Reconnect: A documentary on cell phones and the potential negative health effects

• Embed

A documentary on cell phones and the potential negative health effects

• Launched: Sep 12, 2012
• Funding ends: Oct 22, 2012
• Remind Me

I’m Kevin Kunze the director of Reconnect, a documentary on the potential negative health effects from cell phone radiation, the proposed policies regarding safer use, and the mainstream media’s portrayal of the issue. 

I’ve been working on this film for nearly two years interviewing doctors, politicians, cancer patients, and representatives from the cell phone industry. Although we’re nearly finished with the film there is still a lot that needs to be done, including: filming additional b-roll, motion graphics, composing an original score, color correction, sound mixing, licensing footage, submitting to film festivals, and creating an interactive website. Take a minute to watch our trailer and see how far we've come.

Although, we‘ve had several offers from different companies that want to buy our footage, they’ve always come with unusual exceptions such as we want to make this film but not about cancer. In order to maintain the documentary’s integrity and independent funding, we’re asking for your help.

In return, we’re doing something no other documentary has done before. We’re giving you complete access to all of our unedited interviews filmed for the movie. These interviews include the co-founder of Apple, experts from the World Health Organization, National Cancer Institute, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Environmental Working Group, and much more. Each day of our Kickstarter campaign we’ll upload a new full length video so check back to follow our progress. The interviews can be found at the bottom of this page.

Watch an exclusive clip from the credits of Reconnect featuring an array of interviewees' colorful commentary and advice on the long-term health effects from cell phone radiation. This sequence includes: Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, Dr. Jonathan Samet from the National Cancer Institute, and numerous other experts.

But this film can’t just talk about the urgency of the problem, it needs to move people and inspire them to take action. Globally, there are 6 billion cell phones in use right now - yet there has been very little research about the long-term health effects of this technology on our brains and bodies. But the independent research that has been done tell us we need to be more precautious about cell phone radiation.

Our goal is to capture the public’s attention while delivering a powerful message about what the science is showing us and what we can do to use our cell phones safer. Although our ambitions and ideas have grown working on this documentary, we need your help in order to complete this film. We’re trying to raise $25,000. This is the minimum amount of money for us be able to complete the film. Many in the film industry have suggested that we set a high goal such as $50,000 or $100,000 in order to make the film as professionally executed  as possible. While we hope to raise more than our goal, we realize that unless we raise the full amount we won’t get a penny. 

Please make a pledge. Any amount helps whether only a dollar or two, your contribution will help us to finish the film and to shed a light on this issue and the need for more research on cancer and its causes. Thank you very much for your time and support. If you pledge any amount to our project you will get a gift in return. Our rewards vary based on the price of the pledge but some of the prizes include a Reconnect t-shirt, a limited edition poster, and a private screening package.

FULL LENGTH INTERVIEWS

Each day we'll release a new full length video interview from the film. So check back to see the latest updates.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/reconnect/reconnect

Mobile towers making the city skyline aesthetically unpleasant

Mobile towers making the city skyline aesthetically unpleasant

Authoradmin

Published onSeptember 12, 2012

CategoriesCell Tower Radiation Side Effects, Radiation

0

With mobile penetration of more than 100%, many mobile towers are mushrooming in the cities. To provide seamless coverage to the mobile users, telecom companies are installing the towers every 300 meters in the city and sometimes less than that. This is all done to keep up the growing demand of voice and data traffic in the cities.

Apart from the health issues which these mobile towers pose on human being, these mobile towers are making the city skyline aesthetically unpleasant. These mobile towers are just an eye sore when somebody looks at the skyline. No regulation on installations of these mobile towers in the cities has degraded the skyline of almost every city. Moreover there are no proper design specification for the towers and no designated approval body to approve the tower designs. Safety of such towers is also questioned by different agencies in the recent past including Resident Welfare Associations (RWA) of residential colonies.

In European countries, innovative methods like camouflaging, landscaping and stealth structures are used to lessen the unpleasant visual impacts of mobile towers and antennas installed on them. And they also use low power radiating systems where the antennas can also be mounted on the street furniture like behind sign boards and light poles so that visual asthetics of the the city are maintained and do not create eye sores like seen above in India.

http://www.killergsmtowers.com/?p=54

Physician group adds weight to Wi-Fi warnings

Written by: Kristy Kirkup, Parliamentary Bureau
Oct. 5, 2012

(MARK WIERZBICKI/QMI AGENCY)

OTTAWA - Schools should not install wireless Internet systems because the technology is linked to learning disabilities, headaches and immune system deficiencies, according to an international association of physicians.

