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from Buergerwelle Website
Abstract
The alternating fields generate alternating electric currents that flow through cells and tissues. This removes structurally-important calcium ions from cell membranes, which then makes them leak. Electromagnetically treated water (as generated by electronic water conditioners used to remove lime scale from plumbing) has similar effects, implying that the effects of the fields can also be carried in the bloodstream.
Virtually all of the non-thermal effects of electromagnetic radiation can be accounted for by the leakage of cell membranes.
Most of them involve the inward leakage of free calcium ions down an enormous electrochemical gradient to affect calcium-sensitive enzyme systems. This is the normal mechanism by which cells sense mechanical membrane damage. They normally respond by triggering mechanisms that stimulate growth and repair, including the MAP-kinase cascades, which amplify the signal.
If the damage is not too severe or prolonged, we see a stimulation of growth and the effect seems beneficial, but if the exposure is prolonged, these mechanisms are overcome and the result is ultimately harmful. This phenomenon occurs with both ionizing and non-ionizing radiation and is called radiation hormesis.
Gland cells are a good example of this, since short term exposures stimulate their activity but long term exposures cause visible damage and a loss of function.
Damage to the thyroid gland from living within 100 meters of a cell phone base station caused hypothyroidism and may be partially responsible for our current outbreak of obesity and chronic fatigue. Secondary effects of obesity include diabetes, gangrene, cardiac problems, renal failure and cancer.
Cell phone base station radiation also affects the adrenal glands and stimulates the production of adrenalin and cortisol.
Excess adrenalin causes headaches,
cardiac arrhythmia, high blood pressure, tremors and an inability to
sleep, all of which have been reported by people living close to
base stations. The production of cortisol weakens the immune system
and could make people living near base stations more susceptible to
disease and cancer.
When this happens in the brains of unborn babies and young children, it reduces their ability to concentrate on learning social skills and can cause autism. Leakage of the cells of the peripheral nervous system in adults makes them send false signals to the brain, which results in the symptoms of electromagnetic intolerance (aka electromagnetic hypersensitivity).
Some forms of electromagnetic
intolerance may be due to cell phone damage to the parathyroid
gland, which controls the calcium level in the blood and make cell
membranes more inclined to leak. Further exposure could the tip them
over the edge into full symptoms of electromagnetic intolerance.
The effects of cell phone and WiFi
radiation have also been determined experimentally using ejaculated
semen. The results showed the production of ROS, and a loss of sperm
quality and, in some cases DNA fragmentation.
The opening of the blood-brain barrier has been shown to cause the death of neurons and can be expected to result in early dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
The opening of the barrier in our
respiratory epithelia by electromagnetic fields has been shown to
increase the risk of asthma in children. The opening of other
barriers, such as the gut barrier allows foreign materials from the
gut to enter the bloodstream, which may also promote allergies and
has been linked autoimmune diseases.
Mitochondrial membranes use the flow of
hydrogen ions to couple the oxidation of food to the production of
ATP. The outer cell membrane uses the flow of sodium ions to couple
the ATP produced to the uptake of nutrients. If either of these
leak, or are permanently damaged, both of these processes will be
compromised leading to a loss of available energy, which some people
believe to be a contributory factor to chronic fatigue syndrome.
This means that there is no simple
dose-response curve, which many people find confusing, but a
plausible theoretical model is described. The mechanism also
explains the resonance effects that make certain frequencies
especially 16Hz particularly effective.
However, all of this is expensive in energy and resources and leads to a loss of cellular efficiency.
If the exposure to the radiation is
prolonged or frequently repeated, any stimulation of growth caused
by the initial ingress of calcium runs out of resources and growth
and repair becomes inhibited. If the repairs fail, the cell may die
or become permanently damaged.
It is unfortunate that virtually all
digital mobile telecommunications systems use pulses within this
range. The Industry clearly did not do its homework before letting
these technologies loose on the general public and this omission may
already have cost many lives.
The only DECT phones that are even remotely acceptable are those that automatically switch off the base station between calls; e.g. the Siemens Gigaset C595 operating in Eco Plus mode.
If you are highly electromagnetically
intolerant, you may need to screen your home or at the very least
your bed from incoming microwave radiation and sleep as far away as
possible from known sources of ELF.
They include an increased risk of,
The power and cell phone companies, hoping to avoid litigation, assert that because the energy of the fields is too low to give significant heating, they cannot have any biological effect.
However, the evidence that alternating electromagnetic fields can have non-thermal biological effects is now overwhelming (see here and here.)
The explanation is that it is not a
heating effect, but an electrical effect on the fine structure of
the delicate electrically-charged cell membranes upon which all
living cells depend.
These can interfere with the normal direct currents and voltages that cells use extensively to make their sensory cells work and are also essential for the metabolism of all cells. Virtually every living cell is a seething mass of electric currents and electrical and biochemical amplifiers that are essential for their normal function.
