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January 2006
In 2002, Gro Harlem Brundtland, then head of the World Health Organization, told a Norwegian journalist that cell phones were banned from her office in Geneva because she personally becomes ill if a cell phone is brought within about four meters (13 feet) of her. Mrs. Brundtland is a medical doctor and former Prime Minister of Norway. This sensational news, published March 9, 2002 in Dagbladet, was ignored by every other newspaper in the world.
The following week Michael Repacholi,
her subordinate in charge of the International EMF (electromagnetic
field) Project, responded with a public statement belittling his
boss’s concerns. Five months later, for reasons that many suspect
were related to these circumstances, Mrs. Brundtland announced she
would step down from her leadership post at the WHO after just one
term.
Caller A, worried, commonly asks what
kind of shield to buy for his cell phone or what kind of headset to
wear with it. Sometimes he wants to know what is a safe distance to
live from a cell tower. Caller B, sick, wants to know what kind of
shielding to put on her house, what kind of medical treatment to
get, or, increasingly often, what part of the country she could move
to escape the radiation to save her life.
Most Wi-Fi systems and some cordless
phones operate at the exact same frequency as a microwave oven,
while other devices use a different frequency. Wi-Fi is always on
and always radiating. The base units of most cordless phones are
always radiating, even when no one is using the phone. A cell phone
that is on but not in use is also radiating. And, needless to say,
cell towers are always radiating.
Scientists usually divide the
electromagnetic spectrum into “ionizing” and “non-ionizing.”
Ionizing radiation, which includes x-rays and atomic radiation,
causes cancer. Non-ionizing radiation, which includes microwave
radiation, is supposed to be safe. This distinction always reminded
me of the propaganda in George Orwell’s Animal Farm: “Four legs
good, two legs bad.” “Non-ionizing good, ionizing bad” is as little
to be trusted.
An increasing number of scientists
speculate that our own cells, in fact, use the microwave spectrum to
communicate with one another, like children whispering in the dark,
and that cell phones, like jackhammers, interfere with their
signaling. In any case, it is a fact that we are all being
bombarded, day in and day out, whether we use a cell phone or not,
by an amount of microwave radiation that is some ten million times
as strong as the average natural background. And it is also a fact
that most of this radiation is due to technology that has been
developed since the 1970s.
And there are no sensory nerve endings
in the brain to warn you of a rise in temperature because we did not
evolve with microwave radiation, and this never happens in nature.
Worse, the structure of the head and brain is so complex and
non-uniform that “hot spots” are produced, where heating can be tens
or hundreds of times what it is nearby. Hot spots can occur both
close to the surface of the skull and deep within the brain, and
also on a molecular level.
One problem, however, is the arbitrary assumption, upon which the FCC’s regulations are based, that the brain can safely dissipate added heat at a rate of up to 1 degree C per hour. Compounding this is the scandalous procedure used to demonstrate compliance with these limits and give each cell phone its SAR rating.
The standard way to measure SAR is on a
“phantom” consisting, incredibly, of a homogenous fluid encased in
Plexiglas in the shape of a head. Presto, no hot spots! But in
reality, people who use cell phones for hours per day are
chronically heating places in their brain. The FCC’s safety
standard, by the way, was developed by electrical engineers, not
doctors.
Albumin is a protein that is a normal
component of blood but that does not normally cross the blood-brain
barrier. The presence of albumin in brain tissue is always a sign
that blood vessels have been damaged and that the brain has lost
some of its protection.
A one-time exposure to an ordinary cell phone for just two minutes causes albumin to leak into the brain. In one set of experiments, reducing the exposure level by a factor of 1,000 actually increased the damage to the blood-brain barrier, showing that this is not a dose-response effect and that reducing the power will not make wireless technology safer.
And finally, in research published in June 2003, a single two-hour exposure to a cell phone, just once during its lifetime, permanently damaged the blood-brain barrier and, on autopsy 50 days later, was found to have damaged or destroyed up to 2 percent of an animal’s brain cells, including cells in areas of the brain concerned with learning, memory and movement.1
Reducing the exposure level by a factor
of 10 or 100, thereby duplicating the effect of wearing a headset,
moving a cell phone further from your body, or standing next to
somebody else’s phone, did not appreciably change the results! Even
at the lowest exposure, half the animals had a moderate to high
number of damaged neurons.
Diseases that have increased remarkably in the last couple of decades, and that there is good reason to connect with the massive increase in radiation in our environment, include
Radiation from microwave towers has also
been associated with forest die-off, reproductive failure and
population decline in many species of birds, and ill health and
birth deformities in farm animals. The literature showing biological
effects of microwave radiation is truly enormous, running to tens of
thousands of documents, and I am amazed that industry spokespersons
are getting away with saying that wireless technology has been
proved safe or — just as ridiculous — that there is no evidence of
harm.
The Soviets named it, appropriately,
radio wave sickness, and studied it extensively. In the West its
existence was denied totally, but workers came down with it anyway.
Witness congressional hearings held in 1981, chaired by then
Representative Al Gore, on the health effects of radio-frequency
heaters and sealers, another episode in “See, we are doing something
about this,” while nothing is done.
You may recognize some of its common symptoms:
Patients may also develop medical problems such as:
What makes this disease so difficult to accept, and even more difficult to cope with, is that no treatment is likely to succeed unless one can also avoid exposure to its cause — and its cause is now everywhere. A 1998 survey by the California Department of Health Services indicated that at that time 120,000 Californians — and by implication 1 million Americans — were unable to work due to electromagnetic pollution.4
The ranks of these so-called electrically sensitive are swelling in almost every country in the world, marginalized, stigmatized and ignored. With the level of radiation everywhere today, they almost never recover and sometimes take their own lives.
A neuroscientist at the famous Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Dr. Johansson heads a research team that is documenting a significant and permanent worsening of the public health that began precisely when the second-generation, 1800 MHz cell phones were introduced into Sweden in late 1997.5, 6 After a decade-long decline, the number of Swedish workers on sick leave began to rise in late 1997 and more than doubled during the next five years.
During the same period of time, sales of antidepressant drugs also doubled. The number of traffic accidents, after declining for years, began to climb again in 1997. The number of deaths from Alzheimer’s disease, after declining for several years, rose sharply in 1999 and had nearly doubled by 2001.
This two-year delay is understandable
when one considers that Alzheimer’s disease requires some time to
develop.
They found, in the United States, Sweden and dozens of other countries, that mortality rates for skin melanoma and for bladder, prostate, colon, breast and lung cancers closely paralleled the degree of public exposure to radio waves during the past hundred years.
When radio broadcasting increased in a
given location, so did those forms of cancer; when it decreased, so
did those forms of cancer. And, a sensational finding: country by
country — and county by county in Sweden — they found,
statistically, that exposure to radio waves appears to be as big a
factor in causing lung cancer as cigarette smoking!
Radar facilities and emergency
communication networks are also proliferating out of control. Since
1978, when the Environmental Protection Agency last surveyed the
radio frequency environment in the United States, the average urban
dweller’s exposure to radio waves has increased 1,000-fold, most of
this increase occurring in just the last nine years.8 In the same
period of time, radio pollution has spread from the cities to rest
like a ubiquitous fog over the entire planet.
Unlike victims of hurricanes and
earthquakes, we are not the subject of any relief efforts. No one is
donating money to help us, to buy us a protected refuge; no one is
volunteering to forego their cell phones, their wireless computers
and their cordless phones so that we can once more be their
neighbors and live among them.
To answer caller A:
To caller B:
Yes, radiation comes down from satellites, too; they are part of the
problem, not the solution. There is simply no way to make wireless
technology safe.
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