The American Academy of Environmental Medicine, which is holding a conference on the brain and nervous system this week in Florida, says safer alternatives should be used instead of Wi-Fi.

"Adverse health effects from wireless radio frequency fields, such as learning disabilities, altered immune responses, and headaches, clearly exist and are well documented in the scientific literature," the academy said in a statement on its website. "Safer technology, such as use of hard-wiring, is strongly recommended in schools."

The American Academy of Pediatrics has also called for a review of government safety limits for electromagnetic radiation because of the growing number of wireless devices that are part of children's lives.


In 2011, the World Health Organization classified radiation emitted by wireless devices, including cellphones and wireless Internet, as possibly carcinogenic. Despite this classification, Health Canada still says Wi-Fi is safe.

Dr. Jennifer Armstrong, an Ottawa-based doctor who works an environmental health clinic and former president of AAEM, says it is important to practise precaution, especially with kids.

"They're more vulnerable. Their skulls are smaller, their brains are still developing. We don't want to start treating any permanent damage in these kids," Armstrong said. "If they're going to have trouble learning while at school or if they're developing immune system problems ... we don't need to contribute more to it with something we can prevent."

Tory MP Terence Young has called for a review of Safety Code 6, the framework for industry guidelines on radiation exposure in Canada.

"My constituents believe that Safety Code 6 is outdated, and there are a number of studies that have come out in the last year that they haven't taken into consideration," Young said in an interview with QMI Agency.

http://chealth.canoe.ca/channel_health_news_details.asp?news_id=33091&rss=67&rid=999999&news_channel_id=40&channel_id=40&rot=3

Open Mind Conference Radiation 2012

And welcome back in 2011!

We are deeply thankful for all the positive feedback during and after “Wireless Humanity 2010″. This, the practical help from many sides, and of course our conviction keeps us going – toward Water Symposium march 2011 and the III. El-Symposium “Wireless Humanity” in autumn 2011.
Keep in touch!

here are some news regarding elsymposium 2010 and related subjects and events:

Now the major lectures can be downloaded  on this website.

http://elsymposium.org/?lang=en

Opinion: Cell Phone Health Risk?

Opinion: Cell Phone Health Risk?

Security concerns during the Cold War may have led to the generation of misinformation on the physiological effects of microwave radiation from mobile phones.

By Allan H. Frey | September 25, 2012

Recently, Congress tasked its investigative arm, the General Accountability Office (GAO), to consider the health risks of mobile phones and to report back to Congress. While a previous report published in May 2010 by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) stated that there was no evidence of increased health risk resulting from exposure to the radiofrequency (microwave) energy emitted by cell phones, the World Health Organization reported the following year that cell phone radiation may be carcinogenic. Also in 2011, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse published a paper in JAMA reporting that 50 minutes of cell phone use by people altered glucose metabolism in the part of the brain closest to where the cell phone antennas were located. This summer, the GAO completed the task and sent a report to Congress stating that the risks were unclear and deserved greater scrutiny from the government.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC)  “should formally reassess and, if appropriate, change its current RF energy (microwave) exposure limit and mobile phone testing requirements related to likely usage configurations, particularly when phones are held against the body,” the GAO wrote.

The controversy over whether the technology poses a risk to human health is substantial. And while much of science could be considered controversial, what has, and is, happening in microwave research is not a routine scientific dispute. Concerns about the health risks of cell phones, confusion regarding the evidence for or against such risks, and even misinformation in the scientific literature may all be collateral damage of the Cold War between the USSR and the United States. This was a time when the use of microwave-generating equipment, such as radar, was seen by some as critical to the security of the United States, and efforts were taken to ensure that such innovations were not suppressed by findings that suggested such technology to be unsafe.

Hiding data

During the Cold War, a group at Brooks Air Force Base (AFB) was tasked with reassuring residents when the Air Force wanted to install radar (microwaves) in their neighborhood. To meet that responsibility, the Brooks group hired contractors to write Environmental Impact Statements to justify the placing of the radars—an obvious conflict of interest. Even worse, when a scientist did publish findings that might indicate a risk, Brooks selected contractors to do experiments that suggested the scientist’s research was invalid or not relevant to the safety of Air Force radar.

For example, after my colleagues and I published in 1975 that exposure to very weak microwave radiation opens the regulatory interface known as the blood brain barrier (bbb), a critical protection for the brain, the Brooks AFB group selected a contractor to supposedly replicate our experiment. For 2 years, this contractor presented data at scientific conferences stating that microwave radiation had no effect on the bbb. After much pressure from the scientific community, he finally revealed that he had not, in fact, replicated our work. We had injected dye into the femoral vein of lab rats after exposure to microwaves and observed the dye in the brain within 5 minutes. The Brooks contractor had stuck a needle into the animals’ bellies and sprayed the dye onto their intestines. Thus it is no surprise that when he looked at the brain 5 minutes later, he did not see any dye; the dye had yet to make it into the circulatory system.