Some have tremendous amplifying
capacity; e.g. it is claimed that a dark adapted human eye can
detect a single photon (the smallest possible unit of light) and the
human ear can hear sounds with energies as low as a billionth of a
watt. We should therefore not be too surprised to find that our
cells can detect and respond to electromagnetic fields that are
orders of magnitude below the strength needed to generate
significant heat.
I will explain the scientific evidence leading to this conclusion and also how we can put matters right but still keep on using cell phones and other wireless communications. I have included key references that should enable the more inquisitive reader to delve deeper.
In many cases, you should be able to
find the abstract of the paper in question by copying into Google
its entry in the list of references.
There are many reasons for this, including differences in the genetic make-up, physiological condition and the history of the test material. However, when these effects occur in humans, they include,
...and various symptoms of electromagnetic intolerance.
Not everyone is affected in the same way and some may not be affected at all. However, there is increasing evidence that the situation is getting worse.
Our electromagnetic exposure is rapidly increasing and previously healthy people are now becoming sensitized to it.
In this study, I am concentrating on the
cases where there have been definite effects, since this is the most
efficient way in which we can find out what is going wrong and what
can be done to prevent it.
(Amplitude modulation is where the strength of a carrier wave
can transmit information by rising rises and falling in time with a
lower frequency information-carrying signal).
Higher frequencies such as the microwaves used in cell phones, WiFi and DECT phones, are the most damaging.
Our present exposure to man-made microwaves is about a million billion billion (one followed by eighteen zeros) times greater than our natural exposure to these frequencies.
We did not evolve in this environment and we should not be too surprised to find that at least some people may not be genetically adapted to it.
As with most populations faced with an
environmental change, those members that are not adapted either die
prematurely or fail to reproduce adequately. Ironically, those who
are electromagnetically intolerant may be better equipped to survive
since they are driven to do what they can to avoid the radiation.
Cell membranes have a very high resistance to direct currents but, because they are so thin (about 10nm) they behave like capacitors so that alternating currents pass through them easily.
Since the effective resistance of a
capacitor to alternating current (its reactance) is inversely
proportional to its frequency, microwave currents will pass through
the membranes of cells and tissues more easily than radio waves of
lower frequencies and can therefore do more damage to the cell
contents.
It is made by allowing tap water to flow rapidly between the poles of a powerful magnet or by exposing it to a weak pulsed electromagnetic field from an electronic water conditioner. Water treated in this way can remove calcium ions (electrically charged calcium atoms) from surfaces, and the effect on the water can last for several days.
I was following up some Russian and Israeli work that had shown that magnetically conditioned water could increase the growth of crops, but it turned out to be far more important than that.
The underlying principle was also to
explain the mechanisms by which weak electromagnetic fields can
damage living cells and what can be done to stop it.
Since it had been known since the work of Bawin et al. (1975) that weak electromagnetic fields could remove calcium ions from the surfaces of brain cells, it seemed likely that both the conditioned water and the electromagnetic fields were working in the same way; i.e. by removing structurally-important calcium ions from cell membranes, which then made them leak.
We now know that membrane leakage of
this kind can explain most of the biological effects of both
conditioned water and of direct exposure to electromagnetic fields.
It may also increase the toxicity of
other poisons found naturally in the environment and this effect
could also apply to humans.
Less than 30 seconds of conditioning stimulated growth but more than this inhibited growth. It was as if the conditioning process was steadily generating one or more chemical agents in the water. A low dose from the shorter conditioning period stimulated growth, but longer conditioning periods gave higher doses, which were inhibitory.
This toxic effect of heavily conditioned water, where the water is recycled continuously through the conditioner, has now been exploited commercially to poison blanket weed in ornamental ponds.
By the same token, blood continually circulating for prolonged periods under the pulsating fields from a cell phone or similar device could become toxic to the rest of the body.
This means that no part of the body,
from the brain to the liver and gonads, can be considered to be safe
from the toxic effects of the radiation.
Small doses of otherwise harmful radiation often stimulate growth and appear to be beneficial (a phenomenon known as radiation hormesis) but larger doses are harmful.
It also explains why small doses of
pulsed magnetic fields are effective in treating some medical
conditions such as broken bones (Bassett et al. 1974) but prolonged
exposure (as we will see later) is harmful.
The inward leakage of calcium ions is
the normal mechanism by which a cell senses that it has been damaged
and triggers the necessary repair mechanisms. This involves huge
amplification processes so that even minor leakage (e.g. due to
membrane perforation or weak electromagnetic fields) can give rapid
and often massive responses.
There is an enormous (over a thousand fold) concentration difference for free calcium between the inside and outside of living cells. In addition, there is a voltage difference of many tens of mV acting in the same direction.
This means that even a slight change in
the leakiness of the cell membrane can permit a very large inflow of
calcium ions. It’s like a transistor, where a slight change in the
charge in the base can allow a massive current to flow through it
under the influence of a high voltage gradient between the emitter
and collector.
The final stage then activates the
protein synthesizing machinery needed for cell growth and repair.
