Saturday, May 11, 2013

Cell Phone Use, Acoustic Neuroma and Cancer of the Pituitary Gland


Cell Phone Use, Acoustic Neuroma and Cancer of the Pituitary Gland

Cell phone use was associated with increased risk of two types of brain tumors in a new study of 790,000 women.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE



PRLog (Press Release) - May 10, 2013 - BERKELEY, Calif. -- Cell phone use was associated with increased risk of acoustic neuroma and cancer of the pituitary gland in a prospective study of more than 790,000 women in the United Kingdom. (1)

Acoustic neuroma is a rare, non-malignant tumor that develops on the main nerve leading from the inner ear to the brain. The pituitary gland is an organ that produces hormones which regulate important functions of the body and is located in the middle of the base of the brain.

Women who used cell phones for ten or more years were two-and- a-half times more likely to develop an acoustic neuroma. Their risk of acoustic neuroma increased with the number of years they used cell phones.

The results for acoustic neuroma re-affirm one of the two major conclusions by the World Health Organization (WHO) in its recent monograph about radiofrequency electromagnetic fields and form the basis for classification of cell phone radiation as "possibly carcinogenic" to humans:

“Positive associations have been observed between exposure to radiofrequency radiation from wireless phones and glioma, and acoustic neuroma.” (p. 421) (2)

The risk of cancer of the pituitary gland more was more than twice as high among women who used a cell phone for less than five years as compared to never users. Although the risk was elevated for women who used a cell phone for ten or more years (about 60% greater than never users), this effect was not significant. Since this may be the first study to find an association between cell phone use and pituitary cancer, further research on this cancer is necessary.

The women reported their cell phone use in 2005 to 2009 and again in 2009 and were followed through 2011 to see whether they developed tumors. The analyses controlled for other factors associated with tumor risk.

The study had numerous weaknesses which may explain why the research failed to replicate the increased risk of glioma associated with cell phone use of ten or more years found in several previous studies. Although this was a prospective study, the assessment of cell phone use was poor. Cell phone use was measured only at two time points and in a crude manner. The authors considered anyone who used a cell phone at least a minute per week to be a cell phone user. Although the authors measured the amount of cell phone use per week at follow-up, they did not report these results.The study did not assess cordless phone use or other microwave radiation exposures that are similar to cell phone emissions. If the never-cell phone users were cordless phone users, the effect of cell phone use on brain tumor risk would have been underestimated.

Since brain tumors can take decades to develop, the study underestimates the long term risk due to cell phone use as the average follow-up period for cell phone users was only seven years. Few women (about 8%) in this study used cell phones for ten or more years. Moreover, the women in this study may have used their cell phones much less than women do today.

The study was published online in the International Journal of Epidemiology on May 8, 2013. The authors are affiliated with the University of Oxford and the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer.

Joel M. Moskowitz, Ph.D.
School of Public Health
University of California, Berkeley

For more information about electromagnetic radiation safety, see http://saferemr.com

Also see: U.K. Cell Phone Study Points to Acoustic Neuroma, Not Brain Cancer, Risk
http://microwavenews.com/short-takes-archive/uk-study-poi...

References

(1) Benson VS, Pirie K, Schüz J, Reeves GK, Beral V, Green J; for the Million Women Study Collaborators.Mobile phone use and risk of brain neoplasms and other cancers: prospective study. Int J Epidemiol. 2013 May 8. [Epub ahead of print].  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23657200

(2) Non-ionizing radiation, Part II: Radiofrequency electromagnetic fields.  IARC Working Group on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans (2011: Lyon, France).  Vol. 102. 2013.  http://monographs.iarc.fr/ENG/Monographs/vol102/index.php

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http://www.prlog.org/12135511-cell-phone-use-acoustic-neuroma-and-cancer-of-the-pituitary-gland.html

Smart Meter Installations Headed for a Decline


Smart Meter Installations Headed for a Decline


Posted May 9, 2013

A smart meter in California (Photograph by Jennifer Kiernan/Flickr)
A smart meter in California (Photograph by Jennifer Kiernan/Flickr)

Smart meters are just one aspect of the new electric infrastructure generally known as the smart grid, but for consumers, they are the most visible. Utilities in California, Texas and other states have led the way on installing the meters, which can relay information about a household’s energy use back to the grid.
A new report, however, predicts that smart meter installations will drop more than 35 percent through 2014 in North America, due to the depletion of stimulus money granted by the first-term Obama administration. The research and consulting firm Navigant produced the report, “Smart Grid: 10 Trends to Watch in 2013 and Beyond,” with an eye toward the many vendors who hope to make a profit from ongoing industry moves to overhaul the nation’s aging electricity infrastructure.  It paints a picture of a $500 billion effort that is moving forward, but in fits and starts.
“While technologies such as smart metering have been around for more than a decade, it is tough to claim that any aspect of the smart grid is a mature market,” the report’s authors write. It sees the smart meter market recovering slightly in 2015, “followed by basically flat shipments for several years.”
Worldwide, the smart meter market is expected to grow overall through 2020 after a dip in 2015, with Asia contributing most to the growth. “Massive smart meter rollouts in China will continue in the near term as the country endeavors to fulfill its goal of deploying some 300 million smart meters by mid-decade,” the report says.
Smart meters have met with small, but vociferous pockets of resistance from opponents who fear they will relay more about a household’s energy use than the homeowner might care to disclose. (See related story: “Who’s Watching? Privacy Concerns Persist as Smart Meters Roll Out.“) Others fear radiation from the meters, even though such fears have not been justified by any major scientific study.
But for the majority of U.S. homes, smart meter installations have progressed without incident, and utilities say that the meters are helping them provide better service to customers. Indeed, many customers are the opposite of curious when it comes to learning what their smart meter does. That’s a problem for utilities, who want consumers to feel as invested in smart meters as they are. To help illuminate the benefits, many utilities are providing customers with an easy way to access their own smart meter data via the “Green Button Initiative”—but the technology is still pretty, well, green.  (See related post: “The Green Button Initiative One Year Later: Got Energy Data?“)
Still, smart meters are an important factor in trend no. 3 on Navigant’s smart grid list. The “home energy management” (HEM) market will gain momentum in 2013, it says, crediting utility savings programs, new construction and  consumer interest in cost-cutting technology, among other factors. (Examples of HEM products and services would be a smart thermostat such as Nest, or an app that helps you manage your energy information.)
Smart meters also figure in another prediction on Navigant’s list, one that should offer comfort to millions of consumers who have sat in the dark with melting foodstuffs in the freezer during an outage after a storm. Disaster recovery and service restoration will become more efficient in the coming years, the report says: “Disaster plans are being revised and improved, especially after recent catastrophic events have caused massive amounts of damage and widespread outages.” Meters help utilities pinpoint service outages, while other smart grid technologies, along with new work-force management tools, help limit damage and speed repairs.

