n
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.
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 it's a
communication device and it's not attached to the wall by a wire, it's
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 Orwell's 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 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.
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
phone's 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 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.
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.
America's 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 Alzheimer's 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, Alzheimer's
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 world's 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 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.
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 ?rjan 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 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.
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.
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.
?rjan Hallberg and Olle Johansson, "1997 A Curious Year in Sweden,"
European Journal of Cancer Prevention 13, no. 6 (2004): 535?538.
6.
?rjan 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. ?rjan 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.
8. David E. Janes Jr.,
"Radiofrequency Environments in the United States," in 15th IEEE Conference
on Communication, Boston, MA, June 10?14, 1979, vol. 2,
31.4.1?31.4.5.