Health Committee on Oct. 28th, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the health committee. I am so pleased to see everybody here today.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we have a study on the impact of microwaves on human health. It is something this committee has wanted to pick up on and continue for some time. I am very pleased that the witnesses have been able to come today.

From the Department of Health, we have Beth Pieterson, director general, environmental and radiation health sciences directorate, healthy environments and consumer safety branch.

Welcome, Beth.

We also have with us Frank Prato, imaging program leader, assistant scientific director, from the Lawson Health Research Institute,

I'm so glad you could make it as well.

We also have, from the Simcoe County Safe School Committee, Rodney Palmer, who is a member.

Thank you for joining us today.

Joining us as an individual we have Anthony Martin Muc, adjunct lecturer at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, occupational and environmental health unit, University of Toronto.

You were here before. Welcome back. It's nice to see you here again.

Via video conference we have two guests. Curtis Bennett is president of Thermographix Consulting Corporation.

Welcome, Curtis. I'm glad you're here.

Also, from Columbia University, coming to us from Victoria, British Columbia, we have Dr. Martin Blank, associate professor of physiology and cellular biophysics, department of physiology and cellular biophysics.

We're very happy that all of you can be here. We will give you five minutes for a presentation from each organization. Then we'll have questions and answers. At the end of the committee meeting, at 12:45, I will suspend because we have some business we have to do for the final 15 minutes.

We will begin with Ms. Pieterson, please, for five minutes.

[Beth Pieterson, Director General, Environmental and Radiation Health Sciences Directorate, Healthy Environments and Consumer Safety Branch, Department of Health]

Thank you, Madam Chairperson and members of the committee.

I'm pleased to be back before the committee today to speak to Health Canada's position on the impact of microwaves on human health.

In April, when this issue was last presented before the committee, I spoke to you of Health Canada's awareness of concerns from some communities of stakeholders about the possible effects of radio frequency electromagnetic emissions on the health of Canadians, including our children. These ongoing concerns received significant press, largely buoyed by the media and by a small yet very vocal group of scientists; however, in many instances, the information communicated is misrepresented.

Health Canada acts within the authority of the Radiation Emitting Devices Act, providing advice and guideline development for electromagnetic energy emissions. Guidelines developed by Health Canada set recommended limits for safe human exposure to electromagnetic energy from various devices, including cellphones, Wi-Fi equipment, and cellphone towers. These guidelines, commonly referred to as Safety Code 6, were reviewed carefully and revised as recently as October 2009.

Health Canada's revision of Safety Code 6 followed a thorough evaluation of worldwide peer-reviewed scientific evidence and literature on the effects of radio frequency energy on biological systems. The department, furthermore, conducted its own in-house studies, also published in peer-reviewed journals, which to date do not support the position that electromagnetic energy emissions from cell towers and wireless technologies pose hazards to the health of Canadians.

Considering the quality of all the individual studies, the reproducibility of observed effects in different laboratories, and acceptance within the international scientific community, Health Canada established limits for human exposure that are well below the level that has been shown to cause any harm. Despite the lack of studies focused solely on children, the limits recommended for general public exposure were designed to provide protection to all age groups, including children, if exposed on a continuous basis.

There's no question about the widespread exposure to cellphones and Wi-Fi in schools, boardrooms, and households across the country. However, the large majority of scientists conducting work related to electromagnetic energy agree that exposure levels encountered by Canadians in these environments are, according to the vast majority of currently available evidence, well below levels that would result in any health effects.

During my last presentation before the committee, I referenced a report cited by electromagnetic field advocates and entitled “The BioInitiative Report”. This report suggests that regulatory authorities such as Health Canada should apply precautionary approaches to sources of electromagnetic field exposure and apply much more stringent limits.

It should be noted that in the international dialogue that followed the release of the BioInitiative Report, numerous electromagnetic energy experts, associations, and countries around the world issued statements refuting claims included within the report, expressing criticism for its lack of balance, lack of new scientific evidence, exclusion of numerous studies, internal inconsistencies, and a bias toward negative outcomes.

The science underpinning the report was not peer-reviewed, which is the gold standard for scientific publications, nor was it accepted by governments around the world. Having reviewed the report, Health Canada is of the opinion that there are insufficient grounds to revise our views on the electromagnetic field health risk assessment at this time.

