[Sosfbay-discuss] Making Cell Phones sound scary

[Tian Harter]

http://www.eldoradosun.com/Archives/01-06_issue/Firstenberg.htm
The Largest Biological Experiment Ever
by Arthur Firstenberg

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.

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 
Örjan 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.
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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. Örjan Hallberg and Olle Johansson, “1997 — A Curious Year in Sweden,” 
European Journal of Cancer Prevention 13, no. 6 (2004): 535–538.
6. Örjan 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. Örjan 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.

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