Electromagnetic Fields (EMF) Killing Fields
Today I am homeless. My money does not provide me shelter. My good health
does not ensure my survival. My friends are unable to help me. I am being
killed, but the law offers me no protection.
An
invisible electrosmog engulfs us, destroying the health of many who do not even
know why they have fallen ill. Why is no one listening to the mass of evidence
telling us we are frying our brains?
In February
this year Richard Box, artist-in-residence at the University of Bristol’s
physics department, installed hundreds of fluorescent light tubes in a field
underneath power lines. The tubes came on at dusk, powered solely by the EM
field generated by the cables above. |
For eight years I have provided advocacy and support in North
America and worldwide for people in similar circumstances. Some have epilepsy,
or heart disease, or diabetes, or cancer. Some have allergies or asthma. But
most, like me, are in good health. The assault we are all suffering is a radical
increase in electromagnetic pollution, or electrosmog, that is engulfing the
earth.
In 1982 1 was in my final year of medical school, a promising
career ahead of me. For several months I had been having headaches and
difficulty concentrating and remembering things. Then, while on a surgery
rotation, I suffered crippling pains in my hips, making it difficult to assist
in operations. My heart rate slowed to less than 50. One day I collapsed and was
unable to get up. My chest hurt, and I could not get enough breath. I was sure I
was having a heart attack. During the next two weeks I lost 15 pounds. And I was
a slim man to begin with. It wasn’t a heart attack, but it was still six months
before I could walk up a flight of stairs without becoming short of breath. It
was three years before I was strong enough to ski again. It was seven years
before I met someone who validated my own experience that being near certain
electrical appliances, such as television sets and computers, made me ill, and
that staying away from them kept me healthy. However, having discovered how to
remain healthy, I gradually found that I was being effectively disabled by my
society.
Having stumbled upon an obviously well-kept secret, I researched
the world literature on bioelectromagnetics, (or the biological effects of
electromagnetism), and made myself an expert. I learned that electro-cautery
machines, used in every modern surgical operation to cut through tissue and to
stop bleeding, expose surgeons to much higher levels of radio frequency
radiation than is permitted for workers in any industry. I learned that there
was a disease thoroughly described in the Russian and Eastern European medical
literature called radiowave sickness, the existence of which was usually denied
by western authorities. This description made me remember my `unknown illness’,
the one that had derailed my medical career. Bradycardia, or a slow heart rate,
was said, in these texts, to be a grave sign.
Because there are virtually no workplaces without computers any
more, I have not held a job since 1990. I had resigned myself to living on
Social Security Disability, and learned, together with other members of a
support group I had found, how best to live with my disability. This mostly
meant learning to avoid exposure to electromagnetic fields. But in July 1996, to
my dismay, I learned that an innovation was coming to my city, which threatened
to make it impossible to avoid exposure any more.
At that time, cell phones were still a luxury item that only
worked in some locations. People were not accustomed to staying connected
whenever they left their home, and even at home most still had a cord, not an
antenna, attached to their telephone. Most were not accustomed to holding
devices that emit microwave radiation next to their brain. In 1996, the
telecommunications industry began a marketing campaign designed to change all
that. For Christmas that year, all over the country, digital cell phones were
going to be on a lot of shopping lists. And to make them more practical, tens of
thousands of antennae were going to be erected on towers, buildings, church
steeples and lampposts all over the country before Christmas, and hundreds of
thousands more during the next few years.
In response to this emergency, a few friends and I created the Cellular Phone
Task Force, and contacted all the public officials we could think of, and the
press, to warn them of the danger. But on November 14 1996, Omnipoint, New York
City’s first digital cellular provider, did open for business, broadcasting from
thousands of antennae newly erected on the rooftops of apartment buildings.
According to the health authorities, an early flu hit New York City – but not
Boston, and not Philadelphia – on about 15 November. The flu was severe and ran
a prolonged course, often dragging on for months instead of the usual two
weeks.
At Christmas time, the Cellular Phone Task Force placed a small
classified ad in a free weekly newspaper. It read: ‘If you have been ill since
11/15/96 with any of the following: eye pain, insomnia, dry lips, swollen
throat, pressure or pain in the chest, headaches, dizziness, nausea, shakiness,
other aches and pains, or flu that won’t go away, you may be a victim of a new
microwave system blanketing the city. We need to hear from you.’ And we did hear
from them. Hundreds called, men, women, whites, blacks, Asians, Latinos,
doctors, lawyers, teachers, stockbrokers, airline stewards, computer operators.
Most had woken up suddenly in mid-November, thinking they were having a stroke
or a heart attack or a nervous breakdown, and were relieved to know they were
not alone and not crazy.
Later, I analysed weekly mortality statistics, which the Centres
for Disease Control publish for122 US cities. Each of dozens of cities recorded
a 10-25 per cent increase in mortality, lasting two to three months, beginning
on the day in 1996 or 1997 on which that city’s first digital cell phone network
began commercial service. I published both the raw data and the complete
analysis, with graphs. This appeared in No Place To Hide, an
investigative journal published by my organisation and I am presently working
with scientists in Europe to expand this study to other countries.
