Cell
Phones
Largest Biological Experiment Ever
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 bosss 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.
Nothing could better illustrate our collective schizophrenia when it comes
to thinking about electromagnetic radiation. We respond to those who are
worried about its dangers - hence the International EMF Project - but we
ignore and marginalize those, like Mrs. Brundtland, who have already
succumbed to its effects.
As a consultant on the health effects of wireless technology, I receive
calls that can be broadly divided into two main groups: those from people
who are merely worried, whom I will call A, and those from people who are
already sick, whom I will call B. I sometimes wish I could arrange a large
conference call and have the two groups talk to each other - there needs
to be more mutual understanding so that we are all trying to solve the
same problems. 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 to escape the radiation to save her life. The
following is designed as a sort of a primer: first, to help everybody get
more or less on the same page, and second, to clear up some of the
confusions so that we can make rational decisions toward a healthier
world.
Fundamentals
The most basic
fact about cell phones and cell towers is that they emit microwave
radiation; so do Wi-Fi (wireless Internet) antennas, wireless
computers, cordless (portable) phones and their base units, and all
other wireless devices. If its a communication device and its not
attached to the wall by a wire, its emitting radiation. 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.
Why is this a problem, you might ask? 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
Orwells Animal Farm: Four legs good, two legs bad. Non-ionizing good,
ionizing bad is as little to be trusted.
An astronomer once quipped that if Neil Armstrong had taken a cell phone
to the Moon in 1969, it would have appeared to be the third most powerful
source of microwave radiation in the universe, next only to the Sun and
the Milky Way. He was right. Life evolved with negligible levels of
microwave radiation. 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.
As far as cell phones themselves are concerned, if you put one up to your
head you are damaging your brain in a number of different ways. First,
think of a microwave oven. A cell phone, like a microwave oven and unlike
a hot shower, heats you from the inside out, not from the outside in. 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.
Cell phones are regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, and
you can find, in the packaging of most new phones, a number called the
Specific Absorption Rate, or SAR, which is supposed to indicate the rate
at which energy is absorbed by the brain from that particular model. One
problem, however, is the arbitrary assumption, upon which the FCCs
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 FCCs safety standard, by the way, was
developed by electrical engineers, not doctors.
The Blood-Brain Barrier
The second effect that I want to focus on, which has been proven in the
laboratory, should by itself have been enough to shut down this industry
and should be enough to scare away anyone from ever using a cell phone
again. I call it the smoking gun of cell phone experiments. Like most
biological effects of microwave radiation, this has nothing to do with
heating.
The brain is protected by tight junctions between adjacent cells of
capillary walls, the so-called blood-brain barrier, which, like a border
patrol, lets nutrients pass through from the blood to the brain, but keeps
toxic substances out. Since 1988, researchers in the laboratory of a
Swedish neurosurgeon, Leif Salford, have been running variations on this
simple experiment: they expose young laboratory rats to either a cell
phone or other source of microwave radiation, and later they sacrifice the
animals and look for albumin in their brain tissue. 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.
Here is what these researchers have found, consistently for 18 years:
Microwave radiation, at doses equal to a cell phones emissions, causes
albumin to be found in brain tissue. 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
animals 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 elses
phone, did not appreciably change the results! Even at the lowest
exposure, half the animals had a moderate to high number of damaged
neurons.
The implications for us? Two minutes on a cell phone disrupts the
blood-brain barrier, two hours on a cell phone causes permanent brain
damage, and secondhand radiation may be almost as bad. The blood-brain
barrier is the same in a rat and a human being.
These results caused enough of a commotion in Europe that in November 2003
a conference was held, sponsored by the European Union, titled The
Blood-Brain Barrier - Can It Be Influenced by RF [radio frequency]-Field
Interactions? as if to reassure the public: See, we are doing something
about this. But, predictably, nothing was done about it, as nothing has
been done about it for 30 years.
Americas Allan Frey, during the 1970s, was the first of many to
demonstrate that low-level microwave radiation damages the blood-brain
barrier.2 Similar mechanisms protect the eye (the blood-vitreous barrier)
and the fetus (the placental barrier), and the work of Frey and others
indicates that microwave radiation damages those barriers also.3 The
implication: No pregnant woman should ever be using a cell phone.
Dr. Salford is quite outspoken about his work. He has called the use of
handheld cell phones the largest human biological experiment ever. And
he has publicly warned that a whole generation of cell-phone-using
teenagers may suffer from mental deficits or Alzheimers disease by the
time they reach middle age.
Radio-Wave Sickness
Unfortunately, cell phone users are not the only ones being injured, nor
should we be worried only about the brain. The following brief summary is
distilled from a vast scientific literature on the effects of radio waves
(a larger spectrum which includes microwaves), together with the
experiences of scientists and doctors all over the world with whom I am in
contact.
Organs that have been shown to be especially susceptible to radio waves
include the lungs, nervous system, heart, eyes, testes and thyroid gland.
