Vatican Radio lawsuit

The Vatican Radio lawsuit was started by the Regional Health Department for "Throwing of dangerous things" on the Italian ground at their antenna site.

The Santa Maria di Galeria transmitter site is the subject of a dispute between the station and some local residents who claim the non-ionising radiation from the site has affected their health.[1] However these claims are not accepted by the station. The only peer reviewed study of these statistics did find a statisticly higher incidence of leuchemia within 6 km of the transmitter site, stated that no causal implication can be drawn.[2] Every time it has been sued, the station showed the 'Lateran Treaty', bilateral agreements signed by the Holy See and Benito Mussolini which exempt it from Italian Law. (The area around the antennas at the time it was built was not heavily populated).

Vatican Radio covers an area of Rome, as set by the 'extraterritorial right' in Italian law. Within this area, the radio station has pylons some higher than 100 meters (330 feet). These transmitters have been in place since 1957. Since this part of Rome is not under Italian jurisdiction, these transmitters are not subject to the Italian laws that limit the radiation that a radio station can emit. In the vicinity of these pylons, the radiation emitted can be more than the double the amount allowed by Italian law, as verified officially by the Italian Civil Defense and the Department for the Environment of the region of Lazio. However, these levels compare with those allowed in other countries and are frequency dependent.

Residents who have moved to the area near the transmitters have experienced other disturbances relating to the station, as is common near transmitter sites the world over. The most common complaints are that one can hear the transmissions breaking through on telephones, and other electronic devices (due in many cases to the devices having poor electromagnetic immunity to the strong signals). The Region of Lazio has also found that the people in the area around the transmitters are more likely to have leukemia; the closer those in the examined sample lived to the radio station, the more likely they were to have leukemia, up to six times the Italian national average.[3] This study was not peer reviewed.

Dramatizing the study, a well known Italian TV program called Le Iene went to the radio station and replaced the radio's insignia with a new one stating 'Radio Erode' meaning 'Herod's Radio', referring to Herod the Great and the Massacre of the Innocents, since the study showed that the most affected people are children 0 to 14 years old.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Vatican Radio officials charged - in case concerning the electromagnetic force of radio transmitters - Brief Article from BNET
  2. ↑ http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/155/12/1096.full
  3. ↑ (Agenzia di Sanità Pubblica - Regione Lazio - March 2001)
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