I learned that in February 1996, Congress had passed a law
prohibiting local governments from denying permits for cell phone antennae
because of environmental concerns – so long as they comply with Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) rules. I also learned that the FCC had just
issued regulations setting public exposure limits for microwave radiation at
levels at least ten thousand times higher than levels which, according to the
Environmental Protection Agency, were causing reports of illness from all over
the world. Levels that are at least ten thousand times higher than the levels
that had forced me to leave behind my home, my family, and my friends, and to
run for my life, never to be able to return home again.
The Cellular Phone Task Force, along with over 50 other grass
roots organisations and individuals around the US, became involved in a legal
challenge of the FCC’s absurd standards and its pre-emption of local control.
This was taken all the way to the US Supreme Court. Dozens of cities, towns and
public officials, including several US senators and representatives, submitted
briefs urging the High Court to hear our case. But in January 2001, the Supreme
Court, without comment, declined.
You will hear statements by supposed experts – always the same
few, in the pay of the telecommunications industry – to the effect that cell
phones/cell towers/microwave radiation have been proven safe in countless
studies. It is an easy lie, one that the news media have been eager to
propagate. Such studies don’t exist. Quite the contrary: it has been shown that,
just as for X-rays, there is no safe level of exposure to microwave radiation,
and it is so easy to demonstrate harmful effects that it takes some skill to
design experiments that don’t show them. It is harder to show effects today than
10 years ago because now the entire planet is exposed, making it impossible to
do experiments with ‘unexposed’ controls. But most experiments still show
effects anyway � effects on heart rhythms, on brain waves, on the blood-brain
barrier, on sleep, on the eyes, on the gonads, on the skin, on hearing, on
calcium, on melatonin, on glucose, on metabolism, on human well-being. If you
look, you will find. Zorach Glaser reviewed over 5,000 such studies for the
United States Navy during the 1970s alone. After 1982, the United States ceased
funding Glaser’s cataloguing work. But the flood of alarming research occurring
all over the world continued.
From the volume of literature I have seen, certain results stand out in my
mind.
In the 1960s, Allan Frey was the first to discover that people and animals
can hear low-energy pulsed microwaves. He also did some of the earliest work
showing how heart rhythms are disturbed by microwaves, and how the blood-brain
barrier is compromised, letting large molecules leak across, exposing the brain
to potential damage. Ophthalmologist Milton Zaret was the first to describe
cataracts caused by low-energy microwaves. Canadians Tanner, Romero-Sierra and
Bigu Del Blanco worked with parakeets, chickens, pigeons and seagulls. Birds
avoided microwave fields if they could, and collapsed within seconds if they
couldn’t. Defeathered birds showed no such distress, and these researchers then
showed that feathers act as antennae conveying microwave energy to the birds.
Thirty years later, Alfonso Balmori Mart�nez has carefully documented the
decline and disappearance of white storks, house sparrows, and free-tailed bats
from the vicinity of cellular phone base stations.
The idea that there is an exposure threshold, below which microwave radiation
can be considered safe, has been disproven many times over. In Moscow, Igor
Belyaev has found resonance effects on bacterial DNA that occur at exposure
levels 10,000,000,000,000,000 times less than the average exposure from a cell
phone. W Grundler, in Germany, has found effects on the growth of yeast cells,
also at near-zero levels of exposure.
In the early 1990s, the government of Switzerland commissioned a study in
response to people’s complaints of insomnia near the shortwave transmitter at
Schwarzenburg. Residents kept sleep diaries and did not know when the
transmitter was on or off. The investigators found that the transmitter was
disturbing sleep up to several miles away, and because of this finding that
particular radio station was permanently shut down.
An early warning radar station was due to be decommissioned at Skrunda,
Latvia after the end of the Cold War. Before it was shut down, a coordinated
effort was made to determine whether the station had had any environmental
effects. Teams of researchers found such effects wherever they looked, even at
extremely low levels of exposure: smaller growth rings in trees, premature
ageing in pine needles, chromosome damage in cows, decreased memory, attention,
learning, and pulmonary function in school children, increased white blood cells
in adults, and an altered sex ratio (more girls) in children born during the
years of the radar’s operation.
In Germany, Wolfgang Volkrodt linked forest die-back to microwave radiation
rather than acid rain. Wolfgang L�scher and G�nther K�s documented illness in
dairy cows caused by cell towers. This included decreased milk production,
infertility, abortions, birth deformities, behavioural problems and early death.
Autopsies revealed that the cows died of acute circulatory collapse and bleeding
from several organs.