I should emphasize that the scientific evidence supporting Health Canada's exposure limits is verified on an ongoing basis. Our Canadian exposure limits are comparable to those of other jurisdictions, including the United States and the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection. To our knowledge, there is no major jurisdiction in the world that has banned Wi-Fi from schools based on scientific evidence available.

The United Kingdom recently released on their website a general position statement on Wi-Fi, stating: There is no consistent evidence to date that Wi-Fi and WLANs adversely affect the health of the general population. Based on current knowledge and experience, radio frequency exposures...from Wi-Fi are likely to be lower than those from mobile phones.

They say, “On the basis of the studies so far carried out in house” at the Health Protection Agency in the U.K., they see “no reason why Wi-Fi should not continue to be used in schools”.

Just to conclude, Health Canada is committing to protecting the health and safety of Canadians and to ensuring that our guidelines are safe. We continually evaluate the science, and the guidelines are based on up-to-date science. As with any new technology, it is a sensible precautionary principle to maintain an ongoing review to provide Canadians with reassurance.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Thank you very much.

We'll now go to Dr. Prato.

[Dr. Frank Prato, Imaging Program Leader, Assistant Scientific Director, Lawson Health Research Institute]

My name is Frank Prato. I'm assistant scientific director of the Lawson Health Research Institute. I've been doing research in non-thermal effects of electromagnetic radiation since 1982, when I was interested in the possibility that medical imaging using magnetic resonance imaging might have some effects.

Since then I've published a few papers in RF, but mostly I participate in reviewing the scientific literature. I have reviewed the scientific literature as a past president of the Bioelectromagnetics Society, the scientific literature as chair of Commission K, and also the biological effects of non-ionizing radiation for the International Union of Radio Science, and I sit on the long-range planning committee. I'm also Canada's representative to URSI, the International Union of Radio Science.

I've participated with the Royal Society with respect to reviews of the scientific literature and the review of Safety Code 6 in the late 1990s. I really believe that this process is an excellent process. Through the former chair of that committee, Dan Krewski, we continue to write reviews of literature every few years.

Safety Code 6, specifically in the area of RF and specifically in the area of Wi-Fi, addresses the issue of heating. Given that that is the major scientific finding, it protects the public from Wi-Fi, from cellphones, etc. The radiation from Wi-Fi is lower in electric and magnetic field intensity than the radiation from cellphones, particularly transmit of cellphones when they are held up to your face and you're going back to a base tower.

So if we allow cellphones in children's homes and allow children to use cellphones, and if we allow children to use Wi-Fi in their own homes, it seems a bit paradoxical that there would be some concern about using this in a more controlled environment in the schools. Nevertheless, I've been reviewing the research program on non-thermal radiation in the area of radio frequency for the Swiss national academy and recently I spent four or five days in Lund, Sweden, reviewing their work on non-ionizing radiation and cellphone effects in blood-brain barrier permeability.

More recently, new technologies have allowed us to particularly evaluate what happens during exposure. In the past, we would do an epidemiology study: someone is exposed for 10 years, and then we try to see whether there's an effect. Right now we can start looking for deterministic effects—non-stochastic effects, let's say—by actually exposing someone and looking to see whether their brain activity is changing during the exposure. These are new findings; they are not necessarily.... And new findings have been produced by the Swiss consortium. Repeated reproducible findings have been produced by the Lund group in Sweden, and these look to be reproducible biological effects, but not necessarily detrimental effects.

I believe the process that Canada has in place—and I'm biased, because I'm part of that review process—for updating Safety Code 6 is a process in which arm's-length committees look at literature and then Safety Code 6 responds to that literature with respect to recommendations for regulations. I think this is a good process. And I see a disconnect with individuals stating that Wi-Fi should be taken out of the schools when in fact those children are exposed to similar conditions everywhere they go these days, and particularly in the home, and particularly if they're allowed to use wireless communication devices.

Really, that's all I need to say.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Thank you very much, Dr. Prato. We appreciate your input.

Now we'll hear from Simcoe County Safe School Committee.

Mr. Palmer, please.

[Rodney Palmer, Member, Simcoe County Safe School Committee]

Thank you.

We've heard a lot from Health Canada officials that Wi-Fi has absolutely no risk and it's perfectly safe, but I'm here to report that this statement is false.