This means that if the damage is prolonged or persistent, sooner or later it runs out of resources and gives up, which is when we see the inhibitory phase, perhaps followed by apoptosis (cell death) or the loss of some of its normal functions.
We are now seeing this loss of function
increasingly after prolonged human exposure to cell phone base
station radiation; e.g. the loss of thyroid gland function after six
years of exposure (Eskander et al. 2012).
Their secretions are usually released in vesicles (bubbles of membrane) that fuse with the external cell membrane and disgorge their contents to the outside (exocytosis). The vesicle membrane then becomes part of the external membrane. The resulting excess external membrane is counterbalanced by the reverse process (endocytosis) in which the external membrane buds off vesicles to the inside of the cell, which then fuse with the internal membranes.
In this way, an active gland cell may internalize the equivalent of its entire surface membrane about once every half an hour.
This means that if the surface membrane is damaged directly by the fields or by electromagnetically conditioned blood, the damaged membrane will rapidly become part of the internal membrane system, upon which its normal glandular activity depends.
If the damage is too severe, the cell concerned may lose its normal function.
We are now seeing increasing evidence of
this.
This is particularly serious for the
glands of the endocrine system (those that coordinate our bodily
functions) since it can affect many aspects of metabolism and throw
the whole body out of kilter.
Esmekaya et al. (2010) found a similar visible deterioration of the thyroid gland in rats exposed to simulated 2G cell phone radiation for 20 minutes a day for three weeks. Eskander et al. (2012) found that people living for six years within 100 meters of a cell phone base station showed a highly significant loss in their ability to produce thyroid hormones.
The expected consequence of this is
hypothyroidism, the most frequent symptoms of which are fatigue and
obesity.
The consequences of obesity include,
Between them, they cause a great deal of human suffering and cost the nation’s economy a great deal of money.
If just a fraction of this is due to
microwave telecommunications, the cell phone companies will have a
lot to answer for.
Cortisol is a stress hormone that
is normally produced in the cortex of the adrenal glands and is
controlled by the calcium level in its cells (Davies et al. 1985) so
electromagnetically- induced membrane leakage letting more calcium
into the cytosol should also have this effect.
However, when exposure to base station
radiation does it, it is not good news since the suppression of the
immune system will also increase the risk of infection and of
developing tumors from precancerous cells that might otherwise have
been destroyed.
It is also synthesized in the adrenal
medulla in response to signals from the sympathetic nervous system.
Adrenalin also puts the body into fight or flight mode by diverting
resources from the smooth muscles of the gut to the heart muscle and
the skeletal muscles needed for flight or combat. It addition, it
stimulates the production of cortisol by the adrenal cortex, with
all that that implies.
These results confirm and explain some
of the findings of Abdel-Rassoul et al. (2007) who found that people
living near cell towers (masts) had significantly increases in
headaches, memory loss, dizziness, tremors and poor sleep.
Neurons are typically highly branched nerve cells. They usually have one long branch (the axon), which carries electrical signals as action potentials (nerve impulses) to or from other parts of the body or between relatively distant parts of the brain (a nerve contains many axons bundled together).
The shorter branches communicate with
other neurons where their ends are adjacent at synapses. They
transmit information across the synapses using a range of
neurotransmitters, which are chemicals secreted by one neuron and
detected by the other.
Electromagnetically-induced membrane leakage would increase the background level of calcium in the neurons so that they release their neurotransmitters sooner.
This improves our reaction time to
simple stimuli but it can also trigger the spontaneous release of
neurotransmitters to transmit spurious signals that have no right to
be there, which would make the brain hyperactive and less able to
concentrate.
Dr Dietrich Klinghardt has shown the relationship between microwaves and autism; a summary of his work can be found here.
The core symptoms are an inability to communicate adequately with others and include abnormal social behavior, poor verbal and non-verbal communication, unusual and restricted interests, and persistent repetitive behavior. There are also non-core symptoms, such as an increased risk of epileptic seizures, anxiety and mood disorders.
ASD has a strong genetic component,
occurs predominantly in males and tends to run in families.
This would be expected to lead to
neuronal hyperactivity and the formation of sometimes unnecessary
and inappropriate synapses, which in turn can lead to ASD (Krey and
Dolmetsch 2007).
This increase corresponds in time to the proliferation of,
We can now explain at least some of this
in terms of electromagnetically-induced membrane leakage leading to
brain hyperactivity and abnormal brain development.
Their release is normally triggered by a brief pulse of calcium entering their cytosols. If the membrane is leaky due to electromagnetic exposure, it will already have a high internal calcium concentration as calcium leaks in from the much higher concentration outside.
This puts the cells into hair-trigger mode so that they are more likely to release neurotransmitters and the brain as a whole may become hyperactive (Beason and Semm 2002; Krey and Dolmetsch 2007, Volkow et al. 2011).
This results in the brain becoming
overloaded with sometimes spurious signals leading to a loss of
concentration and attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD).
During this process, the neurons in the brain make countless new connections, the patterns of which store what the child has learnt.