Doctor warns of health effects of WiFi exposure


Doctor warns of health effects of WiFi exposure

Caledon Enterprise
ByJason Spencer
Torstar Network
Dozens of parents gathered at the Port Credit Legion on May 9 to learn about the potential dangers of WiFi in schools.
The information session, hosted by Concerned Peel Parents for the Health & Safety of all Children, was prompted by the Peel District School Board’s decision to install WiFi in all 253 of its schools by mid-fall.
Though the Board cites research from Public Health Ontario and the World Health Organization stating there are no adverse health effects from WiFi exposure, Magda Havas, associate professor of environmental and resource studies at Trent University, disagrees.
“Exposing children to wireless routers as a way of accessing the Internet is a very, very serious mistake,” she told the 80 or so people in attendance.
Havas cited several negative health effects of exposure to the microwave radiation WiFi emits such as headaches, dizziness, nausea, lack of concentration and increased heart rate.
“Students and teachers are going to become ill and that’s what I’m most concerned about.”
Duration of exposure to low-level microwave radiation, Havas notes, is “absolutely critical.” Prolonged exposure could increase people’s chances of getting cancer, she said.
With children in school for an average of six hours a day, five days a week for 40 weeks a year, they will be exposed to 1,200 hours of WiFi radiation in a single school year, she cautioned.
“In my mind, to say that this perfectly safe, is based on no science whatsoever.”
Athina Tagidou is concerned about the safety of her daughter, a Grade 6 student at Tomken Road Middle School. Working as a support worker in a Mississauga school, Tagidou also disagrees with the the Peel Board’s Bring Your Own Device initiative, which will see students bringing personal electronic devices into the classroom.
“The discipline that children need in order to stay focussed on their work is not there when they have accessibility to any kind of electronic device,” she said.
Come this fall, the Peel Board stated in a recent newsletter that it plans on conducting “random, representative testing of WiFi levels in schools and work sites.” The testing, the letter states, will be carried out by an external occupational hygienist to ensure that levels continue to be below Health Canada’s guidelines for safe exposure.
If the health concerns Havas listed fail to sway any detractors, she also points out that WiFi will soon be out of style.
“What’s coming is LiFi — they’re actually using light to carry the information.”
The meeting also included presentations from former Microsoft Canada president Frank Clegg, who spoke on behalf of Citizens 4 Safe Technology, and Rodney Palmer from the Simcoe County Safe School Committee.
http://www.caledonenterprise.com/news-story/2558393-doctor-warns-of-health-effects-of-wifi-exposure/

American doctors caution Peel board

American doctors caution Peel board


Wi-Fi concerns. Peel District School Board Education Director Tony Pontes has told the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) that the school board does not share the same health concerns it has about the installation of Wi-Fi in schools. File photo by Roger Belgrave
An American-based medical association has added its voice to those of Peel parents expressing health concerns with the Peel board’s widespread installation of Wi-Fi in schools.
The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM)has written to Peel District School Board Education Director Tony Pontes and Chair Janet McDougald cautioning them about installing wireless networks boardwide.
The computer networks allow electronic devices to exchange data wirelessly by using radio waves.

As part of a multi-million dollar technology plan, the board is installing Wi-Fi in all its schools. According to board officials, about half of the 239 public schools in Peel already have Wi-Fi. Full installation is expected by the late fall of this year.
Some parents have told the school board and trustees they have concerns wireless networks may expose their children to radiation emitted by wireless signals.
The AAEM, based in Wichita, Kansas, describes itself as an international association of physicians and other professionals interested in the health of humans as it relates to their environments. 
The organization said it provides research and education in the recognition, treatment and prevention of illnesses induced by exposures to biological and chemical agents in air, food and water.  
“To install this widespread wireless internet access system in Peel District schools risks a widespread public health hazard that the medical system is not yet prepared to address,” the AAEM told the school board.
The AAEM noted that in May 2011 the World Health Organization elevated exposure to wireless radiation, including WiFi, onto the Class 2b list of possible carcinogens.
Debate in the medical and scientific communities continues about the health hazards posed by Wi-Fi and the long-term effects of exposure to wireless technology. While some consider the health risks minimal others are sounding an alarm bell.
According to the board, all wireless equipment in Peel schools comply with Health Canada’s Safety Code and is considered safe for students and staff.
Pontes has told the AAEM and parents that misinformation and misleading references are fueling concerns that the board does not share.
“To date, based on numerous scientific studies on radio frequency exposure and its impact on human health, we feel assured that there remains no evidence of negative health effects of Wi-Fi,” Pontes said in his response to the AAEM, which had references to test findings and statements from organizations such as Health Canada, theWorld Health OrganizationPublic Health Ontario and Industry Canada.
The board has posted information on its use of Wi-Fi and sent out responses to commonly asked questions in a newsletter, in an effort to allay concerns as well as detail its installation plan. 