There is a public health disaster unfolding among children in Simcoe County, north of Toronto, where the school board installed a commercial grade Wi-Fi system in every school about three years ago.

Since then, the health of many children has taken a dramatic shift. Some report chronic headaches so severe that their parents are called to the school to take them home. Some report dizziness and vertigo, but only when they're in the school. Others report a cognitive disassociation where they forget where they are sometimes or they can't hold a pencil.

The more severe cases involve heart problems, specifically, an erratic and sudden speeding heart rate known as tachycardia. The children with this condition have reported that they feel like they're having a heart attack at school. At least one child with this problem passed out on several occasions, one time hitting his head on the gym floor as he went down. At least two children have been evacuated from school because the teacher could see their little hearts pounding through their shirts and had to get them out and call their parents.

Two more children have suffered cardiac arrest in Simcoe County schools in the last year. One of them was revived by a teacher with CPR; another one was revived by an attending police officer with a defibrillator. Now every school in Simcoe County has its own defibrillator, as though teenage cardiac arrest is the new normal. Outside of Simcoe County, it's actually less than one in a million. Inside Simcoe County, it's 46 times higher since they installed the Wi-Fi.

The reality is that we're allowing an experiment to be conducted at our schools every day and nobody's taking notes. This is the state of affairs in a school board that installed Wi-Fi in just about every classroom and hallway, and it's most likely the case in every school board that has installed these powerful Wi-Fi systems, but nobody knows because no one is keeping track and, so far, nobody cares.

We've reported all of this to the school board and they say that it can't be the Wi-Fi because Health Canada says it's safe. We reported it to the public health unit, and they said it can't be the Wi-Fi: Health Canada says it's safe.

We've reported this right up to the Minister of Health for Canada and we're told the same story, often with the same cut-and-pasted, word-for-word explanation that “Health Canada has got our back, don't you worry, Wi-Fi is safe”. Beth Pieterson herself was quoted on national television two weeks ago as saying, “There's no scientific evidence that those kinds of effects are caused by the energy limits the kids are exposed to by Wi-Fi”.

Well, I have news. The U.S. government's National Institutes of Health published a study this year showing that children's health is profoundly at risk from exposure to wireless devices. The European Journal of Oncology published an entire volume this month on the dangers of low-level radiation, and one of those studies showed that this exact heart problem, tachycardia, which is being reported in our schools, is agitated by the exact frequency of Wi-Fi. Just yesterday, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine reported that only four hours of exposure from a laptop with Wi-Fi on can damage DNA in sperm.

So what arrogance declares that all of these scientists and all of their work don't exist?

I've found that by scratching only a thin surface of Health Canada you discover a conflict of interest with the wireless industry, a conflict of interest that might explain why they're ignoring the scientists who have proved time and again that Wi-Fi is in fact harmful, especially to children.

Even though this experiment that is being conducted in Simcoe County has failed miserably, we're about to roll it out in schools throughout Toronto, London, Ottawa, and across Canada until every child in this country is irradiated by microwaves all day long because Health Canada says that's okay. The parents will have no say in this, and when their kids start having heart problems, their doctors will be just like the ones in Simcoe County. They'll say to the kids that it can't be the Wi-Fi because Health Canada says its safe. Instead, they'll prescribe pharmaceuticals, like they do for kids in our schools, or as in the case of one little boy in Barrie, they'll install a permanent defibrillator in his chest.

Despite the statements of Health Canada, we are without a doubt endangering the future of an entire generation of Canadian children. And for what? So that they can connect to the Internet in a new and cool way. Well, hard wires do the exact same thing. They give them the exact same Internet and they're harmless.

The children of Simcoe County have been failed by every level of government oversight installed to protect them, but they are just the beginning. They're a harbinger of Canada's future of sick children irradiated daily by microwave exposure without consent, and here, in this room, is their last level. This is the last chance for these kids. What do we tell them in a decade or two when we finally figure this out?

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Mr. Palmer, I'm sorry. You're going to have to wrap up.

[Rodney Palmer]

I'll say this in closing. Our great political leaders have on many occasions had to apologize for the institutional abuse of children in decades before, and they always say the same thing. They say, “Never again, not on my watch”. Well, it is happening again, and it's on your watch, and I hope that now that you know something you rise to your position and do what you're empowered to do to protect them.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Thank you very much, Mr. Palmer.