However, after a matter of months, connections that are rarely used are pruned automatically (Huttenlocher and Dabholkar 1997) so that those that remain are hard-wired into the child’s psyche.
The production of too many spurious
signals due to electromagnetic exposure during this period will
generate frequent random connections, which will also not be pruned,
even though they may not make sense. It may be significant that
autistic children tend to have slightly larger heads, possibly to
accommodate unpruned neurons (Hill and Frith 2003).
These children are not necessarily unintelligent; they may even have more brain cells than the rest of us and some may actually be savants.
They may just be held back from having a
normal life by a deficiency in the dedicated hard-wired neural
networks needed for efficient communication.
The chance of having an autistic child may now be as high as one in fifty. Apart from the personal tragedies for the affected children and their families, autism is of enormous economic importance. In the UK alone, the annual cost to the Nation in care and lost production exceeds the annual tax revenue from the entire cell phone industry, which is about 20billion UK pounds.
If it were all due to cell phones, the Government could close down the entire industry and actually show a profit!
There may be ways in which the modulation of the signal can be changed to avoid this (see later), but in the meantime, we should do whatever we can to minimize our exposure to information-carrying microwaves, including those from cell phones, DECT phones, WiFi and smart meters.
Failure to do this could be very costly.
About 3 percent of the population suffers in this way at present, although only a small proportion of these are as yet so badly affected that they can instantly tell whether a radiating device is switched on or off. At the other end of the scale, there are people who are sensitive but do not yet know it because they are chronically exposed to electromagnetic fields and accept their symptoms as being perfectly normal.
Electromagnetic intolerance is in fact a continuum with no clear cut-off point. In some cases there may only be relatively mild symptoms on or after using a cell phone but in severe cases it can prevent people living a normal life and force them to live in almost total isolation.
There is every reason to believe that
prolonged exposure will increase the severity of the symptoms, so if
you suffer from any of them you should do whatever possible to
minimize further exposure.
A more complete list can be found here.
Most if not all of these can be explained by the radiation making cells leak.
...and many others.
A more comprehensive list can be found here.
It is possible that some forms of
electromagnetic intolerance is due to low levels of calcium in the
blood. Electromagnetic exposure would then remove even more calcium
from their cell membranes to push them over the edge and give the
symptoms.
It is adjacent to the thyroid gland and,
if it were to be damaged by the radiation in the same way, the
production of the parathyroid hormone would go down, the amount of
calcium in the blood would be reduced and the person concerned would
become electromagnetically intolerant.
A comprehensive study on this was in the Reflex Project, sponsored by the European Commission and replicated in laboratories in several European countries. They found that radiation like that from GSM cell phone handsets caused both single and double stranded breaks in the DNA of cultured human and animal cells.
Not all cell types were equally affected
and some, such as lymphocytes, seemed not to be affected at all
(Reflex Report 2004).
However, It would be unwise to assume that exposures of less than 16 hours are necessarily safe, since DNA damage may give genetically aberrant cells long before it becomes obvious under the microscope.
It would also be unwise to assume that
the damage would be restricted to the immediate vicinity of the
handset since, as described earlier; the effects of the radiation
can be transmitted in the bloodstream in the form of magnetically
conditioned blood; so nowhere is safe, not even the sex organs.
The most plausible mechanism is that DNase (an enzyme that destroys DNA) and possibly other digestive enzymes leak through the membranes of lysosomes (organelles that digest waste) that had been damaged by the radiation.
Other mechanisms involve the leakage of
reactive oxygen species (ROS)such as hydrogen peroxide from damaged
peroxisomes and superoxide free radicals from damaged mitochondrial
membranes and NADH oxidase in the plasma membrane. According to
Friedman et al. (2007), the first to respond to non-thermal cell
phone frequencies is the NADH oxidase in the plasma membrane, which
is activated within minutes of exposure.
Only one molecule of ROS is needed to initiate a domino-effect chain reaction, in which each damaged lipid molecule generates a free radical which damages the next one. The process normally stops when it reaches an anti-oxidant molecule, which sacrifices itself by combining with the free radical in such a way that it does not generate a new one.
Most of our anti-oxidants come from our
diet (e.g. vitamin E) but the most important one that we make
ourselves is melatonin. It’s unfortunate that the production of
melatonin by the pineal gland is also disrupted by electromagnetic
fields (Henshaw and Reiter, 2005) which makes matters worse.
There may therefore be little difference between holding a cell phone to your head and holding a radioactive source of gamma rays.
Both can damage cell membranes, cause
the fragmentation of DNA and also do considerable collateral damage
to other cellular components, which may either kill the cells or
make them lose their normal function over time.
Recent studies on the incidence of brain cancer are already beginning to show this. Heavy cell phone use roughly doubles the risk of getting brain cancers in adults on the side of the head used for the cell phone.
For younger people, the risk increases to five times more (Hardell and Carlberg 2009).