http://www.bramptonguardian.com/community/education/article/1615377--american-doctors-caution-peel-board

Dear Telecom Unions: Time to Fight for the Public Switched Network Infrastructure & Technology (PSNIT) -- The State-based Utility Wires


Dear Telecom Unions: Time to Fight for the Public Switched Network Infrastructure & Technology (PSNIT) -- The State-based Utility Wires


Bruce Kushnick




Since I started writing at Huffington Post, I've been getting letters from the front -- CWA and IBEW communications union members from around the country who not only care about their jobs -- but about the networks they helped to build.
They are frustrated with management not only because of dramatic staff cuts but because of a serious lack of basic maintenance and equipment where they can't properly maintain the wires. They are also not happy because the companies are not upgrading the basic U.S. telecom infrastructure -- the same infrastructure that supports not only phone calls but broadband, internet, cable and -- oh yes, wireless services -- as every cell tower is attached to a wire.
And while there are those who think everyone is going wireless -- go home, take your shoes off and start the evening by watching a video or TV on your 4-inch-by-3-inch wireless screen all night until your eyes give out or your 'bandwidth caps' kick in.
But now it is getting serious as AT&T, Verizon and Centurylink came up with a plan to remove all regulations and to close down the wires -- claiming it's about innovation and IP-enabled (Internet Protocol) services when it's really about removing every basic safeguard -- such as providing phone or data services to customers over the existing wires -- or not having obligations to upgrade them to fiber optics -- even though customers paid for these upgrades.
And the attack on the wires is happening across the U.S. as well as on the federal level as there is an AT&T petition to 'transition' -- read shut down -- the Public Switched Telephone Networks (PSTN). I'll get back to this in a second.
Truth is, what is really going on is the creation of new "digital dead zones" where the companies are planning on abandoning about 50 percent of all customers who use the state-based utility wires -- the PSNIT -- the Public Switched Network Infrastructure & Technology (a term that includes all wires, network switches, technology and includes the PSTN).
In the case of Verizon, anything that is not FiOS can be "abandoned." For AT&T, anything that is not U-Verse can be abandoned -- even though U-Verse is based on the old copper, already existing wires.
The future of the unions is tied to these wires -- as they abandon areas and stop upgrading the wires -- they are abandoning the staff required to do the upgrades or even maintain the plant.
We've gotten plenty of letters of horror stories from those doing the installs or the repairs because there isn't enough staff to do the work or even deal with customer problems -- and in fact stories now abound of the customer service reps being instructed once the line breaks to say, go to wireless or cable -- or just go away.
Through attrition and a death by 1000 cuts, then, the networks and the unions are now under siege.
How bad does it get? Local 827 in New Jersey pointed out that the return of service after the Hurricane Sandy was hampered because there has been multiple layoffs, with the most recent last week.
In a petition to the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, (BPU), IBEW 827 President Bill Huber writes: 

The service failures of Verizon in maintaining telephone service have resulted in inadequate restoration of telephone service in a timely fashion which can be ascribed in large measure to its failure to maintain a sufficient number of employees... who were conversant with technology and facilities in New Jersey.
But this is not simply New Jersey. The New York State Attorney General filed a petition with the State's Department of Public Service in April 2012, outlining that the State's deregulations harmed the quality of service.
The Commission's deregulatory decision relieving Verizon of providing adequate service to most of its customers was deeply flawed and has resulted in seriously diminished service quality for Verizon customers. Commission assumptions made about the effect of market competition ignored the fact that, at best, New York's telephone service market is a duopoly, and contrary to theoretical expectations of market controls, the presence of a single competitor has not in fact prevented Verizon from allowing customer service to continue to degrade ... The Commission allowed the company to provide below standard service to 92% of its customers with impunity.
But it's a lot worse. In the state of New Jersey, Verizon committed to have 100 percent of the state upgraded to a fiber optic service capable of 45 Mbps in both directions. In fact, the company collected over $13 billion for these upgrades. At a hearing in April 2012 by the NJ BPU in a small town of Stow Creek, the room was packed with towns folk as well as union members who were, in essence, explaining to the gathering, including the BPU staff and the Verizon management that there was a covenant between the customers and the company to provide FiOS and broadband service, not to mention making sure that the phone lines worked -- for voice and data applications.
Stow Creek and the neighboring town of Greenwich have had problems and regularly lose even working phone service during storms -- and that includes cell phone service.
The outcomes of this failure to upgrade the telecom infrastructure and to keep upgrading until everyone got service have harmed the U.S. economy -- and customers. In fact, in virtually every state commitments were made to upgrade the networks to fiber optic services to reach all customers, not to mention schools, libraries and hospitals, paid for by excess telephone charges on customers' bills.
The international organization OCED pegs the U.S. as 16th in the world in broadband. Meanwhile, both AT&T and Verizon announced slowing to a trickle the deployments of FiOS, while AT&T claimed it was abandoning its U-Verse deployments --- if the government doesn't protect their business by supporting their FCC petition.
Of course, the companies got their 'friends,' such as ITIF, to create data and analysis to confuse the politicians. According to them nothing is wrong, even though AT&T and Verizon combined have about 9 million customers using U-Verse or FiOS TV -- out of 120 million households that's only 7.5 percent -- or that they are abandoning about half of America. (Note: ITIF does not list its funders and has refused to disclose its funding sources when asked multiple times.)
In fact, Verizon got the government to give the OK to cut a deal with the cable companies to sell their wireless service while Verizon bundles the cable companies' services -- thus killing any hopes Verizon would actually build out their fiber optic networks.
But the real kicker -- as mentioned, AT&T pulled a massive bait and switch as "U-Verse is a 'copper-to-the-home' product and is still using the aging copper wires to complete U-Verse -- so the need for any 'transition' is simply a way to remove basic regulations.
Now, to be frank, I've had problems with unions' position on many things -- as some of the policies are so tied to corporate or they believe the hype that they are willing to do things that hurt the union members or the customers.
But, it is a little-known fact that the unions have been one of the few defenders against the state-based deregulation attacks where AT&T and Verizon, working with a group called ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, designed model legislation then get state ALEC-member politicians to propose state legislation to close down the networks. They also have thousands of groups with financial ties to the companies, either through foundation grants or business dealings to help pull it off. And so far it has worked in 23 states and counting. While the laws vary by state, they remove basic obligations like "carrier of last resort" -- i.e., the company doesn't have to supply service, or they remove regulatory oversight -- so they let the company off the hook on basic quality of service obligations.
Moreover, this ALEC-based legislation is now at the FCC as 'principles' embodied in AT&T's FCC Petition and it will be in Congress in 2013.
In 2011-2012, CWA with AARP and other groupshelped to stop the ALEC bills in multiple Verizon East Coast states that would have closed down customers' rights for not only phone but data services.
And the ALEC-based attacks are insidious. CWA in New York pointed out in their 'Don't Hang Up on Us'campaign that language was put into the state's annual budget.
The real question is: Are the unions going take an active role in stopping the closing down of the networks? Are they going to help to get the networks get upgraded, as it's a win-win -- building the networks ensures customers get broadband and new services and also ensures that there are jobs and economic growth in the state and community.
As Bill Huber put it,
Our members and their families, live, work and pay taxes and vote in communities throughout New Jersey. We are on the front line of telecommunications service delivery in the state and we know, first hand, how Verizon failed to deliver promised broadband service. We therefore decided as a union, to become an advocate for the customers we service.
Ed Starr, Esq., Business Manager IBEW Local 2321, Massachusetts adds:
It is unfortunate but the telecom unions throughout the country are besieged by the telecommunications companies with their regulatory and legislative agenda. Collectively, the unions and their members need to address this attack on the union membership as an advocate for the communities and the consumers who are also affected, as the basic US telecom infrastructure is being abandoned. Consumers are left with very little competition and an inferior, costly wireless alternative, compared to a state-of-the-art all fiber optic network in which the current union workers are ready to build and maintain. Grassroots consumer activism by the unions and their members, calling for with a new national telecom policy should be paramount.
Shouldn't America be Number 1 in the world in broadband not 16th? Shouldn't everyone get served?
And should AT&T's Petition be allowed to strip-mine customers' rights and close down the networks -- and thus shut down the union jobs?
We're all in this together so let's work together.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/dear-telecom-unions-time-_b_2707296.html

