Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2005 13:24:14 -0700
To: technorealities@yahoogroups.com
From: Michael Heleus
Subject: Facts and few shocking statistics re Wireless effects on people
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http://www.earthcalm.com/


Cell Phone Health Effects


Recent Article by Will Thomas


Though intended for renovations, Chris Anderson would like all visitors to
deposit their cellular phones in the cement mixer by his front door. This sounds
excessive - until you step into Anderson's orchard, where the pegged needle of
a shrieking electromagnetic radiation (EMR) meter placed beside a connected
cellphone still shows significant exposure 100 feet away.

Much to the chagrin of this certified EMR-mitigation specialist, every day some
300 million cell phone users are "reaching out and touching someone you love.
Yourself, and anyone else within range of the microwaves emitted by your cell
phone."

Mesmerized by magical gadgets, we have yet to count the costs of miniature
radio transmitters that are transforming Marconi's invention into new
possibilities for portable personal pollution. As entire nations reach for
pocket
communicators, the explosively emergent $40 billion a year cell phone industry
is poised to deliver a "Wireless Revolution" that over the next five years is
expected to double the one-billion people connected by telephone lines over
the past century.

Silicon sensors are already calling to each other. Soon, countless
communicating microchips embedded in everything from bumpers to brooms
will be sending streams of encoded electrical energy through glass, steel,
concrete, bone and flesh.

Exquisitely sensitive to subtle electromagnetic harmonies, human brains and
bodies as intricate as galaxies depend on tiny electrical impulses to conduct
complex life-processes - including the ability to read, recall and respond to
these words. Acting as antennas, our anatomies just as easily tune into
spurious signals from radio and microwave transmissions. Blake Levitt, author
of Electromagnetic Fields, says that when it comes to cellphones, "a worse
frequency could not have been chosen for the human anatomy."

As cell phones conquer consumer minds and markets, researcher Carolanne
Patton notes that "the brain reaches peak absorption in the UHF bands, right
where cellular telecommunications operate." British military scientists have
discovered that cellphone transmissions disrupt the brain sites for memory and
learning, causing forgetfulness and sudden confusion.

Other studies show that electromagnetic signals from cellular phones reduce
the ability to concentrate, calculate and coordinate complicated activities such
as driving a car. Startled by $4 billion a year in extra claims among
cellphone-wielding drivers, North American insurers did a double-take that
found simply juggling `cell phones is not causing a 600% increase in accidents
over other drivers busy shaving, applying makeup, tuning radios, taming pets,
making out, pouring coffee, retrieving dropped cigarettes, talking and gesturing
to passengers, or actually steering the vehicle.

Instead of just another dangerous distraction, tests conducted by the U.S.
Department of Energy found that using a cell phone severely impairs memory
and reaction times. "Hands-free" mobile speaker-phones cause even more
crashes because they typically emit 10-times more brainwave interference than
handheld units.

For all drivers dialing outon their cell phones, University of Toronto
investigators report that the heightened probability of cracking up your car
persists for up to 15-minutes after completing a call.

That's comparable to the risk of crashing while driving dead drunk exclaims Dr.
Chris Runball, chairman of the B.C. Medical Association's emergency medical
services committee. Reeling from "dial-a-collision" costs, the government of
British Columbia may join England, Spain, Israel, Switzerland and Brazil in
restricting or banning the use of cell phones by drivers.

In New Zealand, cellphone towers are prohibited on school property because
of possible health effects. But Health Canada regulations ignore the hidden
hazards of cell-wrenching cellphones, which send pulsed signals through the
skull in a process one expert likens to "jackhammers on the brain."

"Safety Code 6" looks only at microwaves burning skin. "Basically, Health
Canada claims if it can't cook you, it can't hurt you," says Walter McGinnis.
"It's
like saying cigarettes aren't dangerous unless they burn you."

One of a handful of licensed electricians who understand electromagnetic
fields well enough to eliminate them from household wiring, McGinnis has been
testing EMFs and collaborating with fellow testers and researchers for nearly a
decade. In Victoria, where he has helped residents defeat six cellphone towers,
there was dancing in the streets after Microcell Connexions withdrew its
application to erect a microwave transmission tower against the Wishart
Elementary School fence in the spring of 1998.

Microcell spokesman Colin McCrae points out that emissions from the
company's towers carry about the same energy as a 50-watt lightbulb - well
within federal guidelines.
This is hardly reassuring, retorts the former president of the Wisehart parents
advisory council. Tania Berenuik observes that Health Canada "also told us
thalidomide, asbestos and the blood supply were safe."