Since brain cancers normally take decades to develop, it is too soon to assess the final impact of the radiation, but the World Health Organization has already classified cell phones as a Group 2B Carcinogen (possibly carcinogenic) similar to benzene and DDT.
Other head cancers are also on the
increase, including cancers of the parotid salivary gland (next to
where you hold your cell phone) and the thyroid gland, which is in
the neck.
A number of epidemiological studies have
shown significant reductions in sperm motility, viability and
quantity in men using cell phones for more than a few hours a day (Fejes
et al.2005; Agarwal et al. 2006) and the subject was reviewed by
Desai et al. (2009). A common finding that these effects were
associated with the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS)
which can damage many cellular components, including cell membranes
and DNA.
More recently still, Avandano et al.
2012 found that exposing ejaculated semen to a WiFi laptop for four
hours gave a decrease in sperm motility and an increase in DNA
fragmentation as compared with samples exposed to a similar computer
with the WiFi switched off.
It is therefore advisable for men to avoid strong magnetic fields, restrict their cell phone calls to a minimum and keep them switched off (or in airplane mode if it has this facility). Otherwise, the phones transmit regularly at full power to the base station, even when not in use.
If they have to be switched on for any
reason, men should at least keep them out of their trouser pockets.
We humans should therefore exercise caution since, although our sperm are produced in their countless billions and take about three months to mature, all the eggs that a woman will ever have were in her ovaries before she was born and will be exposed to the radiation (and electromagnetically conditioned blood) throughout her life.
There could therefore be considerable cumulative damage, both to the eggs and the follicle cells that nourish and protect them. Damage to either, beginning when the child is in the womb, can be expected to cause a loss of fertility.
Pregnant mothers should avoid all present forms of microwave telecommunications, including cell phones and WiFi.
Her child may be damaged, but she will
not know until he or she reaches puberty and wants to have a child
of her own.
They protect all of our body surfaces from the entry of unwanted materials and often protect one part of the body from being unduly influenced by the others. For example, the blood-brain barrier prevents toxins entering the brain from the bloodstream. Normally, these barriers are closed but they are programmed to open if calcium ions enter their cells.
This was demonstrated by Kan and Coleman (1988) who showed that the calcium ionophore A23187 (a substance that lets calcium ions leak into cells) opened tight junction barriers in the liver.
The electromagnetic opening of the blood-liver barrier could be a contributory factor to the current outbreak of liver disease in the UK in the under forties (the cell phone generation), which is at present being blamed on alcohol abuse. Since all tight junction barriers have basically the same design, unscheduled calcium entry resulting from electromagnetic exposure is likely to open all of them in much the same way.
The opening of our tight junction
barriers by electromagnetic fields can account for many modern
illnesses, ranging from asthma to multiple allergies and Alzheimer’s
disease.
The radiation from cell phones, even at one hundredth of the permitted SAR value, can open the blood brain barrier in rats so that protein molecules as large as albumin could enter their brains (Persson et al. 1997). Later experiments by Salford et al. (2003) showed that this was associated with the death of neurons.
We would not expect an immediate effect because the brain has spare capacity, but prolonged or repeated exposure to cell phone or similar radiation would be expected to cause a progressive loss of functional neurons and result in early dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in humans.
The extreme sensitivity of the blood-brain barrier to the radiation could mean that even sitting close to someone using a cell phone could affect you too.
It may not be too surprising to find
that early onset Alzheimer’s disease is now on the increase in
modern society.
This can be explained by the radiation removing structural calcium from the cells of the tight junction barrier lining the respiratory tract, which then opens.
This is supported by the findings of Chu et al. (2001) who showed that either low levels of external calcium or the addition of EGTA, both of which would remove structural calcium ions from cell surfaces, caused massive increases in its electrical conductance (a measure of its permeability to ions) and also to its permeability to much larger virus particles.
We would therefore expect many allergens
to enter by the same route and predispose the child to asthma.
Also, Furuse et al. (2002) showed that mutant mice deficient in Claudin-1 (a vital component of the sealing mechanism) died within a day of birth and their skin barriers were permeable to molecules as large as 600D, which is enough to admit many unwanted foreign materials, including potential allergens.
In humans, this could be the basis of multiple chemical sensitivities, where people have become allergic to a wide range of chemicals, although they leave most of us unaffected.
People suffering from multiple chemical
sensitivities are often also electromagnetically intolerant and many
of their symptoms are very similar.
An electromagnetically-induced increase
in the permeability of any of these would allow the more rapid entry
into the body of a whole range of foreign materials, including
allergens, toxins and carcinogens.
For example, Grigoriev et al (2010) showed that 30 days exposure to unmodulated 2450MHz microwave radiation triggered a small but significant increase in anti-brain antibodies in the blood of rats. In other words, the radiation had sensitized the body’s immune system to one or more components of its own brain, which could then result in an autoimmune attack on the brain and/or nervous system.
An example of an autoimmune disease of
the brain is Graves disease in which the pituitary gland (at the
base of the brain) is affected.
