Thank you very much.
I want to thank everybody for their presentations and I want to apologize for being late. There's some stuff going on and I'm being called to the telephone on emergency calls during this time, so I was late for listening to what you had to say.
I was reading the presentation from Ms. Krogh and Beth Harrington; and I heard some of what you had to say, Ms. Nicol.
The bottom line really is that we know there is not conclusive evidence linking cause and effect. We know, however, there is an upgrading to a possible carcinogen by the World Health Organization.
We have had people telling us about linkages that may not have the causality piece in it, but make us want to stop and think. I think that for me the question is simply this. We should have learned lessons from cigarettes. We should have learned lessons from acid rain. We should have learned lessons from thalidomide. The question about thalidomide is a good one. In every case, as far as I'm concerned—this is a health committee—the ability to look at risk management, i.e., weigh up the benefit versus the risk, is always at the foremost of whatever you do, and you mentioned that as well.
When we're talking about human health, we have historical experiences of how we went ahead and we allowed things to happen, and we are now trying to deal with the fallout of it in terms of cigarettes. How many people have died from cardiovascular disease? It's not just lung cancer, but from COPD, emphysema. How many people have been severely maimed through thalidomide when at that time it was just one person's gut feeling in the United States that said, “Let's not do this”? Then eventually we saw that it was right.
The bottom line for me is simply this. The precautionary principle is extremely important. My mother, who was neither a scientist nor a researcher or anything like that, used to always say that a pound of prevention is worth an ounce of cure. In other words, if you prevent things, then you will actually prevent the fallout. When we talk about human health, especially in this particular instance, I just think we need to err on the side of precaution.
You had suggested, Ms. Krogh, that we look at some things that are happening in California, which is in the brochures here that help people to know, to be warned—some kind of warning, a caveat emptor kind of thing—and then what you can do to minimize your use.
We had lots of people tell us that looking at just the thermal effects was only looking at a certain sector of the community that uses electromagnetic energy. We're not talking about thermal effects. We're talking about other kinds of effects.
My question is simply this. Would you recommend, all of you, that we work with industry to develop some sort of brochure or whatever to tell people there may be linkages? Because you do that on labelling. This may cause a problem, please be careful when you're using it. People do it to protect themselves. Companies do it all the time. Then we could also talk to people about how you unplug the baby monitors, just simple little precautionary measures.
That is something I would like to see happen. I would also like to hear what you think about that, and what you think about Health Canada working with groups like you who were not part of this panel. You are researchers and people who are actually out there in the field who might be able to help look at a reasonable way of telling people that this could cause problems and here's how they might use it more carefully down the road, and help deal with industry to look at how they can minimize the amount of radiation emitted when people use their products. We see that Europe does it. We saw some actual examples here of what is happening in Europe with regard to cordless phones and what's happening with regard to child monitors.
I just wondered if any of you had any comment on how we could do that without causing a panic and going, “Oh, my God, this is going to harm you,” but do that sort of precautionary use.