President´s letter

The social alarm generated by any health-related issue or question has led, in the majority of European countries, to the creation of benchmark institutions or committees which take on the task of advising and providing scientific rationality to the debate. This function has been entrusted to ad hoc agencies or it has been integrated into the agendas of agencies or organisms with general government assessment mandates in technical or health issues.

There was no institution, organism or agency of these characteristics in Spain until the Fundación General of the Complutense University of Madrid took the step of collaborating in the task of evaluating the effects of electromagnetic fields and created the Scientific Advisory Committee on Radio Frequencies and Health (CCARS) in July 2005.

The Committee was set up as an independent institution, comprised of acknowledged experts in Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Biology and other related disciplines, with the mission of providing objective judgement, information and scientific and technical assessment to public administrations and to society as a whole in debates that might arise regarding questions concerning radio frequencies and health.

The CCARS is a multidisciplinary committee which represents the areas of expertise that help to form a scientific consensus on the nature of radio frequencies and their biological effects, experts in those fields of biology and medicine that are more closely related to the possible effects of radio frequencies in addition to analysing and understanding these social movements.

The members of the Committee are experienced and professionally acknowledged in their respective disciplines and, as a whole, the CCARS is characterised by:

• Its independence of the administrations directly involved;
• its observance of the criteria of scientific excellence expected of the leading universities in the country;
• the multidisciplinarity of its make-up;
• it represents the universities from all parts of Spain
• the excellence of its members’ curricula.

Emilio Muñoz Ruiz

President

CCARS