Natural electric currents are important in power and information transfer
For example, these currents are important in energy production in mitochondria (the cell’s power stations) and in cell signaling (the transfer of information within and between cells).
They are carried as flows of ions, which
are the normal ways in which electricity is carried through water
and through living cells.
These are proteins that use metabolic energy to transport specific ions, usually one or two at a time, from one side of the membrane to the other. This generates a voltage across the membrane (the membrane potential) and a chemical imbalance between the concentrations of ions on either side.
Their combined effect gives an
electrochemical gradient, which provides energy for other functions.
They evolved when an aerobic bacterium,
which used oxygen to metabolize its food efficiently, was engulfed
by an anaerobic organism, which could not do his, but was more
efficient in other respects. From then on they lived together
symbiotically, but are still separate in that that the mitochondria
are surrounded by two membranes; the inner one belonging to the
bacterium and the outer one to its host.
This combination with oxygen occurs using enzymes actually within the membrane, and the released energy is used to expel hydrogen ions to create an electrochemical gradient between the inside and the outside of the mitochondrion. They are then allowed back through another enzyme in the membrane called ATP synthase that uses the gradient to make ATP, which is the main energy currency of the cell.
The cycle then repeats to give an
electrical circuit with hydrogen ions carrying the electricity from
where it is made to where it is used, with the membrane being the
insulator (Alberts et al. 2002).
If it just leaked it would short circuit the system, reduce ATP synthesis and deprive the cell of energy. If the damage were also to include the oxidizing enzymes, they could release free radicals, which are normal intermediates in the process. This would damage both the inside of the mitochondrion (including its DNA) and also the rest of the cell.
Mitochondrial dysfunction of this sort
is thought to be a possible cause of chronic fatigue syndrome.
For example, enzymes in the outer membrane of each cell (the plasma membrane) use energy from ATP to pump positively charged sodium ions out of the cell. This generates its own membrane potential, which typically makes the inside of the cell about 70-100mV negative to the outside. This provides energy for the active transport of other materials across the membrane against a concentration gradient.
In this case, the sodium ions that have been expelled are allowed back in, through transporter enzymes, but they carry with them nutrients from the outside by a process called ion co-transport (Alberts et al. 2002)
If this membrane leaks, it will short
circuit the voltage across it and reduce nutrient uptake as well as
a number of other processes which use this voltage as a source of
energy.
They normally open and close in response to specific stimuli; e.g. changes in voltage across the membrane or the presence of other chemicals. They can be thought of as amplifiers, by which a tiny stimulus can cause a very large current to flow almost instantly to give a rapid biological effect.
An example of this is the coordinated
opening and closing of sodium and potassium channels that
continuously amplify nerve impulses and enable them to travel from
one end of the body to the other, both rapidly and without loss.
Later, Carl Blackman showed that
this occurs only with weak radiation, and then only within one or
more ‘amplitude windows’, above and below which there is little or
no effect (Blackman et al. 1982; Blackman 1990).
If you don’t shake it hard enough, no
apples fall off, but if you shake it too hard, they all fall off.
However, if you get it just right, only the ripe ones fall off and
are ‘selectively harvested’.
Alternating voltages try to drive these ions off and then back onto the membranes with each cycle. If the voltage is too low, nothing happens. If it is too high, all the ions fly off, but return when the voltage reverses. However, if it is just the right, it will tend to remove only the more strongly charged ones, such as divalent calcium with its double charge.
If the frequency is low, at least some of these divalent ions will diffuse away and be replaced at random by other ions when the field reverses.
There will then be a net removal of divalent ions with each successive cycle until enough have been removed to cause significant membrane leakage and give a biological effect, but only within a narrow range of field strength to give an amplitude window.
Pulses are more effective than smooth
sine waves because their rapid rise and fall times catapult the ions
quickly away from the membrane and leave more time for them to be
replaced by different ions before the field reverses.
For example, if you keep giving a
pendulum a gentle push at just the right time at the end of its
travel, the energy of each push builds up and is stored in the ever
increasing violence of its motion. If you were suddenly to stop it
by putting your hand in the way, the combined energy of each push is
released in one go and could do more damage to your hand than the
energy you gave it from each individual push.
This could enable it to bring about a chemical reaction that would not have been possible from the energy of each pulse alone, but only at its resonant frequency. Some frequencies are especially effective in giving biological effects.
An example is 16Hz, which is the ion
cyclotron resonance frequency of potassium ions in the Earth’s
magnetic field.
If they are simultaneously exposed to an alternating field at this frequency, they absorb its energy and increase the diameter of their orbits, which increases their energy of motion and chemical activity.
Potassium resonance is particularly important because potassium is the most abundant positive ion in the cytosols of living cells, where it outnumbers calcium by about ten thousand to one. It is therefore the ion most likely to replace any calcium that has been lost by electromagnetic exposure.
An increase in the chemical activity of
potassium will therefore increase its ability to replace calcium and
so increase calcium loss from the membrane and further reduce its
stability.
