I would like to begin by thanking the Committee for giving me the opportunity to make a few comments with regard to frequencies.
Our program at the University of Ottawa focuses on potential health risk issues associated with radio frequency fields, including those from wireless telecommunications devices. These would be mobile phones, base station transmitters, and other sources of exposure to radio frequency fields.
We've been working in this area for more than a decade. One of our major contributions is that we maintain a comprehensive website--www.rfcom.ca, if you're interested in checking us out--that summarizes the world's literature on potential health risk issues associated with radio frequency fields.
We also are participants in the ongoing World Health Organization study of potential cancer risks associated with mobile phone use. This is an area that is of concern to many members of the public, and it's an area that's not well understood. It will be the largest study of its kind ever undertaken. It has been under way for almost 10 years now. It involves 13 countries, 5,000 cancer cases, and 10,000 other participants. We have about 60 investigators working on the interpretation of those results. We expect those results to be available some time in the middle of 2007. This will be a very important contribution, perhaps the single most important contribution, to the literature on potential health issues surrounding mobile phone use.
I also participated a number of years ago as chair of the Royal Society of Canada's panel on potential health risks of radio frequency fields. The panel did an exhaustive review of the literature. It reviewed more than 1,000 scientific articles. At that time, in 1999, we reached the conclusion that there were no clear adverse health effects associated with radio frequency fields. There were some biological effects of no known clinical significance, which did require clarification. We recommended additional research be done, and part of that was a large-scale epidemiologic study of the type that the World Health Organization is currently undertaking. We do periodic updates of the literature on the Royal Society's original report, and we continue to work in that area.
That's an overview of the program. We like to serve as a resource for industry, for government, and the public. We have involvement with virtually all those sectors in terms of providing health advice on radio frequency field risk issues.
Thank you.