Comprehensive personal RF-EMF exposure map and its potential use in epidemiological studies.

Abstract

In recent years, numerous epidemiological studies, which deal with the potential effects of mobile phone antennas on health, have almost exclusively focused on their distance to mobile phone base stations. Although it is known that this is not the best approach to the problem, this situation occurs due to the numerous difficulties when determining the personal exposure to the radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF). However, due to the rise of personal exposimeters, the evolution of spatial statistics, the development of geographical information systems and the use of powerful software, new alternatives are available to deal with these epidemiological studies and thus overcome the aforementioned difficulties. Using these tools, this paper presents a lattice map of personal RF-EMF exposure from exterior mobile phone base stations, covering the entire 110 administrative regions in the city of Albacete (Spain). For this purpose, we used a personal exposimeter, Satimo EME Spy 140 model, performing measurements every 4s The exposimeter was located inside the plastic basket of a bicycle, whose versatility permitted the access to all the zones of the city. Once the exposure map was prepared, its relation with the known antenna locations was studied. The 64 mobile telephone antennas of the city were also georeferenced; the randomness of both variables (exposure and antennas) were studied by means of the Moran's I test. Results showed that the distribution of the antennas follows a grouped pattern (p<0.001), while the distribution of the average exposure values have a random distribution (p=0.618). In addition, we showed two Spearman correlation studies: the first between the average exposure values and the number of mobile telephone antennas per administrative region, and the second, also considering the antennas of the neighbouring regions. No substantial correlation was detected in either of the two cases. This study also reveals the weaknesses of the epidemiological studies, which only take into account the distance to the antennas, which would provide a new approach to the problem. By precisely knowing the resident population of each administrative region of the city, this proves to be highly useful to rely on a prepared aggregate data map based on the mean exposure values to RF-EMF in these sections. The displayed map would permit the execution of more accurate epidemiological studies, since it would be possible to compare the exposure measurements with the incidence data of a disease.