Also, any metabolic consequences of this calcium loss may be similarly enhanced. Any bioelectromagnetic responses that peak or trough at 16Hz is evidence that they stem from divalent ion depletion in membranes. In fact, many biological responses appear to peak at 16Hz.
These include stimulations of the growth of yeast (Mehedintu and Berg 1997) and higher plants (Smith et al. 1993), changes in rate of locomotion in diatoms (McLeod et al. 1987), and the especially severe neurophysiological symptoms reported by electrosensitive people exposed to the radiation from TETRA handsets (which is pulsed at 17.6Hz).
All of this supports the notion that a
large number of the biological responses to weak electromagnetic
radiation stem from the loss of calcium (and possibly other divalent
ions) from cell membranes.
Calcium ions are particularly good at this because their double positive charge enables them to bind more strongly to the surrounding negative phospholipids by mutual attraction and hold them together like mortar holds together the bricks in a wall.
However, monovalent ions are less able to do this (Steck et al. 1970, Lew et al. 1998, Ha 2001).
Therefore, when electromagnetic radiation replaces calcium with monovalent ions, it weakens the membrane and makes it more likely to tear and form temporary pores, especially under the stresses and strains imposed by the moving cell contents. Normally, small pores in phospholipid membranes are self healing (Melikov et al. 2001) but, while they remain open, the membrane will have a greater tendency to leak.
This can have serious metabolic
consequences as unwanted substances diffuse into and out of cells
unhindered, and materials in different parts of the cell that should
be kept separate, become mixed.
This implies that living cells can
demodulate a modulated signal to extract the biologically active
ELF. Furthermore, if they are to respond to cell phone and WiFi
signals, they must be able to do it at microwave frequencies but,
how do they do it?
A non-biological example of this effect
is a radio set that was made from a
single carbon nanotube. The
asymmetry induced by applying a DC voltage between its ends allowed
it to demodulate and even to amplify radio signals, including those
at microwave frequencies.
In as much as our tight junction
barriers have a similar trans-barrier potential (around 70mV for the
skin barrier with the inside of body positive) the ion channels of
the whole barrier could act in concert to demodulate the signal, the
damaging low frequency components of which could then be applied to
and affect the whole body.
Some of them are as follows:
Under normal circumstances, the entry of free calcium ions is carefully regulated and small changes in their concentration play a vital role in controlling many aspects of metabolism.
These processes can be disrupted if electromagnetically-induced membrane leakage lets extra and unscheduled amounts of calcium into the cell, either from the outside or from calcium stores inside. To compensate for this, the mechanism that normally pumps surplus calcium out can go into overdrive.
However, its capacity to do this is
limited because, if the pumping were too effective, it would hide
the small changes in calcium concentration that normally control
metabolism.
One such polyamine is spermine, which
normally protects the DNA of sperm and is also responsible for the
characteristic smell of semen.
They are normally produced within
minutes of the onset of the stress and combine with the cell’s
enzymes to protect them from damage and shut down non-essential
metabolism (the equivalent of running a computer in “safe mode”).
When exposed to electromagnetic fields, they initiate the gene’s transcription to form RNA, which is the first stage in the synthesis of the protein (Lin et al. 2001). The job of these heat-shock proteins is to combine with vital enzymes, putting them into a sort of cocoon that protects them from damage.
However, this stops them working
properly and also drains the cell’s energy and resources, so it
isn’t an ideal solution either.
They originally evolved to protect us
from occasional weak natural radiation, such as that from
thunderstorms. However, prolonged or repeated exposure such as that
from cell towers, WiFi and most DECT base stations is harmful
because they normally run continuously and disrupt metabolism for
long periods and is expensive in bodily resources.
Some may be drawn from our physical energy, making us feel tired, some may come from our immune systems, making us less resistant to disease and cancer. There is no hidden reserve. As it is, our bodies are constantly juggling resources to put them to best use.
For example, during the day, they are directed towards physical activity but during the night, they are diverted to the repair of accumulated damage and to the immune system. Day and night irradiation from cell phone towers (which run continuously) will affect both, with little or no chance to recover.
In the long term, this is likely to
cause chronic fatigue, serious immune dysfunction (leading to an
increased risk of disease and cancer) and many of the neurological
symptoms frequently reported by people living close to mobile phone
base stations (see Abdel-Rassoul et al. 2007).
All that is needed with domestic wiring is low-tech electromagnetic hygiene. As for cell phones, the operators have known for over a decade how to modify the radiated signal to make it safe; they have just chosen not to do so.
I will deal with these one at a time.
We cannot screen the magnetic field in this way but by careful design of the circuits, we can make the magnetic fields of the live and neutral wires cancel each other out.
To do this, all you need is to make sure that the live and neutral wires to any device are as close together as possible (preferably twisted together) with each device having its own connection to the main distribution panel.