We'll now go to Dr. Muc.

[Dr. Anthony Martin Muc, Adjunct Lecturer, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Occupational and Environmental Health Unit, University of Toronto, As an Individual]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I don't want to take too much time. I think questions and answers are more relevant and I'm here to try to share my experience with you on these issues.

Just for the record, Ms. Pieterson mentioned the RED Act. I started my career in non-ionizing radiation with drafting regulations related to microwave ovens in the early 1970s under the RED Act. I've done research in the area ever since then. I moved on to the Ontario Ministry of Labour and worked there more broadly, in non-ionizing radiation in general, which covers the so-called range of “DC to Daylight”. I've participated in the standard-setting process and I agree with Dr. Prato about the validity of that process, the serious attempts made, and the absolute attention to every detail related to every aspect of the science of the day.

In the early days.... Just let me make one other point regarding SC 6. While I was with the Health and Welfare Canada of that day, I was personally the author of the seminal drafts of SC 6, and it has evolved significantly since those days, just as understanding of the possible effects of microwaves, radio frequency energy, and non-ionizing radiation in general has evolved over that time. Just as Ms. Pieterson said, all of the standards and guidelines--SC 6, ICNIRP, etc.--are under the same process of evolution as time goes on, developing with advances in scientific knowledge.

Scientific knowledge is not just associations. It's not just indications. A rooster crows in the morning and the sun rises. The rooster does not cause the sun to rise. Many associations are shown in many studies related to the possible effects of RF and microwave non-ionizing radiation in general. They do not become established effects until they meet sufficient criteria related to the whole process of reproducibility, development of mechanisms, and realistic models of how things occur.

The other issue that I think is important in the context of this sort of discussion is the perspective. What risks are we talking about? Are these risks relevant? Are they advantageous to us in terms of expending resources to control things that are hypothetical and to literally not control things that we know are very, very detrimental to us? To me, the glaring example of that is things like automobile fatalities. Children are at higher risk of death and dismemberment going back and forth from school than they are from Wi-Fi, for example. There are many issues like that in the environmental area. I think scientists try to bring perspective and rationality to these kinds of issues.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Thank you very much.

We'll now go on to our video conference. We have Dr. Blank and Curtis Bennett.

You will have five minutes for a presentation. I would like to have Curtis Bennett, president of Thermographix Consulting Corporation begin, please.

[Curtis Bennett, President, Thermographix Consulting Corporation]

I want to thank you very much for inviting me to testify at this committee.

I first want to tell the people in the room what my professional background is. I'm a government-trained provincial and national electrical professional, so I design magnetic fields for a living and install these applications for industry.

On top of that, I have a building engineering background. Really important in that as well is that I've built that education to complement a background in infrared technology, which allows us to see temperature beyond our visible spectrum. Now, that can't be overstated, because seeing temperature molecular levels has allowed us to do consulting for a multitude of industries in oil and gas. We are part of a team giving their professionals the ability to see beyond their visible spectrum.

It's really important for the committee to understand in regard to me being here that I've consulted on national security issues and on every part of industry. I lecture medical academia in the United States and Canada, where they get education credits they need for licensing. One of the things I educate on in medical academia is magnetic and electromagnetic interference with humans and what it means to interact with anything.

I'll give you an idea of how important this issue is. In the case of electromagnetic radiation, we just recently submitted information to Natural Resources showing that electromagnetic radiation from the sun was causing the excitation of buildings to generate heat close to boiling temperature.

What I also what to say about that is that I've actually imaged, for the medical community, the early detection of breast cancer. I've imaged cellphone radiation in arms, face, and ears without even understanding what I was looking at; nor could the patient see what was in front of me.

As an electrical professional, what I wanted to bring forward to this committee as well is the point that there's been an oversight in Safety Code 6, in that you didn't compare frequencies to frequencies. Children aren't inanimate objects sitting in a room. They are very intricate electrical systems, and in this application they are essentially bare conductors. Being a bare conductor means they're very susceptible to any electromagnetic fields.

Something I've done for industry--and I've done this for their insurers, for these guys, and for manufacturing or lumber industry at the same time--is to actually image this effect in an electrical application. I have imaged 60 hertz, a very low frequency interaction, with electrical components that would have caused failure in their operation, killed people, and shut down the whole process.