F.C.C. Advances Plan for Faster In-Flight Wi-Fi


F.C.C. Advances Plan for Faster In-Flight Wi-Fi

Marty Katz for The New York Times
Using Wi-Fi on a Southwest flight. A new proposal would increase in-flight Internet speeds.
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WASHINGTON — It may soon be easier and faster to surf the Web at 30,000 feet.
The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday proposed auctioning off the rights to use newly available airwaves to provide better in-flight Wi-Fi connections, as the government agency seeks to improve the speed and lower the cost of Internet service on commercial flights.
The commission’s proposal is the first step toward a goal that it is likely to take a couple of years, at least, to reach: providing in-flight Internet service that can match or exceed the capabilities that most Americans have at home or can find in coffee shops.
The new format would use a more reliable system of contact between a plane and the ground, agency officials said, and should allow providers to offer more consistent service that is many times faster than the service that many Americans have in their homes.
Although it will be at least a couple of years before the new service is available, federal officials and people in the broadband business expressed excitement that the new format could free airline passengers from being captive to the expensive and rather slow Wi-Fi that is currently available on only some domestic flights.
“The reality is that we expect and often need to be able to get online 24/7, at home, in an office or on a plane,” Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, said at a meeting where the commission voted 4 to 0 to begin the necessary steps. “This will enable business and leisure travelers aboard aircraft in the United States to be more productive and have more choices in entertainment, communications and social media, and it could lower prices.”
The agency’s plan calls for the sale of one or more licenses to allow an Internet service provider to share certain airwaves with satellite communications companies. Those airwaves would then be used for an air-to-ground system of connections that employs cellphone towers.
Before the auction, the agency will have to decide how many licenses to grant in the 500-megahertz block of spectrum and what engineering rules will be required to prevent interference between the various services. The agency’s action Thursday kicks off the process by requesting public comment.
Roughly a quarter of daily domestic flights have Wi-Fi service, according toRoutehappy.com, which tracks travel information. Another 12 percent of flights have trial service or offer service on a given route depending on the aircraft used. But it is not always easy to tell when booking a flight whether it will have Wi-Fi service, said John Walton, director of data for Routehappy.
In-flight service is now usually limited to about 3 megabits per second, per plane — barely half the speed of the average household DSL connection and one-third the average wired broadband speed. The new system will be faster in part because it will operate on a different band of spectrum, and in part because of the way it transmits signals.
Currently, there are two types of in-flight broadband service: satellite-based and air-to-ground. Satellite systems use antennas mounted on the top of planes to communicate with satellites. Air-to-ground systems send signals between a ground-based network and an antenna on the bottom of a plane.
The new system would share the 14.0-14.5 gigahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum, a 500-megahertz band that is far wider than the current 4-megahertz band used in air-to-ground systems. All of that means that the new system would be capable of transmitting data at up to 300 gigabits per second in combined service to all aircraft aloft.
“Air-to-ground connectivity is inherently less expensive than satellite systems,” said Mary Kirby, editor in chief of Airline Passenger Experience magazine. “The industry knows that they need to meet consumer demand for increased connectivity. It’s quite literally become the cost of doing business.”
Not everyone is so enthusiastic. The Satellite Industry Association said it had filed with the commission “detailed technical analyses that demonstrate that the proposed air-ground service would cause interference into the satellite services.”
Those services have first rights to the airwaves in question, which are used by media, public safety and American military customers for essential communications, the association said. Companies like Boeing, which makes satellites as well as planes, also oppose the proposal.
Jessica Rosenworcel, a commissioner who supported getting the proposal under way, said it was clear which way the requirements for connectivity were moving.
“In our hyperconnected age, we need and expect access to connectivity and content anytime and anywhere,” Ms. Rosenworcel said. “The world simply does not wait for us to get off the plane.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 10, 2013
An earlier version of this article characterized incorrectly the possible speeds of in-flight broadband Internet service under a proposal being considered by the F.C.C. The proposal envisions a combined service speed of up to 300 gigabits per second, to be shared among all the aircraft using the system at a given moment; individuals would not be able to access a 300-gigabit connection. The error was repeated in a picture caption. The earlier version also miscalculated a comparison of 300 gigabits per second to the average home broadband connection speed. The average home broadband connection is roughly 10 megabits per second in the United States. A 300-gigabit connection would be 30,000 times the average home speed, not 30 times.