The cheap UK practice of using ring
mains (where many plug sockets are connected in a ring, beginning
and ending in the distribution panel) should be made illegal. This
is because differences in the resistance of the conductors mean that
electricity flowing to any plug socket may not flow back the way it
came so that their magnetic fields do not cancel and there will be
an unnecessarily high field surrounding the whole ring.
Although there is very little risk of
shock, they still emit electric fields at about half the supply
voltage, which some people may find intolerable.
However, we can make this radiation much less biologically active. There are at least two ways to do this. The first was devised tested and patented by Theodore (Ted) Litovitz working at the Catholic University of America in the 1990s.
All you have to do is to add
low frequency electromagnetic noise to the signal.
It works on the principle that most of the biological effects of electromagnetic fields are due to the relatively slow but progressive loss of calcium from cell membranes, which then makes them leak. However, the effect on any cell takes place only within certain amplitude windows, as I described earlier. We may not be able to prevent this leakage just by reducing the power of the field.
All this might do is to put other cells
(perhaps nearer the source) into their amplitude windows and we may
be no better off.
This theory has been tested in several
biological systems and found to work.
ODC is part of a defense mechanism
against the radiation and an increase in its production is taken as
an indication that damage is occurring. Conversely, if the random
signal prevents its production, it is an indication that damage is
not occurring.
They found that constant frequencies between 6 and 600Hz were harmful as measured by ODC production. Simple amplitude modulated speech (which is more random) did not stimulate ODC production, neither did frequency modulated microwaves and frequency modulated analogue phone signals.
Continuous microwaves had only a slight
effect.
This includes,
...all of which are potentially harmful.
The mobile telecommunications industry clearly did not do its homework before letting these technologies loose on the general public.
There could be other harmful effects of
the radiation that do not trigger ODC production, but at the very
least these pulse frequencies should not have been used if the cell
phone industry had acted responsibly.
For example, a random field between 30 and 100Hz with an RMS strength of 5 microtesla completely inhibited the ODC production induced by a cell phone signal with an SAR of about 2.5 W/kg.
A coil within the handset could easily
deliver a random magnetic field of this magnitude and probably
protect the user from the harmful effects of its radiation.
By the same token, random low frequency magnetic fields emitted by a cell phone base station would not be able to protect most users. For this you may need something like a system that I devised myself, to which I gave the name “Balanced Signal Technology”.
I am not claiming any patent rights and
anyone who wants to test and use it can do so free of charge.
However, living cells would be unlikely to distinguish between the two carrier frequencies and the pulses on each would cancel and it would look like a relatively harmless continuous wave. It would need very little extra bandwidth since only one of the signals need be used, with the other one being effectively thrown away and they could all be dumped on the same frequency.
In theory, this technology could be
applied to both handsets and base stations, but has not yet been
tested.
It looks very much as if they would
prefer many people to become sick and perhaps die, rather than admit
that that their safety rules are based on false premises and that
their current technologies are not yet safe.
Use text (which takes seconds to transmit) rather than voice calls and avoid unnecessary Internet downloads.
The choice is yours, but spare a thought for the people living near the base stations. Some may be badly affected by their continuous radiation but they have no choice.
Your cell phone calls will contribute to
their problems, so your restraint may help them too.
Avoid using WiFi altogether. Ethernet connections via cable are not only safer, but faster, more reliable and offer greater security. Various “Homeplug” devices that connect to the Ethernet sockets of your computer and router via the household electricity supply is a second best alternative.
They are not perfect since there is
still some radiation from the wiring; especially with those offering
faster speeds.
However, make sure they are programmed
to work in the Eco Plus mode since this is not the default setting.
The electrical field is produced by a
voltage gradient and is measured in volts per meter. The magnetic
field is generated by a flow of current and is measured in tesla.
When you are close to the source (typically within one wavelength)
you are in the near-field, where the electrical and magnetic fields
are mainly separate.
For example, standing under an alternating power line would expose you to a voltage gradient due to the difference between the voltage of the line (set by the power company) and the Earth. You would also be exposed to a magnetic field proportional to the current actually flowing through the line, which depends on consumer demand.
Both the magnetic and the electrical
fields can induce electric currents in your body and are potentially
harmful, but the magnetic field is worse because it penetrates
living tissues more easily, goes through most walls and aluminium
foil as if they were not there, and is very difficult to screen.
This is usually complete within a few
wavelengths, after which you are in the so called far-field where
all the power takes the form of radio waves. Your exposure to these
is usually measured in units of power (e.g. microwatts per square
meter) or its associated voltage gradient (e.g. volts per meter).
For practical purposes, this means that
you can screen yourself against the radiation from a cell tower,
WiFi router, or DECT phone base station if they are several
wavelengths away (several tens of centimeters) but not from a cell
phone held against your head, where you are in the near field and
the raw magnetic component will penetrate deep into your brain.
These come mainly from the battery circuits and are well over the minimum needed to give harmful effects.
When they are added to
the damaging effects of their microwave fields themselves, these
devices are potentially the most dangerous sources of
electromagnetic fields and radiation that the average person
possesses.
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