Now, that's 60 hertz. Compare that to these children who are functioning at low hertz, at 7.8 hertz, and now you're imposing 2.4 gigahertz, or 5 gigahertz on a 7 hertz signal. You're going to cause electromagnetic induction, which is going to produce heat. You're going to change the frequency and the electrical parameters of that child. Also, when you get into the higher radiations, all you're talking about is a bigger heating effect because you have more aggressive radiations with that.

Safety Code 6 says that what's “to be avoided is the unintentional stimulation” of tissue. Safety Code 6 says we're to avoid the heating effect. Because that oversight didn't include frequency to frequency and what this meant for biologic systems in this. Guess what's happening in schools? This is, in effect, causing the “unintentional stimulation” of tissue. This is causing a heating effect. When they talk about non-thermal issues, when you're talking about things in biologic tissue polarizing at high speeds, the fact that it produces a heat effect should be very disturbing to every professional. It's absolutely unnatural to have a mystery heating effect in an electrical application.

When I actually took this forward to Health Canada, to the radio frequency professionals, I got comments like “they're not electrical”, and that's the extent of it. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers said the same thing. They laughed when they heard there was a mysterious heat effect, but they didn't know cause. Causality and biological plausibility are that you have a frequency and an electrical conflict inducing electrical currents into those children--into everybody.

This is also dangerous out in industry, because this is causing our ecosystems and our atmosphere to polarize up to 10 billion times a second, at twice the frequencies, and if you take anything and ask it to change direction by 4.8 or 10 billion times a second, you're going to have some problems and produce heat.

I'm looking forward to answering any questions related to this. The work that I do has humbled me, but we're here to tell the truth related to all issues.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Thank you very much, Mr. Bennett.

Now we'll go to Dr. Blank, associate professor of physiology and cellular biophysics.

[Dr. Martin Blank, Associate Professor of physiology and cellular biophysics, Department of physiology and cellular biophysics, Columbia University]

Good morning. I am speaking from Victoria. I am a professor at Columbia University and I've spent a good deal of my life doing research.

I want to answer some of the questions that have come up from the speakers, but let me first give you the gist of my statement.

As a result of the research I do, I feel that I'm acting really as a translator for what cells would want to say if they spoke our language, because cells have a way of expressing what happens to them by the things they do.

One of the things we have found out and have published in peer-reviewed journals--and it has been shown by many other people as well--is that when there are electromagnetic signals in the air, the cells start to react as if there were a harmful stimulus around. They do this when there is an increase in temperature. They do this when there's a change in acidity. They do this when there are toxic ions around. Cells start to make stress proteins and the stress proteins are indicative of a potential harm.

Cells make stress proteins in the presence of radio frequency, EMF, in the environment. They do this even with a much weaker power line frequency. You can get this with 60 hertz as well as with 800 megahertz. This is a characteristic that goes up even into ionizing radiation. It's a characteristic which indicates first that the cells are saying they are hurting and they are going to do something to protect themselves. There's no question about this. This happens at a very low level. We've published thresholds for this kind of thing, and they are very low.

The other thing about the stress protein is that this is made across the spectrum. You find it in not only non-ionizing, but up into the ionizing range. You start getting stress proteins being generated on exposure to EMF.

The fact that this occurs over such a wide frequency range is characteristic of what engineers call a fractal antenna. A fractal antenna is unlike the antennas that we are used to. Many of you may remember that when TV first came in they used to have these bars on top of the roofs that would pick up these signals. You had a long bar and a much smaller bar on top. This was so that you could pick up different levels of signals. The length of the bar told you something about the frequency that it would respond to.

If you look at EMF, you see that it looks as if the DNA is picking up all kinds of frequencies; that is, frequencies that relate to all different lengths. If you look into the nucleus to see the structure of DNA, you see that DNA is actually made like a fractal antenna. There is a double helix that everyone is familiar with, but in order for this long six-foot piece of molecule, the DNA, to fit into the nucleus, which is about a micron and very much smaller, this thing is coiled and coiled. The helix is coiled and then that coil is coiled itself. This keeps on going many times over. This is a property that is characteristic of fractals and the fractal response to a variety of frequencies--a much broader range than a single frequency.