Another Brooks AFB responsibility that further incentivized the spreading of misinformation was to lead a lab on a classified microwave-bio weapons program. Competition between this effort and the microwave-bio research programs undoubtedly going on in other nations at the time would explain the Brooks group’s attempts to block and discredit unclassified research in the microwave area and the subsequent publication of the results: it did not want advances in knowledge to appear in the scientific literature where the USSR could benefit from it. This is not unlike the recent uproar over whether bird flu results should be published—or even done at all—because of the fear that they may help terrorists develop biological weapons.

Stalling funding

In addition to actively suppressing results of microwave-bio research, the Brooks group also attempted to block funding for such research in the first place—and largely succeeded. For example, after we and others published the first papers in the mid- to late-’70s showing that very low intensity microwaves could open the bbb, the Department of Defense (DOD) issued a report, written by a psychologist at a Kansas Veterans Administration hospital who was neither trained nor experienced in research on the bbb, that concluded “…if a real potential for catastrophic effects exists, it would be evident from the research already reported in the literature.” (An original draft of the report also noted that “DOD funding of research evaluating the effects of microwaves on the bbb should be of low priority,” though this statement was removed before the report was released to the public.)

Largely as a consequence of this report, funding for open microwave-bio research in the United States was essentially shut down. Several months after the report was released, I requested renewal of government funding, which in part supported research on the bbb. I received a letter stating that funding would not be granted unless I dropped the bbb part of the proposal. And in a September 1981 article in Microwave News, 2 years later, the editor wrote, “Surprisingly, no new [bbb] work was reported this year.”

Even now, the recent GAO report states, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) “is the only federal agency we interviewed that is directly funding ongoing studies on health effects of RF energy (microwave radiation) from mobile phone use.” And the NIH funded only one relevant completed experiment, by an in-house researcher, during the time the GAO did its assessment. For many years now most of the published microwave research—what little that has been done—has been conducted in other countries. And as I noted in a recent paper, many, if not most, of those have been epidemiological studies looking for health problems associated with outdated technologies that are not relevant to the phones used today or that will be used in the future.

Thus, the shutdown of normal open microwave research in the U.S. and the misinformation placed in the literature appears to be collateral damage of the actions of people who saw themselves as fighting a war. And since the research was not allowed to proceed in the normal fashion, we don’t have the set of data needed to determine if there is a health hazard of mobile phone use—and, if so, how serious the hazard is.  This suppression of research has now made hundreds of millions of people subjects in a grand experiment that may involve their health, without their informed consent, and the outcome of which can have substantial medical, legal, and economic consequences.

Allan H. Frey (allan@freys.us) is a semi-retired scientist in Potomac, Maryland, who was Technical Director of Randomline, Inc., a consulting and research firm. Read about more unsavory actions that I and others have observed in my chapter of bioethicist Nicholas Steneck’s Risk Benefit Analysis: The Microwave Case.

http://the-scientist.com/2012/09/25/opinion-cell-phone-health-risk/

Cellphones And Their Dangers

Cellphones And Their Dangers

Published: Tuesday | September 11, 2012

By Dr Tony Vendryes
LESS THAN a century ago, it was not uncommon for doctors to advise patients to use cigarette smoking as an aid in weight control. The idea that inhaling tobacco smoke was harmful was regarded as alarmist, ridiculous, and almost superstitious. Now,...

In a short time, a technological and cultural revolution called the Wireless Age has exploded worldwide. In 2011, there were over 5.6 billion cellular telephones in use by almost 80 per cent of the world's inhabitants. Not to be left out, Jamaica ranks high in its addiction to the use of this electronic marvel. Here, everyone seems to have at least one cellphone. But are cellphones safe, or are they the cigarettes of the new millennium?

At last, after years of denial, in 2011, no less an authority than the World Health Organisation (WHO) admitted that mobile phone use can be dangerous to your health. Yes, an active cellphone held next to your head can give you brain cancer. A special WHO team, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, reached this conclusion after reviewing several studies on cellphone safety. It found evidence of an increased incidence of brain cancer in mobile phone users. Sadly, cancer is not the only danger that cellphone users face.