Carrying similar risks of long-term lethality, and strangely just as legal,
cellphone addiction mirrors the prestigious early allure of smoking - as well as
an immensely profitable industry's steadfast denial of risk and responsibility.
As
poisonous as cigarette smoke and even harder to corral, the cellphone's
"second-hand" microwave and radio-frequency (RF) pollution pose invisible but
significant risks to bystanders - particularly children riding in cars that
transmit
amplified cellphone signals through their steel structure. Reporting the
conclusions of a 12-person British study team, scientist Sir William Stewart
told
London's Financial Times that "children may be more vulnerable because of
their developing nervous system, the greater absorption of energy in the
tissues of the head and a longer lifetime of exposure."

Roger Coghill became a long-standing advocate for health warnings to be
affixed to cell phones after this biologist found that cellphone transmissions
damage the ability of white blood cells to ward off infectious disease by
disrupting the immune system's electromagnetic communications.

Dr. Neil Cherry has measured accelerated aging, increased cell death and
cancers caused by radio frequency microwaves from cellphones and their relay
towers. With the brain's electro-chemical communications repeatedly zapped
by lightning-like cellphone pulses, this Ph.D. biophysicist warns that
headaches, fatigue, lethargy, nausea, dizziness, depression, arteriosclerosis
and even Alzheimer's can result from frequent or prolonged calls on cell
phones.

"There is also a higher incidence of cardiac problems," Cherry comments, "in
terms of the timing function in hearts. You get more heart attacks and more
heart disease - it has now been shown in many studies."

The biophysicist from Lincoln University in Christ Church, New Zealand has
also found that cell phones can murderously modify moods. In brains and
bodies seriously derailed by tiny imbalances in trace minerals and hormones,
depression, suicide, anger, rage and violence can result when calcium and
serotonin levels are disrupted by cellphone transmissions.

In 1995, Cell phone sales in North America exceeded the birth rate. Hired by
the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association to condone cellphones,
public health scientist George Carlo found that rare tumors on the outside of
the brain are more than doubled among cell phone callers - particularly on the
right side of the head where `phones are usually held. Carlo told ABC's "20/20"
that cell phone causes genetic damage that leads to cancer.

Warning of "the potential for a global health disaster," ABC recommended
"prudent avoidance" of cellphones after finding that every cellphone they
lab-tested exceeded the Federal Communication Commission's standards for
EMF absorption rates. EMF researcher Dave Ashton cautioned 20/20 viewers
that because cellphones constantly search for the nearest repeating tower,
"long-term damage comes from cell phones in the stand-by mode." Cell phone
"shields" and headsets "cannot adequately address these problems," Ashton
added.

Dr. Carlo later told London's Express newspaper that cellphones cause
genetic damage following a dose-response curve. That is, the more a person
uses a cell phone, the more cellular destruction and health risks they incur.
Cellphone-confused cells can go crazy, Carlo cautioned. Experiments on
captive animals show that this cumulative DNA damage is passed on to
succeeding generations.

Addicted as we are to a culture of convenience, we forget how inconvenient it
is to contract cancer. An Adelaide Hospital study confirmed Carlo's conclusions
after finding B-cell lymphomas doubled in mice within 18 months of one-hour
daily exposure to power densities experienced by a cellphone user. B-cell
lymphomas are implicated in 85% of all cancers.

READY OR NOT

As magazine-size "cellular" relay antennas hidden in church steeples and
rooflines keep popping up just about everywhere, more and more communities
are declaring their airspace a "No Fry Zone". But in Canada, where cell phone
towers come under federal jurisdiction, municipalities are only "advisers' to a
process in which no permits are required to erect transmitter towers deemed
necessary for "national security." Cellphones do save a lot of lives. FCC
Chairman William Kennard reports that every day more than 98,000 people
make 911 calls from wireless cell phones.

Many more lives are involuntarily imperiled by non-emergency calls. Pat Irwin
was working in a Colwood health food store when she noticed a truck
unloading metal framework. The next morning, a new cellphone tower was
ready to add its emissions to another BC Tel tower already operating down the
street. There had been no announcement, no public hearings - just a quiet
notification to the municipality that a tower was going up, literally overnight.

The intruder radiated for a month when Irwin felt her immunity dropping. She
wondered if other changes in her energy and menstrual cycle were "not from
the moon or something that I ate."

Irwin also seemed more irritable after her central nervous switchboard began
receiving round-the-clock cellphone calls. With cellular relay towers in Kansas
and Oklahoma being shut down because they interfered with passing aircraft,
Irwin sensed how the same transmissions plucked her own electrical circuitry,
inflicting a "chronic edginess" that "twangs human nerves." Sleep disorders,
she learned, are common among people exposed to high levels of
electromagnetic pollution.