Warning: High Frequency


Warning: High Frequency

Consider this story: It’s January 1990, during the pioneer build-out of mobile phone service. A cell tower goes up 800 feet from the house of Alison Rall, in Mansfield, Ohio, where she and her husband run a 160-acre dairy farm. The first thing the Rall family notices is that the ducks on their land lay eggs that don’t hatch. That spring there are no ducklings.
artwork showing an antenna with radial lines depicting radio waves and a suited figure holding a phone to his headIllustrations by Michael Morgenstern, mmorgenstern.com.
By the fall of 1990, the cattle herd that pastures near the tower is sick. The animals are thin, their ribs are showing, their coats growing rough, and their behavior is weird – they’re agitated, nervous. Soon the cows are miscarrying, and so are the goats. Many of the animals that gestate are born deformed. There are goats with webbed necks, goats with front legs shorter than their rear legs. One calf in the womb has a tumor the size of a basketball, another carries a tumor three feet in diameter, big enough that he won’t pass through the birth canal. Rall and the local veterinarian finally cut open the mother to get the creature out alive. The vet records the nightmare in her log: “I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire practice… All of [this] I feel was a result of the cellular tower.”
Within six months, Rall’s three young children begin suffering bizarre skin rashes, raised red “hot spots.” The kids are hit with waves of hyperactivity; the youngest child sometimes spins in circles, whirling madly. The girls lose hair. Rall is soon pregnant with a fourth child, but she can’t gain weight. Her son is born with birth defects – brittle bones, neurological problems – that fit no specific syndrome. Her other children, conceived prior to the arrival of the tower, had been born healthy.
Desperate to understand what is happening to her family and her farm, Rall contacts the Environmental Protection Agency. She ends up talking to an EPA scientist named Carl Blackman, an expert on the biological effects of radiation from electromagnetic fields (EMFs) – the kind of radiofrequency EMFs (RF-EMFs) by which all wireless technology operates, including not just cell towers and cell phones but wi-fi hubs and wi-fi-capable computers, “smart” utility meters, and even cordless home phones. “With my government cap on, I’m supposed to tell you you’re perfectly safe,” Blackman tells her. “With my civilian cap on, I have to tell you to consider leaving.”
Blackman’s warning casts a pall on the family. When Rall contacts the cell phone company operating the tower, they tell her there is “no possibility whatsoever” that the tower is the source of her ills. “You’re probably in the safest place in America,” the company representative tells her.
The Ralls abandoned the farm on Christmas Day of 1992 and never re-sold it, unwilling to subject others to the horrors they had experienced. Within weeks of fleeing to land they owned in Michigan, the children recovered their health, and so did the herd.
We are now exposed to electromagnetic radio frequencies 24 hours a day. Welcome to the largest human experiment ever.
Not a single one of the half-dozen scientists I spoke to could explain what had happened on the Rall farm. Why the sickened animals? Why the skin rashes, the hyperactivity? Why the birth defects? If the radiofrequency radiation from the cell tower was the cause, then what was the mechanism? And why today, with millions of cell towers dotting the planet and billions of cell phones placed next to billions of heads every day, aren’t we all getting sick?
In fact, the great majority of us appear to be just fine. We all live in range of cell towers now, and we are all wireless operators. More than wireless operators, we’re nuts about the technology. Who doesn’t keep at their side at all times the electro-plastic appendage for the suckling of information?
The mobile phone as a technology was developed in the 1970s, commercialized in the mid-80s, miniaturized in the ‘90s. When the first mobile phone companies launched in the United Kingdom in 1985, the expectation was that perhaps 10,000 phones would sell. Worldwide shipments of mobile phones topped the one billion mark in 2006. As of October 2010 there were 5.2 billion cell phones operating on the planet. “Penetration,” in the marketing-speak of the companies, often tops 100 percent in many countries, meaning there is more than one connection per person. The mobile phone in its various manifestations – the iPhone, the Android, the Blackberry – has been called the “most prolific consumer device” ever proffered.
I don’t have an Internet connection at my home in Brooklyn, and, like a dinosaur, I still keep a landline. But if I stand on my roof, I see a hundred feet away, attached to the bricks of the neighboring parking garage, a panel of cell phone antennae – pointed straight at me. They produce wonderful reception on my cell phone. My neighbors in the apartment below have a wireless fidelity connection – better known as wi-fi – which I tap into when I have to argue with magazine editors. This is very convenient. I use it. I abuse it.
Yet even though I have, in a fashion, opted out, here I am, on a rooftop in Brooklyn, standing bathed in the radiation from the cell phone panels on the parking garage next door. I am also bathed in the radiation from the neighbors’ wi-fi downstairs. The waves are everywhere, from public libraries to Amtrak trains to restaurants and bars and even public squares like Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, where the Wall Street occupiers relentlessly tweet.
We now live in a wireless-saturated normality that has never existed in the history of the human race.
It is unprecedented because of the complexity of the modulated frequencies that carry the increasingly complex information we transmit on our cell phones, smart phones and wi-fi systems. These EMFs are largely untested in their effects on human beings. Swedish neuroscientist Olle Johansson, who teaches at the world-renowned Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, tells me the mass saturation in electromagnetic fields raises terrible questions. Humanity, he says, has embarked on the equivalent of “the largest full-scale experiment ever. What happens when, 24 hours around the clock, we allow ourselves and our children to be whole-body-irradiated by new, man-made electromagnetic fields for the entirety of our lives?”