Cellphones are highly compact ultrahigh-frequency transceivers that just happen to be situated directly at your head when the device is in use. Two decades ago, Dr George Carlo, a public health scientist, was commissioned by the cellphone industry to conduct research that would reassure the public about the safety of their products. His studies, however, began revealing worrying dangers, and he was dismissed, and the project stopped.

Early studies in North America and Europe of people exposed to radio-frequency radiation indicate an increased risk of brain, lung, and blood cancers. Although there is conclusive evidence from several researchers that the radiation from cellphones causes genetic damage to human cells, and that this damage leads to an increased risk of cancer, the experts argued that more research was needed. Now, at last, the issue has become clear in the eyes of the WHO.

Damage to the brain

The brain is extremely sensitive to chemicals. To survive and maintain brain function, humans have evolved special protections for the brain. One such protection is a filter that keeps harmful chemicals from entering the brain. It is called the blood brain barrier. Radio-frequency radiation emitted from mobile phones interferes with the blood brain barrier and allows toxic substances access to the tissues of the brain.

The more one uses a cellphone, the greater the occurrence of headaches, dizziness, and general feelings of discomfort in the head. Increasing the use of these instruments from less than two minutes to more than 60 minutes per day, for example, intensifies these symptoms by over 600 per cent.

Motor vehicle accidents

There is a statistically significant increase in the risk of death because of motor vehicle accidents among users of mobile phones. Operating a motor vehicle while using a cellphone is extremely dangerous, and this practice is now illegal in several countries.

Children at high risk

The radiation that emanates from a cellphone penetrates much deeper into the heads of children than adults. Once it penetrates a child's skull, it enters the brain and eyes at a far greater rate of absorption than it does in adults. This suggests even more serious health risks to children. Sadly, this has not prevented the cellphone industry from mounting major advertisement campaigns targeting children. Proposals are currently being made in the European Union to ban the use of cellphones by students in schools.

Safer use of cellphones

Because cellphones are such an important part of modern life and modern communication, and are so widely used, we need to find ways to coexist with them at minimal risk to our health. Here are some recommendations for doing so:

Restrict cellphone use

Add up the number of minutes you spend using a cellphone each day and try to cut back by 30 per cent or more. Keep the instrument away from your body by using a phone with an earpiece or headset. Everyone should routinely use a headset. I believe that cellphone manufacturers should provide everyone who buys a cellphone a free headset.

When you use the modern cellphone without an earpiece, the instrument functions as a receiver and transmitter of radiation that is emitted from the entire phone into a wide area around your head, neck, and hand. Children under the age of 10 should not use wireless devices of any type. When the signal strength is low, for example, inside some buildings, do not use your phone. The lower the signal strength, the greater the radiation emitted.

Protect yourself against radiation

Optimise your nutrition and eat lots of fresh vegetables and fruit daily. I use the Cellular Nutrition Programme for optimal nutritional support. Supplement with the antioxidant vitamins A, C, E, the mineral selenium, as well as the herbs schizandra, rosemary, ginkgo biloba, pycnogenol, and garlic. All of these have powerful antioxidant properties.

Avoid cigarette smoke, alcohol, chemical pollutants, and other sources of radiation like microwave ovens and other electronic devices. Get lots of fresh air, clean water, and sunshine - natural healing tools - and do an internal cleansing programme every three to four months.

Finally, please realise that cellphones are not the only source of unhealthy radiation. Invisible electromagnetic radiation - emanating from diverse sources such as power lines, home wiring, computers, televisions, microwave ovens, photocopy machines - surrounds us each day.

You may email Dr Tony Vendryes at tonyvendryes@gmail.com, or listen to 'An Ounce of Prevention' on POWER 106FM on Fridays at 8 p.m. His new book, 'An Ounce of Prevention, Especially for Women' , is available locally and on the Internet.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20120911/news/news5.html

Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt - Smart Meters & EMR: The Health Crisis Of Our TIme

This permanently destroys and alters the manufacturing of these proteins, meaning that it completely changes the human organism permanently. The DNA inside the cell is a booklet, an instruction booklet of how to make proteins and we have about 20 to 200 thousand different proteins that are in the cell or in the cell wall, the receptors, you know how the cell wall communicates with the outside environment is through proteins and inside the cell the manufacturing that each cell does of antibodies, of neuropeptides, of hormones, of cholesterol, of building blocks that the body needs to replace used by body parts -- that is all done by proteins. Even the physical structure of your body changes. We`ve seen hoards of people that had normal body weight for 40 years or 50 years and suddenly their weight exploded when the phone company put up the cell phone tower 200 yards from the house -- not even that close, 300 yards from their house. We`ve seen cancer rates shoot up the moment the network of cell phone towers was established...