We are often asked to attend public meetings to describe our evaluations of exposure conditions near new or upgraded wireless telecommunications base stations. And one of the assertions we often hear at such meetings is that exposure standards outside the US are much tighter than what the FCC adopted; that assertion appears to be incorrect.
According to the World Health Organization, most of the countries that have standards have followed the ICNIRP Standard, very similar to that in the US. Developed by the International Committee on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection, this standard was last revised in 1998 and is based on the same whole-body average specific absorption rate (SAR) limit of 0.08 watts per kilogram as are the science-based standards in the US (last updated in 2006) and in Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia.
Here are European countries that also have adopted ICNIRP or some equivalent variant:
Austria
Greece
Portugal
Croatia
Hungary
Romania
Czech Republic
Ireland
Slovakia
Finland
Malta
Spain
France
Netherlands
Sweden
Germany
Norway
United Kingdom
There are other countries with tighter standards, including these seven whose standards are as much as 2 to 20 times tighter:
Belgium
Israel
Poland
Bulgaria
Italy
Russia
China
Luxembourg
Turkey
They are basing their standards on the same basic findings from scientific research, choosing to apply a larger safety factor instead of the 50 times factor more commonly applied.
That’s not to say that certain localities in these countries, or other countries like Switzerland, haven’t adopted their own siting restrictions, sometimes identifying certain land uses, such as schools, where tighter limits apply. But the major Western nations have, in fact, adopted standards comparable to the standard in the US.