
PLEASE SIGN ON TO THE ONE-STEP ACTION HERE to express your concern about wireless risks to your State Senator and Representative, and MA Governor Healey, which begins:
“The rapid, uncontrolled, and poorly regulated expansion of wireless technology and infrastructure, including cell towers, small cells and smart meters, poses significant risks to our health, damages the environment, and threatens the privacy and autonomy of citizens.”
S.2152 requires a no-fee smart meter opt-out. This has an Emergency Preamble to protect the public because Eversource and National Grid are planning to replace their entire electrical meter fleets with wireless smart meters in 2024 and 2025.
S.316 requires the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to establish best management practices for wireless in schools and public institutions of higher education.
S.1044 codifies that those with Electromagnetic Sensitivities (EMS) and other disabilities have a right to ask for reasonable accommodations.
H.2158 requires the MA Department of Public Health to add EMS to the list of diseases dangerous to public health, as An Act recognizing EMS as a disease dangerous to the public health, requiring inclusion in MAVEN (Disease Surveillance and Case Management System), establishing the Massachusetts EMS registry and requiring biennial reporting as part of population health trends. This legislation is an opportunity for MA to be on the right side of history.
Resolve S.155 forms a commission modeling New Hampshire’s lead. In 2020, The New Hampshire Commission to Study the Environmental and Health Effects of Evolving 5G Technology released its final report summarizing its findings that safety assurances for 5G have “come into question because of the thousands of peer-reviewed studies documenting deleterious health effects associated with cellphone radiation exposure.”
See more Information about these bills and others, and the recent history of EMF/RF/5G and wireless legislative bills here.
In conjunction with the February 7 legislative deadline, viewings of the award-winning EHS documentary “Canary in a Gold Mine” created by Jonathan Mirin are available free for Massachusetts residents until February 8 at ptco.org/canary.
Smart Meters, Human Rights, And The Choice For Safer Technology
Informed citizens in Massachusetts have been calling attention to risks, reported harm, and disability associated with the installation of wireless smart meters, testifying repeatedly before the legislature and the Department of Public Utilities for over a decade. In addition to health harm, smart meter concerns include invasion of privacy, surveillance, fire safety, security/ hacking, cost, planned obsolescence, and green-washing.
Meters previously installed by investor-owned utilities have now reached the end of their intended lifecycle, and must be replaced. It is crucial that members of the public advocate now for the right to chose the type of utility meter desired, without punitive surcharges, and for health-vulnerable residents to be safe in their own homes.
Learn more here about smart meters and health Physicians for Safe Technology
Learn from leaders in EMF science and medicine The EMF Medical Conference 2021
Cell Towers
The “Legal Handbook for Massachusetts Boards of Health 3rd Edition, 2021” identified “Cell tower radiation exposure” (Chapter 17, pp. 157 – 161) as an emerging issue.
Communities in Massachusetts are receiving applications for additional cell towers and 5G antennas to be placed in residential and environmentally sensitive areas. There is a very wide disparity between how communities view their zoning protections. Despite a recommendation that infrastructure not be sited with 500 meters of homes, some communities have approved industry-friendly installations on school grounds and/or 25 feet from driveways.
Safety claims about wireless technologies, devices, and infrastructure are based on whether or not they meet theoretical FCC guidelines, and not whether or not exposure guidelines are protective of the environment or health. The guidelines do not address cumulative, chronic, juxtaposed exposures, vulnerable populations, and non-thermal effects, nor do they address environmental effects.
The second largest circuit court in the US issued a ruling in 2021 that the decision by the Federal Communications Commission not to review its 1996 safety guidelines was not evidence-based. Thus far, the FCC has ignored the court’s remand.
Children And Schools
Safety testing procedures are based on the measurements of a male military recruit’s head. Children are not small adults. They have smaller, thinner bones and a higher water content overall in their bodies. Their cells more rapidly multiply, thus cell mutations also are more rapid in multiplying. Children also have less developed immune systems. The court ruling against the FCC may have serious financial consequences for school budgets when health and safety issues receive adequate scrutiny.
See also: Why children absorb more microwave radiation than adults: The consequences
Patricia Burke is a writer working with Safe Tech International, seeking to end the implementation of technologies that are incompatible with health, wellbeing and life. She has been advocating for safety in Massachusetts for over a decade, after becoming injured by smart meters in California.