We have a few answers. Last May, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, a branch of the World Health Organization), in Lyon, France, issued a statement that the electromagnetic frequencies from cell phones would henceforth be classified as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” The determination was based in part on data from a 13-country study, called Interphone, which reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell phone use, the risk of getting a brain tumor – specifically on the side of the head where the phone is placed – goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Israeli researchers, using study methods similar to the Interphone investigation, have found that heavy cell phone users were more likely to suffer malignant tumors of the salivary gland in the cheek, while an independent study by scientists in Sweden concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. According to a study published in the International Journal of Cancer Prevention, people living for more than a decade within 350 meters of a cell phone tower experience a four-fold increase in cancer rates.
The IARC decision followed in the wake of multiple warnings, mostly from European regulators, about the possible health risks of RF-EMFs. In September 2007, Europe’s top environmental watchdog, the EU’s European Environment Agency, suggested that the mass unregulated exposure of human beings to widespread radiofrequency radiation “could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking and lead in petrol.” That same year, Germany’s environmental ministry singled out the dangers of RF-EMFs used in wi-fi systems, noting that people should keep wi-fi exposure “as low as possible” and instead choose “conventional wired connections.” In 2008, France issued a generalized national cell phone health warning against excessive cell phone use, and then, a year later, announced a ban on cell phone advertising for children under the age of 12.
We now live in a wireless-saturated normality that has never existed in the history of the human race.
In 2009, following a meeting in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, more than 50 concerned scientists from 16 countries – public health officials, biologists, neuroscientists, medical doctors – signed what became known as the Porto Alegre Resolution. The signatories described it as an “urgent call” for more research based on “the body of evidence that indicates that exposure to electromagnetic fields interferes with basic human biology.”
That evidence is mounting. “Radiofrequency radiation has a number of biological effects which can be reproducibly found in animals and cellular systems,” says David O. Carpenter, director of theInstitute for Health and the Environment at the State University of New York (SUNY). “We really cannot say for certain what the adverse effects are in humans,” Carpenter tells me. “But the indications are that there may be – and I use the words ‘may be’ – very serious effects in humans.” He notes that in exposure tests with animal and human cells, RF-EMF radiation causes genes to be activated. “We also know that RF-EMF causes generation of free radicals, increases production of things called heat shock proteins, and alters calcium ion regulation. These are all common mechanisms behind many kinds of tissue damage.”
Double-strand breaks in DNA – one of the undisputed causes of cancer – have been reported in similar tests with animal cells. Swedish neuro-oncologist Leif Salford, chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at Lund University, has found that cell phone radiation damages neurons in rats, particularly those cells associated with memory and learning. The damage occurred after an exposure of just two hours. Salford also found that cell phone EMFs cause holes to appear in the barrier between the circulatory system and the brain in rats. Punching holes in the blood-brain-barrier is not a good thing. It allows toxic molecules from the blood to leach into the ultra-stable environment of the brain. One of the potential outcomes, Salford notes, is dementia.
Other effects from cell phone radiofrequencies have been reported using human subjects. AtLoughborough University in England, sleep specialists in 2008 found that after 30 minutes of cell phone use, their subjects required twice the time to fall asleep as they did when the phone was avoided before bedtime. EEGs (electroencephalograms) showed a disturbance of the brain waves that regulate sleep. Neuroscientists at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia discovered in 2009 a “power boost” in brain waves when volunteers were exposed to cell phone radiofrequencies. Researchers strapped Nokia phones to their subjects’ heads, then turned the phones on and off. On: brain went into defense mode. Off: brain settled. The brain, one of the lead researchers speculated, was “concentrating to overcome the electrical interference.”
Yet for all this, there is no scientific consensus on the risks of RF-EMFs to human beings.
The major public-health watchdogs, in the US and worldwide, have dismissed concerns about it. “Current evidence,” the World Health Organization (WHO) says, “does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low level electromagnetic fields.” (The WHO thus contradicts the findings of one of its own research units.) The US Federal Communications Commission has made similar statements. The American Cancer Society reports that “most studies published so far have not found a link between cell phone use and the development of tumors.” The cell phone industry’s lobbying organization, CTIA-The Wireless Association, assures the public that cell phone radiation is safe, citing studies – many of them funded by the telecom industry – that show no risk.
Published meta-reviews of hundreds of such studies suggest that industry funding tends to skew results. According to a survey by Henry Lai, a research professor at University of Washington, only 28 percent of studies funded by the wireless industry showed some type of biological effect from cell phone radiation. Meanwhile, independently funded studies produce an altogether different set of data: 67 percent of those studies showed a bioeffect. The Safe Wireless Initiative, a research group in Washington, DC that has since closed down, unpacked the data in hundreds of studies on wireless health risks, arraying them in terms of funding source. “Our data show that mobile phone industry funded/influenced work is six times more likely to find ‘no problem’ than independently funded work,” the group noted. “The industry thus has significantly contaminated the scientific evidence pool.”
artwork depicting someone holding a mobile phone to their head, waves coming out of it
The evidence about the long-term public health risks of exposure to RF-EMFs may be contradictory. Yet it is clear that some people are getting sick when heavily exposed to the new radiofrequencies. And we are not listening to their complaints.
Take the story of Michele Hertz. When a local utility company installed a wireless digital meter – better known as a “smart” meter – on her house in upstate New York in the summer of 2009, Hertz thought little of it. Then she began to feel odd. She was a practiced sculptor, but now she could not sculpt. “I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t even finish sentences,” she told me. Hertz experienced “incredible memory loss,” and, at the age of 51, feared she had come down with Alzheimer’s.