After several other women in the same business centre reported similar
symptoms, Irwin quit her job. "I saw it as something that was there to stay and
I'd be daily exposed to it over a long period of time," she told Alive. "All
this stuff
is what we're playing with on a daily basis, and we don't know the long-term
health effects."

Implying recognized hazard, cell phone companies such as B.C.'s FIDO insist
that the new digital phones operating at 1/50 the power of older analog models
are safer. But there is nothing "safe" about the new 1.9 gigahertz broadcasting
frequency. Much like a boxer taking repeated blows to the head, rapidly pulsing
cellphones signal permanent brain damage. A study by Dr. Peter Franch found
unequivocally that "cells are permanently damaged by cellular phone
frequencies." This cellular damage, Franch noted, is maximized at low dosage -
and "inherited unchanged, from generation to generation."

Attempting to explain a 25% increase in asthma and a 5% increase in
asthma-related death rates throughout rapidly "mobilizing" metropolitan
Sydney, Franch found that the production of histamine, which triggers bronchial
spasms, is nearly doubled after exposure to mobile phone transmissions.
Cellphones also reduce the effectiveness of anti-asthmatic drugs, and retard
recovery from illness.

Katharina Gustavss, a certified Building Biology consultant with 25 years
experience, explains that CDMA's 217 Hz spikes are very close to the
frequencies of human cell membranes. Gustavss accompanied a Microcell
technician to the Colwood microwave relay tower Irwin and others had
complained about. When he waved a spectrum analyzer, Gustavss checked
the display and saw "pretty scary" energy spikes.

"What's that?" she asked the tech.

"I've never seen that before," he told her. It turned out that this cellphone
tower
tester only set his meter to an averaging mode. Switching to "real time" froze
the readings at "scary" maximum output levels.

How dangerous are cellphones? "The risk is extremely high," declares Dr.
Cherry. "There are 66 epidemiological studies showing that electromagnetic
radiation across the spectrum increase brain tumors in human populations.
Two of those studies are for particular brain tumors from cell phones."

Cherry says that because cancer takes decades to develop, it will be another
10 or 20 years before "mobiles" manifest a big bonanza in brain tumors. But he
adds, we're already seeing "acute effects that are noticed within minutes of
using a cellphone."

After two minutes' conversation, a cellphone's digitized impulses disable the
safety barrier that isolates the brain from destructive proteins and poisons in
the blood. Professor Leif Salford, the neurologist who carried out the research
for this finding, informed the Daily Mail: "It seems that molecules such as
proteins and toxins can pass out of the blood, while the phone is switched on,
and enter the brain. We need to bear in mind diseases such as MS and
Alzheimer's which are linked to proteins being found in the brain."

DANCING WITH THE TELECOMONSTER

If you must pack a cell phone, treat it like a loaded pistol. Keep it turned
off.
Don't carry it near ovaries, testicles, or the heart. For partial protection,
buy an
antenna shield. Limit calls to one-minute, six to 10 minutes a month. Never fire
off a cellphone with children anywhere in sight.

A better bet is to facilitate the growth of organic telephone networks with
lots of
fibre. Instead of more microwave towers, "We should be wiring up our cities
with fibre-optic cables to provide Internet, fax, telephone, radio and
television at
very high quality," Cherry urges, "rather than saturating our cities with the
microwave, radiowave and low frequency signals all the time."

When it comes to cells, consciousness and cell phones, every call is collect.
How can convenience count more than cancer? What is gained by being in
constant contact with disembodied voices, while being "out of touch" with the
friends and neighbours around us? Are we comfortable having our location
traced by monitoring authorities?

Unless we start voting with our wallets, consumer complacency could prove as
species-limiting as corporate cynicism. "Microwave frequencies are the same
as those used in radar and your microwave oven," says Florida cellphone tower
opponent Joe Chwick. "You wouldn't think of sticking your head in the oven, but
there is no hesitation to putting the cell phone to your ear."

Having somehow survived three-million years of evolution without them, many
contemporary hominids claim they cannot live without them. But can exquisitely
sensitive electromagnetic beings live with cell phones - and the cell phone
towers their signals ride in on? Like polyethylene food and water containers,
plastic cookers and coffee-makers, microwave ovens and petroleum-powered
vehicles, cellphones could be one of those brilliantly beguiling inventions we
have to let go. Would hanging up on such an intrusive and hazardous addiction
be so terrible?

On Jan. 1, 2001 I cancelled my cellphone service...