I am telling you that the DNA structure is telling you that this would respond to a great variety of frequencies. You not only have the worry that you're responding to radio frequency, but you're responding to power frequency and you're responding to all the other frequencies that are around. Cells would tell you this if they could speak. I am telling you this because I have studied them and I have found this to be so.

We have taken the DNA apart and found the pieces of DNA that actually respond to the EMF. At the very lowest level in the power frequency range, we can get a piece of DNA that responds to EMF and an adjacent piece of DNA that responds to a thermal stimulus. They are distinct and they can be isolated.

We have actually taken the DNA that responds to the EMF and transferred it to another piece of DNA, which we can turn on. We have shown that we can use this piece of DNA as an electromagnetic trigger. Columbia University owns the patent for this. It is an electromagnetic trigger based on the biology that we've been able to learn from studying the cells.

I thought I would take the last few minutes to make a few comments about the reaction to some of the comments that have been made before now.

In addition to what I said about being at Columbia University, I've been very active in politics. I've been a president of the Bioelectromagnetics Society, the Bioelectrochemical Society, and an officer in the Electrochemical Society, so my experience--

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Dr. Blank, excuse me. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but we don't have time for that. Your time is up, but here's what you can do. The committee is going to go into two rounds of questioning, so keep in mind the points you wanted to make. When they ask you a question, you do have time to answer that. You have seven minutes. This is just the initial presentation.

Thank you so much. That was very insightful.

We will now go into our first round of questions and answers. It's going to be seven minutes per Liberal, Bloc, NDP, and Conservative members.

We're going to begin with Dr. Duncan.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for coming.

It's not disputed that electromagnetic fields above certain levels can trigger biological effects in humans, and therefore exposures to these levels that might be harmful are restricted in Canada and internationally. I think the current debate centres on whether long-term low-level exposure can evoke negative influences on people's well-being.

You see differences between the WHO report and the 2007 “BioInitiative Report”. I'm wondering if you can explain the process of Safety Code 6 for me. How often does the group meet? What experts? Are conflicts of interest declared? What is reviewed? Is it peer-reviewed? Is it grey literature? How often is it reviewed?

Are you doing any research of your own? If you are, what are you measuring, please?

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Would you like to answer that first of all, Ms. Pieterson?

[Beth Pieterson]

I can start and then people can add.

Safety Code 6 was first developed in the late seventies. I think Dr. Muc has referred to that. It has been reviewed many times since then. Most importantly, in 1999 the Academy of Sciences was asked to review all of the literature and provide advice.

But Safety Code 6.... Most lately, it was reviewed and updated last fall and came out in 2009. But most importantly, we review the literature all the time. We don't decide that five years is up and it's time to review all the literature. Health Canada scientists review on an ongoing basis. We talked about papers being published yesterday. My scientists would be on that and reading it, and as soon as we find out anything that warrants the updating of Safety Code 6, it would be done.

I think that's what has to be remembered here. It's ongoing, keeping up on world literature. We look at the grey literature, but most importantly, we put most of the weight on peer-reviewed science literature and discussions with our international colleagues.

And we do some in-house research--you asked that question.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

I assume there's an expert panel that's reviewing this. Is that correct?

[Beth Pieterson]

The expert panel has not reviewed Safety Code 6.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Is there an ongoing process?

[Beth Pieterson]

There's an ongoing process to update and review. There's not a standing expert panel.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

There is not a standing expert panel, so this is in house. Health Canada's doing it. Is that right?

[Beth Pieterson]

Maybe Dr. Muc....

[Dr. Anthony Martin Muc]

If I may, just to try to expand on this issue, I said that when I started out I was involved in the standards and guidelines for microwave ovens. At that time, the standards and guidelines covered the frequency range from 10 megahertz to 100 megahertz, which at the time was like CB radios, and it included AM and FM and the lower frequency TV stations. That was all that there was any standard for at all.

Since that time, that range has expanded to the point where SC 6 now covers 3 kilohertz to 300 gigahertz. That's a hugely different range of frequencies. That's the kind of evolution that has happened over those four or five decades, and it is continuing to happen.

As time has developed, and as information developed about various frequency ranges, different studies and so on were taken into account to look at just how biological systems respond. These guidelines do reflect that and they will continue to reflect that. I have every confidence they will.