One night during a snowstorm in 2010 her house lost power, and when it came back on her head exploded with a ringing sound – “a terrible piercing.” A buzzing in her head persisted. She took to sleeping on the floor of her kitchen that winter, where the refrigerator drowned out the keening. There were other symptoms: headaches and nausea and dizziness, persistent and always worsening. “Sometimes I’d wake up with my heart pounding uncontrollably,” she told me. “I thought I would have a heart attack. I had nightmares that people were killing me.”
Roughly one year after the installation of the wireless meters, with the help of an electrician, Hertz thought she had figured out the source of the trouble: It had to be something electrical in the house. On a hunch, she told the utility company, Con Edison of New York, to remove the wireless meter. She told them: “I will die if you do not install an analog meter.” Within days, the worst symptoms disappeared. “People look at me like I’m crazy when I talk about this,” Hertz says.
Her exposure to the meters has super-sensitized Hertz to all kinds of other EMF sources. “The smart meters threw me over the electronic edge,” she says. A cell phone switched on in the same room now gives her a headache. Stepping into a house with wi-fi is intolerable. Passing a cell tower on the street hurts. “Sometimes if the radiation is very strong my fingers curl up,” she says. “I can now hear cell phones ringing on silent. Life,” she says, “has dramatically changed.”
Hertz soon discovered there were other people like her: “Electrosensitives,” they call themselves. To be sure, they comprise a tortured minority, often misunderstood and isolated. They share their stories at online forums like Stopsmartmeters.org, the EMF Safety Network, and the Electrosensitive Society. “Some are getting sick from cell phones, some from smart meters, some from cell towers,” Hertz tells me. “Some can no longer work and have had to flee their homes. Some are losing their eyesight, some can’t stop shaking, most cannot sleep.”
In recent years, I’ve gotten to know dozens of electrosensitives. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, I met a woman who had taken to wearing an aluminum foil hat. (This works – wrap a cell phone in foil and it will kill the signal.) I met a former world record-holding marathoner, a 54-year-old woman who had lived out of her car for eight years before settling down at a house ringed by mountains that she said protected the place from cell frequencies. I met people who said they no longer wanted to live because of their condition. Many of the people I talked to were accomplished professionals – writers, television producers, entrepreneurs. I met a scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratories named Bill Bruno whose employer had tried to fire him after he asked for protection from EMFs at the lab. I met a local librarian named Rebekah Azen who quit her job after being sickened by a newly installed wi-fi system at the library. I met a brilliant activist named Arthur Firstenberg, who had for several years published a newsletter, “No Place to Hide,” but who was now homeless, living out of the back of his car, sleeping in wilderness outside the city where he could escape the signals.
In New York City, I got to know a longtime member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) who said he was electrosensitive. I’ll call him Jake, because he is embarrassed by his condition and he doesn’t want to jeopardize his job or his membership in the IEEE (which happens to have for its purpose the promulgation of electrical technology, including cell phones). Jake told me how one day, a few years ago, he started to get sick whenever he went into the bedroom of his apartment to sleep. He had headaches, suffered fatigue and nausea, nightsweats and heart palpitations, had blurred vision and difficulty breathing and was blasted by a ringing in the ears – the typical symptoms of the electrosensitive. He discovered that his neighbor in the apartment building kept a wi-fi transmitter next door, on the other side of the wall to his bedroom. When Jake asked the neighbor to shut it down, his symptoms disappeared.
The government of Sweden reports that the disorder known as electromagnetic hypersensitivity, or EHS, afflicts an estimated 3 percent of the population. A study by the California Department of Health found that, based on self-reports, as many as 770,000 Californians, or 3 percent of the state’s population, would ascribe some form of illness to EMFs. A study in Switzerland recently found a 5 percent prevalence of electrosensitivity. In Germany, there is reportedly a 6 percent prevalence. Even the former prime minister of Norway, Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, until 2003 the director general of the World Health Organization, has admitted that she suffers headaches and “strong discomfort” when exposed to cell phones. “My hypersensitivity,” she told a Norwegian newspaper in 2002, “has gone so far that I react to mobile phones closer to me than about four meters.” She added in the same interview: “People have been in my office with their mobile hidden in their pocket or bag. Without knowing if it was on or off, we have tested my reactions. I have always reacted when the phone has been on – never when it’s off.”
“People are reporting these symptoms all over the globe. It’s not likely a transcultural mass hallucination.”
Yet the World Health Organization – the same agency that Brundtland once headed – reports “there is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to EMF exposure.” WHO’s findings are corroborated by a 2008 study at theUniversity of Bern in Switzerland which found “no evidence that EHS individuals could detect [the] presence or absence” of frequencies that allegedly make them sick. A study conducted in 2006 at the Mobile Phone Research Unit at King’s College in London came to a similar conclusion. “No evidence was found to indicate that people with self-reported sensitivity to mobile phone signals are able to detect such signals or that they react to them with increased symptom severity,” the report said. “As sham exposure was sufficient to trigger severe symptoms in some participants, psychological factors may have an important role in causing this condition.” The King’s College researchers in 2010 concluded it was a “medically unexplained illness.”