In France, Roger Santini has found that the closer people live to a cell
tower, the more likely they are to experience dizziness, nausea, memory loss and
other neurological symptoms. Claudio G�mez-Perretta has obtained similar results
in Spain. The Dutch government sponsored double blind experiments in a
laboratory. People exposed to a cell tower signal experienced dizziness,
nervousness, chest pain, shortness of breath, numbness and tingling, weakness,
and difficulty concentrating.
The late Neil Cherry found that childhood cancer rates in San Francisco were
a function of proximity to the antenna-laden Sutro Tower. Olle Johansson and
�rjan Hallberg showed that the rise and fall of asthma and certain cancers
during the 20th century closely paralleled changes in public exposure to radio
waves in every country they looked at. They showed that radio waves are as big a
factor in causing lung cancer as cigarette smoking.
The following are
urgently needed:
- Sanctuaries.
Radiation-free zones. Places without radio antennae, cell phone service, or
television cable (cable is often a significant source of radiation). These
sanctuaries are needed right now, to save lives.
- Legal help.
Environmental and disability rights attorneys who are able to take on this
issue.
- Funding for land
acquisition and legal expenses.
- Volunteer help for
phone calling, letter writing, grant writing, and so on.
Keep in mind these two
principles:
- Distance counts. The
power drops off as the square of the distance. Antennae should be few, and as
far as possible from people and environmentally sensitive areas.
- Digital hurts.
Digital (pulsed) technology is more harmful at lower levels of power than
analog. The mandated replacement of all analog TV, radio, and telecommunications
transmissions with digital during the next few years is very dangerous.
|
Leif Salford’s recent work on the blood-brain barrier has verified the
earlier work of Allan Frey and others, but with additional, ominous findings.
First, sometimes, decreasing the amount of radiation 1,000 times increased the
damage to the brain (demonstrating the ‘window’ effect). Second, animals exposed
to a cell phone once for two hours were found to have areas of brain cell death
two months later. Salford has called cell phones ‘the world’s largest biological
experiment ever’. His work provides solid support for those who warn that every
cell phone call damages brain cells, and that cell phones, like cigarettes, harm
both users and nearby non-users. His findings are particularly alarming in light
of surveys � by Santini in France, and by Sandstr�m and Mild in Sweden � which
include: headaches, migraines, chronic fatigue, agitation, sleep disorders,
tinnitus, nervous and connective tissue pains of unexplained origin, and
susceptibility to infection. The appeal calls for a massive reduction in
exposure limits; no further expansion of cell phone technology; cell phone-and
antenna-free zones; a ban on cell phone use by children; and a ban on cell
phones and digital cordless phones in schools, hospitals, nursing homes, public
buildings and public transportation.
The California Department of Health Services has concluded that, on the basis
of a telephone survey, 120,000 Californians – and by implication one million
Americans – have left their jobs because of electromagnetic pollution in the
workplace. The people who have left their homes for such a reason are not being
counted by anyone.
‘Electrical sensitivity’ is a popular, but inaccurate, term for suffering
caused by this universal pollutant. The problem is much more widespread than is
commonly assumed, and growing daily. By the time people realise that
electromagnetic fields are directly causing their pain or illness, their lives
are often already ruined. They find that reliable information is hard to come by
and harder to understand; that there is little support for them, and no
solutions offered; and that when they finally learn what they have to avoid, it
is nevertheless impossible to do so.
The highest profile person yet to announce that cell phones, cordless phones
and computers make her ill is none other than Gro Harlem Brundtland, a medical
doctor, master of public health, former Prime Minister of Norway, and until 2003
the Director General of the World Health Organisation. Yet even so public a
figure on the world stage has been unable to draw the world’s attention to our
collective plight, or in any way slow down the growth of telecommunications, or
even to put it on the map as an environmental issue.
This must happen. Too many intelligent, professional, useful people are
wandering this country’s barren deserts, homeless, ostracized, robbed of their
civil rights, with no place to land. Too many have committed suicide because
they have lost all hope, have suffered too long, have had to pick up roots and
flee for their lives once too often.
Within the telecommunications industry, too many equipment testers,
installers, and repairpersons with radiowave sickness are afraid to speak out,
or do not even know why they are ill.
So many radars, antennae, and communication devices are being deployed for
government, military, emergency, commercial, and personal uses in both the
developed and developing worlds, and in space, that there is nowhere left to
hide. Even radio astronomers are seriously talking about the far side of the
moon as the only place left that is quiet enough, in the radio spectrum, to
still be able to see the stars.
Arthur Firstenberg is a founder and director of the Cellular Phone Task
Force, a non-profit organisation that disseminates information about
electromagnetic pollution and provides advocacy and support for victims of this
pollution. He is editor of the Task Force’s publication, No Place To
Hide
, and the author of Microwaving
Our Planet: The Environmental Impact of the Wireless Revolution
(1996). He can be contacted by mail at PO Box 1337, Mendocino, CA 95460, USA,
or by phone at (707) 937-3990.
Portector the Radiation
Radar shield radiation protector
