Quantitative criteria in the application of the principle of precaution

Full text: The Principle of Precaution establishes that 'when an activity represents a threat or damage for the human health or the environment, it is necessary to take measurements of precaution even when it could not have demonstrated the cause-effect relationship in a scientific and conclusive form'. This declaration implies acting even in presence of uncertainty, deriving the responsibility and the safety to who creates the risk, to analyze the possible alternatives and to use participate methods to take decisions. This presents practically two dilemmas: 1) How to perform a cost-benefit analysis when the relation cause-effect is not even established for the health of the exposed persons? (In case of ionizing radiations a factor α is in use, that represents the economic cost of the dose received by a person); 2) Which criterion must to be used in case of ionizing radiation act synergically with non ionizing radiation? How to integrate the quantitative optimization criterion with a qualitative criterion of precaution?. It will have to appear some temporary hypotheses in order to be able to perform the quantitative corresponding evaluations. In case of the low frequencies the situation was exactly the same in the past; but the epidemiological studies as well as the experiments in vivo and in vitro demonstrated that the exposure can increase the risk of leukaemia in children and induce other problems of health in children and adults. A temporary possible hypothesis for radio frequency is to assume that the effects are similar in magnitude to the ones caused for the fields of low frequency. In this case it is possible to demonstrate that if this was really like that the statistics would not allow to demonstrate it even due to the persons' quantity and the times used in the studied populations and the times of latency of the leukaemia. The use of some hypothesis of work to perform the cost - benefit studies allow us to establish different alternatives for the systems of communication: 1) To planning the cellular net and other infrastructures of telecommunications to reduce to the minimum the human exposure; 2) To establish criteria to limit the use of the mobile phones to groups of persons, especially the children and teenagers, to the as low as possible level. The precautionary approach must be used until much more detailed information on health effects becomes available and that is not without some cost. (author)