“The scientific data so far just doesn’t help the electrosensitives,” says Louis Slesin, editor and publisher of Microwave News, a newsletter and website that covers the potential impacts of RF-EMFs. “The design of some of these studies, however, is questionable.” He adds: “Frankly, I’d be surprised if the condition did not exist. We’re electromagnetic beings. You wouldn’t have a thought in your head without electromagnetic signals. There is electrical signaling going on in your body all the time, and the idea that external electromagnetic fields can’t affect us just doesn’t make sense. We’re biological and chemical beings too, and we know that we can develop allergies to certain biological and chemical compounds. Why wouldn’t we also find there are allergies to EM fields? Shouldn’t every chemical be tested for its effects on human beings? Well, the same could be said for each frequency of RF radiation.”
Dr. David Carpenter of SUNY, who has also looked into electrosensitivity, tells me he’s “not totally convinced that electrosensitivity is real.” Still, he says, “there are just too many people with reports of illness when chronically near to EMF devices, with their symptoms being relieved when they are away from them. Like multiple chemical sensitivity and Gulf War Syndrome, there is something here, but we just don’t understand it all yet.”
Science reporter B. Blake Levitt, author of Electromagnetic Fields: A Consumer’s Guide to the Issues, says the studies she has reviewed on EHS are “contradictory and nowhere near definitive.” Flaws in test design stand out, she says. Many with EHS may be simply “too sensitized,” she believes, to endure research exposure protocols, possibly skewing results from the start by inadvertently studying a less sensitive group. Levitt recently compiled some of the most damning studies of the health effects from cell towers in a report for the International Commission on Electromagnetic Safety in Italy. “Some populations are reacting poorly when living or working within 1,500 feet of a cell tower,” Levitt tells me. Several studies she cited found an increase in headaches, rashes, tremors, sleep disturbances, dizziness, concentration problems, and memory changes.
“EHS may be one of those problems that can never be well defined – we may just have to believe what people report,” Levitt says. “And people are reporting these symptoms all over the globe now when new technologies are introduced or infrastructure like cell towers go into neighborhoods. It’s not likely a transcultural mass hallucination. The immune system is an exquisite warning mechanism. These are our canaries in the coal mine.”
Swedish neuroscientist Olle Johansson was one of the first researchers to take the claims of electrosensitivity seriously. He found, for example, that persons with EHS had changes in skin mast cells – markers of allergic reaction – when exposed to specific EM fields. Other studies have found that radiofrequency EMFs can increase serum histamine levels – the hallmark of an allergic reaction. Johansson has hypothesized that electrosensitivity arises exactly as any common allergy would arise – due to excessive exposure, as the immune system fails. And just as only some people develop allergies to cats or pollen or dust, only some of us fall prey to EM fields. Johansson admits that his hypothesis has yet to be proven in laboratory study.
One afternoon not long ago, a nurse named Maria Gonzalez, who lives in Queens, New York, took me to see the cell phone masts that irradiate her daughter’s school. The masts were the usual flat-paneled, alien-looking things nested together, festooned with wires, high on a rooftop across from Public School 122 in Astoria. They emitted a fine signal – five bars on my phone. The operator of the masts, Sprint-Nextel, had built a wall of fake brick to hide them from view, but Maria was unimpressed with the subterfuge. She was terrified of the masts. When, in 2005, the panels went up, soon to be turned on, she was working at the intensive care unit at St. Vincent’s Hospital. She’d heard bizarre stories about cell phones from her cancer-ward colleagues. Some of the doctors at St. Vincent’s told her they had doubts about the safety of their own cellphones and pagers. This was disturbing enough. She went online, culling studies. When she read a report published in 2002 about children in Spain who developed leukemia shortly after a cell phone tower was erected next to their school, she went into a quiet panic.
Sprint-Nextel was unsympathetic when she telephoned the company in the summer of 2005 to express her concerns. The company granted her a single meeting that autumn, with a Sprint-Nextel technician, an attorney, and a self-described “radiation expert” under contract with the company. “They kept saying, ‘we’re one hundred percent sure the antennas are safe,’” Maria told me as we stared at the masts. “‘One hundred percent sure! These are children! We would never hurt children.’” She called the office of Hillary Clinton and pestered the senator once a week for six months – but got nowhere. A year later, Gonzalez sued the US government, charging that the Federal Communications Commission had failed to fully evaluate the risks from cell phone frequencies. The suit was thrown out. The judge concluded that if regulators for the government said the radiation was safe, then it was safe. The message, as Gonzalez puts it, was that she was “crazy … and making a big to-do about nothing.”
I’d venture, rather, that she was applying a commonsense principle in environmental science: the precautionary principle, which states that when an action or policy – or technology – cannot be proven with certainty to be safe, then it should be assumed to be harmful. In a society thrilled with the magic of digital wireless, we have junked this principle. And we try to dismiss as fools those who uphold it – people like Gonzalez. We have accepted without question that we will have wi-fi hotspots in our homes, and at libraries, and in cafes and bookstores; that we will have wireless alarm systems and wireless baby monitors and wireless utility meters and wireless video games that children play; that we will carry on our persons wireless iPads and iPods and smart phones. We are mesmerized by the efficiency and convenience of the infotainment appendage, the words and sounds and pictures it carries. We are, in other words, thoughtless in our embrace of the technology.
Because of our thoughtlessness, we have not demanded to know the full consequences of this technology.
Perhaps the gadgets are slowly killing us – we do not know. Perhaps they are perfectly safe – we do not know. Perhaps they are making us sick in ways we barely understand – we do not know. What we do know, without a doubt, is that the electromagnetic fields are all around us, and that to live in modern civilization implies always and everywhere that we cannot escape their touch.
Christopher Ketcham has contributed to ORION, Harper’s, and GQ, where portions of this reporting appeared previously. Find more of his work at ChristopherKetcham.com.
http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/warning_high_frequency/