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 asthma, sleep disorders, anxiety
disorders, attention deficit disorder, autism, multiple sclerosis, ALS,
Alzheimers disease, epilepsy, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome,
cataracts, hypothyroidism, diabetes, malignant melanoma, testicular
cancer, and heart attacks and strokes in young people. 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.
I have omitted one disease from the above list: the illness that Caller B
has, and that I have. A short history is in order here. In the 1950s and
1960s workers who built, tested and repaired radar equipment came down
with this disease in large numbers. So did operators of industrial
microwave heaters and sealers. 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.
Today, with the mass proliferation of radio towers and personal
transmitters, the disease has spread like a plague into the general
population. Estimates of its prevalence range up to one-third of the
population, but it is rarely recognized for what it is until it has so
disabled a person that he or she can no longer participate in society. You
may recognize some of its common symptoms: insomnia, dizziness, nausea,
headaches, fatigue, memory loss, inability to concentrate, depression,
chest discomfort, ringing in the ears. Patients may also develop medical
problems such as chronic respiratory infections, heart arrhythmias, sudden
fluctuations in blood pressure, uncontrolled blood sugar, dehydration, and
even seizures and internal bleeding.
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.
They are acting as a warning for all of us, says Dr. Olle Johansson of
people with this illness. It could be a major mistake to subject the
entire worlds population to whole-body irradiation, 24 hours a day. 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 l997.5,6 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 Alzheimers
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 Alzheimers disease requires some time to develop.
Uncontrolled Proliferation
If cell phones and cell towers are really deadly, have the radio and TV
towers that we have been living with for a century been safe? In 2002
Ãrjan Hallberg and Olle Johansson coauthored a paper titled Cancer Trends
During the 20th Century, which examined one aspect of that question.7
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!
Which brings me to address a widespread misconception. The biggest
difference between the cell towers of today and the radio towers of the
past is not their safety, but their numbers. The number of ordinary radio
stations in the United States today is still less than 14,000. But cell
towers and Wi-Fi towers number in the hundreds of thousands, and cell
phones, wireless computers, cordless telephones and two-way radios number
in the hundreds of millions. 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 dwellers 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.
The vast human consequences of all this are being ignored. Since the late
1990s a whole new class of environmental refugees has been created right
here in the United States. We have more and more people, sick, dying,
seeking relief from our suffering, leaving our homes and our livelihoods,
living in cars, trailers and tents in remote places. 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.
The worried and the sick have not yet opened their hearts to each other,
but they are asking questions. To answer caller A: No shield or headset
will protect you from your cell or portable phone. There is no safe
distance from a cell tower. If your cell phone or your wireless computer
works where you live, you are being irradiated 24 hours a day.
To caller B: To effectively shield a house is difficult and rarely
successful. There are only a few doctors in the United States attempting
to treat radio wave sickness, and their success rate is poor - because
there are few places left on Earth where one can go to escape this
radiation and recover.
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.
Our society has become both socially and economically dependent, in just
one short decade, upon a technology that is doing tremendous damage to the
fabric of our world. The more entrenched we let ourselves become in it,
the more difficult it will become to change our course. The time to
extricate ourselves, both individually and collectively - difficult though
it is already is - is now.
by Arthur Firstenberg
(original in Eldorado Sun)
http://www.newmedia
explorer. org/sepp/ 2006/04/20/ mobile_and_ wireless_ largest_biologic
al_experiment. htm
NOTES
1. Leif G. Salford et al., Nerve Cell Damage in
Mammalian Brain After Exposure to Microwaves from GSM Mobile Phones,
Environmental Health Perspectives 111, no. 7 (2003): 881-883.
2. Allan H. Frey, Sondra R. Feld and Barbara Frey, Neural Function and
Behavior, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 247 (1975):
433-439.
3. Allan H. Frey, Evolution and Results
of Biological Research with Low-Intensity Nonionizing Radiation, in
Modern Bioelectricity, ed. Andrew A. Marino (New York: Dekker, 1988),
785-837, at 809-810.
4. California EMF Program, The Risk Evaluation: An Evaluation of the
Possible Risks From Electric and Magnetic Fields (EMFs) From Power
Lines, Internal Wiring, Electrical Occupations and Appliances (2002),
app. 3.
5. Ãrjan Hallberg and Olle Johansson, 1997 - A Curious Year in Sweden,
European Journal of Cancer Prevention 13, no. 6 (2004): 535-538.
6. Ãrjan Hallberg and Olle Johansson, Does GSM 1800 MHz Affect the
Public Health in Sweden? in Proceedings of the 3rd International
Workshop Biological Effects of EMFs, Kos, Greece, October 4-8, 2004,
361-364.
7. Ãrjan Hallberg and Olle Johansson, Cancer Trends During the 20th
Century,
Journal of Australian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine
21, no. 1 (2002): 3-8.