IN his letter about mobile phone masts, David Foss (August 10) takes a long time to get to what appear to be his main points; these being his clearly implied contention that Bury Council is putting the health of residents at risk by giving planning consent for masts for financial gain.

He is wrong on both counts.

There is no evidence of any effects on health from mobile phone masts and Bury Council has no financial incentive to grant permission for them. I should add that I would have been more impressed by Mr Foss's invocation of the "precautionary principle" if he had addressed the far bigger issue which unfortunately he and his fellow protesters consistently ignore - and which Professor Stewart mentioned in his report - which was to seek, as a precaution, to limit the use of mobile phones by young people.

Why, you might ask?

Because the simple fact is that the radiation intensity experienced by anyone using a hand-held mobile phone is thousands of times greater than the intensity of radiation they are ever likely to experience from a mobile phone mast.

Why is that so?

Because the nearest anyone is likely to get to a mobile phone mast is several metres whilst a phone is held at a distance of only a very few centimetres from the user's brain (the intensity of radiation decreases as the square of the distance from the source).

Why aren't more of the protesting parents stopping their children from acquiring and using mobile phones? I suggest three possible explanations.

One is that it would be very hard to stop their youngsters using what is now virtually an indispensable accessory of modern youth culture. Two is that they neither see any noticeable ill-effects in their own children, nor hear of any in other people's children. Three - it is a lot easier to slag-off the council instead.

A final thought. Just suppose that Bury Council had been able to turn down all applications for mobile phone masts in Bury and make the decisions stick. Would the council have been congratulated by the majority of Bury residents who would then have been unable to use their mobile phones in the borough?

COUN DEREK BODEN