Who are IGNIR?
The International Guidelines on Non-Ionising Radiation (IGNIR) appeared in 2018. Their website says the parent organization was established at a public meeting in the UK in 2017, but gives no indication of who is behind it, funding, the process by which the limits were established, etc. The website also says the aim is to "help achieve substantial reduction in EM exposure", which suggests the organization and the guidelines may not be purely scientific. We include the limits here because they are published exposure limits and we try to be as inclusive as we can. But we stress that this group has no official status that we know of. Certainly, these limits do not apply in the UK (which follows European recommendations which in turn ultimately derive from the International Commission on Non-Ionizing radiation Protection - see more details of exposure limits in the UK).
What are the limits?
We give here just the limits for the ELF frequency range (defined by them as 15 Hz - 3000 Hz). IGNIR also give limits for RF and VLF and say that you have to meet all these limits to be "certified" as meeting the guidelines.
They say the limits apply in the "utilization zone" - roughly speaking, where people could spend 4 hours per day.
| Field | Type of reading | D Day | N Night | S Sensitive |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Electric V/m | average | 10 | 3 | 1 |
| Magnetic μT | average | 0.3 | 0.1 | 0.03 |
| maximum | 1 | 0.3 | 0.1 |
The "sensitive" limits apply to children, the elderly, pregnant women, the ill, and people with hypersensitivity.
What is the basis for these limits?
Neither the website nor the Guidelines document downloaded from it give any details of the scientific basis for deriving these limits, which are much lower than those published by authoritative scientific bodies such as ICNIRP or ICES.
They appear to have been derived (with changes) from a 2016 publication by an organization called the European Academy for Environmental Medicine, EUROPAEM. That document, in turn, does not give a precise account of how its recommended levels were derived from the scientific literature.