Section 704 / TCA

This comment answers HHS RFI questions 2–18 for docket HHS-OASH-2026-0397. The full numbered response is attached. I am filing as a concerned member of the public. Please see the attachment for sources (NTP TR-595, Ramazzini 2018, IARC Monograph 102, EHT v. FCC 2021, Public Law 90-602, and Section 704 of the TCA).

Docket No. HHS-OASH-2026-0397 To Whom It May Concern; My full comment is attached as a PDF. This note summarizes it. I am a retired paramedic and firefighter with over thirty years of service. I worked in fire stations that had commercial wireless antenna arrays mounted on the building. I am not reporting an adverse health effect and I have no diagnosis to attribute to that exposure. What I am submitting is an exposure characterization and a research gap. Career fire service personnel do not visit the station, they live in it. They sleep there, in a fixed location, for twenty-four and forty-eight hour shifts, across careers measured in decades. Where a commercial base station sits on that building, the result is a continuous, fixed-geometry, decades-long exposure to a population that occupies the structure far more hours per year than an ordinary workplace and is unconscious for a large share of them. They fall under the general public exposure limit, which was built around a public assumed to be passing through. Under Section 704 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 their employer is barred from declining the installation on health grounds. In August 2004 the International Association of Fire Fighters adopted Resolution No. 15, asking the federal government for a study "with the highest scientific merit and integrity" contrasting firefighters housed in stations with towers against firefighters without that exposure. It committed the organization to set policy in accordance with whatever the study found. The study was never funded and no federal agency has conducted it. I held elected office in that organization on both sides of that date, and no study came. The federal fire service assessment answering that request, the U.S. Fire Administration's 2008 Executive Fire Officer paper, rests on an evidence base that predates the IARC Group 2B classification of 2011, the National Toxicology Program's finding of clear evidence of carcinogenic activity in 2018, the Ramazzini Institute's independent base-station-model replication in 2018, and the D.C. Circuit's 2021 holding in Environmental Health Trust v. FCC that the Commission failed to justify retaining its 1996 exposure limits. It has not been revisited in eighteen years. I am asking the Department to fund and conduct that cohort study, to characterize aggregate occupational RF dose across the fire and EMS environment, to assess the ambulance patient compartment as an RF environment with attention to implanted cardiac devices, and to recommend mandatory pre-activation and post-activation RF survey with disclosure to the personnel assigned to those buildings. The attached comment answers Questions 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 12, 15, 16 and 17, with citations. Thank you for the opportunity to comment. Michael T. Wilson Carson City, Nevada Retired Paramedic and Firefighter

The FCC RF safety guidelines should be updated to protect the public's health and safety as well as prevent the real potential for privacy infringement and sabotage of our nation's electricity and communications' grid. The current safety guidelines are based on inappropriate (thermal) data prior to 1996, before the explosion of wireless technology. It is unfathomable to me that our government has let slide these inaccurate/outdated guidelines from 1996, including the edict that communities could not use environmental or health harm to fight placement in our neighborhods. To me this is proof that the telecommunications industry knew back then of the harm this technology could cause. This law has been used to ignore information of harm, forcing neighborhoods to accept anytime/anywhere placement of increasingly powerful/harmful cell towers. We were promised wired fiber optic and, instead, were baited & then switched to wireless. I support HHS taking an active role in examining the potential health and environmental effects of wireless radiation. Questions about human health and environmental impact should be addressed by federal agencies with appropriate (non-industry, independent) expertise in medicine, biology, epidemiology, and public health, and the experiences of individuals and families who report being affected should be considered alongside the scientific evidence. I urge HHS to carefully evaluate these experiences and the scientific evidence, identify gaps in current research, give particular attention to children and other potentially vulnerable populations, and establish appropriate federal research priorities regarding wireless radiation and public health. I am responding from the perspective of a [patient, parent, family member, caregiver, healthcare professional, researcher, advocate, concerned member of the public, or other]. I support HHS taking an active role in examining the potential health and environmental effects of wireless radiation. Questions about human health should be addressed by federal agencies with appropriate expertise in medicine, biology, epidemiology, and public health, and the experiences of individuals and families who report being affected should be considered alongside the scientific evidence. I urge HHS to carefully evaluate these experiences and the scientific evidence, identify gaps in current research, give particular attention to children and other potentially vulnerable populations, and establish appropriate federal research priorities regarding wireless radiation and public health. Thank you for providing individuals and families with an opportunity to be heard.