HHS-OASH-2026-0397-0593
https://www.regulations.gov/comment/HHS-OASH-2026-0397-0593

Comment submitted in response to Docket No. HHS-OASH-2026-0397
 Request for Information on Electromagnetic Fields (EMFs), Radiofrequency (RF) Radiation, and Wireless Radiation Exposure
Category: Public Experiences and Reported Potential Health Effects (with relevance also to Categories 2–4)
I am submitting this comment as a private individual residing in Naha City, Okinawa, Japan. I am not a scientist or physician. I am submitting this as a firsthand, timestamped case record, because the domestic health and administrative authorities in my own country have declined to investigate it, and because this RFI explicitly requests real-world clustering data of the kind described below.
1. The core factual record
On August 4, 2021, I experienced a left-hemisphere hemorrhagic stroke while at my workplace, an office building belonging to a regional electric utility company in a dense commercial and administrative district of central Naha City, Okinawa.
Three months earlier, on May 9, 2021, a female coworker of the same age, working in the same building, suffered a stroke and subsequently left her position.
I want to state this timeline as precisely as possible: my hemorrhage occurred before I received any COVID-19 mRNA vaccine dose. I received my first dose during hospitalization, after the hemorrhage had already occurred. This sequence removes vaccination as a possible cause of the initial event and isolates it as a pre-vaccination, environmentally-exposed case — which I believe gives it particular evidentiary value for isolating non-vaccine environmental factors, including RF/EMF exposure.
To summarize the cluster:
Same workplace (a single office building)
Same calendar year (2021)
Same age cohort (both employees born around 1972)
Two cerebrovascular events, three months apart (May and August 2021)
2. The infrastructure context
The district in which this workplace is located underwent a concentrated buildout of 5G small-cell and telecommunications infrastructure during 2020–2021. A major regional telecommunications/data-center facility was completed in the immediate vicinity in November 2021, and I understand from published construction timelines that test transmissions from that facility likely occurred during the summer and fall of 2021 — a period overlapping with both cerebrovascular events described above.
I want to be transparent about the limits of my own documentation: I have not been able to obtain conclusive public records confirming the exact installation date of any small-cell antenna on my own workplace building. I state this as an open, unresolved question — not as a settled fact.
3. Why I am submitting this
I am not asking HHS to conclude that RF/EMF exposure caused these two cases. I am submitting this record because:
It is precisely the kind of "public experience" and "workplace cluster" data this RFI's Category 1 explicitly invites.
It is, to my knowledge, a comparatively rare pre-vaccination case — meaning it may be useful as a data point for isolating environmental (non-vaccine) contributing factors in cerebrovascular events.
No domestic institution in Japan — municipal, prefectural, or national — has been willing to examine or record this cluster. I am placing it into this federal public record because I believe a factual account, however small, should exist somewhere on the public record rather than nowhere at all.
4. Specific points relevant to the RFI's other categories
Exposure standards (Category 2): I would respectfully urge that any revised framework consider occupational and workplace RF exposure in dense commercial office environments — not only residential or personal-device exposure — as a distinct exposure category worth separate evaluation.
Surveillance (Category 3): I would suggest that same-workplace, same-timeframe clustering of cerebrovascular or neurological events be considered a surveillance signal worth systematic, structured tracking — similar to how occupational disease clusters are tracked in other contexts — rather than being dismissed case-by-case as coincidence.
Existing evidence (Category 4): Current exposure standards based solely on short-term thermal effects (SAR) do not, to my understanding, address the kind of chronic, non-thermal, clustered occupational exposure described in this case.
I thank HHS for opening this process to public and international input, and I hope this record is useful in identifying the research gaps this RFI seeks to find.
Respectfully submitted,
 NOBUO TAIRA
 Naha City, Okinawa, Japan