We used to do a better job of it.
I have taught a little bit of epidemiology, and one of my favourite things to do at one point was to tell people to go to NRCan's atlas, the Public Health Agency of Canada's website, and there are a few other sites. They used to have a really good website for toxic sites in Canada, through the Government of Canada. All of those have been severely degraded. The atlas is gone.
The data collection for cancers is usually done by the Canadian Cancer Society and StatsCan, but it's very, very crude data that they're bringing together. For instance, you can find data since 1992 on brain tumours and central nervous system, but you can't find glioma or something like that. Hardell could do his studies because in Sweden they were collecting very specific data, and they've been collecting it for ages.
Even though we are now starting up some kind of brain tumour registry, we won't have that data from 1990 to detect a change, until we've had time for a change to happen, so we'll be kind of mid-stream. Why that is happening, I don't know. We need a lot more evidence.
One other concern with radio frequencies is that they affect membranes. Environmental contaminants like lead, or other things that go through membranes and have their toxic effects, may be magnified in the presence of the radio frequencies that are compromising the integrity of the cell membrane. That's a concern that's been brought forward repeatedly, and it's an open research question. There is some preliminary evidence in children that that actually is happening with lead. But, once again, it's not well established; that's one study.
However, we certainly do need to be collecting environmental data, the data in schools, and we need to have much, much better public health data, not only for cancers, but for other conditions as well. That quality has gone way downhill in the last five years.