Reproduction;
Update on Radio Frequency Radiation
New
Studies Link Cell Phone Radiation with Cancer
Does
cell phone radiation cause cancer? New studies show a correlation in
lab rats, but the evidence may not resolve ongoing debates over
causality or whether any effects arise in people.
The
ionizing radiation given off by sources such as x-ray machines and
the sun boosts cancer risk by shredding molecules in the body. But
the non-ionizing radio-frequency (RF) radiation that cell phones and
other wireless devices emit has just one known biological effect: an
ability to heat tissue by exciting its molecules.
Still,
evidence advanced by the studies shows prolonged exposure to even
very low levels of RF radiation, perhaps by mechanisms other than
heating that remain unknown, makes rats uniquely prone to a rare
tumor called a schwannoma, which affects a type of neuron (or nerve
cell) called a Schwann cell.
The
studies are notable for their sizes. Researchers at the National
Toxicology Program, a federal interagency group under the National
Institutes of Health, tested 3,000 rats and mice of both sexes for
two years—the largest investigation of RF radiation and cancer in
rodents ever undertaken in the U.S. European investigators at the
Ramazzini Institute in Italy were similarly ambitious; in their
recent study they investigated RF effects in nearly 2,500 rats from
the fetal stage until death.
Also
noteworthy is that the studies evaluated radiation exposures in
different ways. The NTP looked at “near-field” exposures, which
approximate how people are dosed while using cell phones. Ramazzini
researchers looked at “far-field” exposures, which approximate
the wireless RF radiation that bombards us from sources all around
us, including wireless devices such as tablet and laptop computers.
Yet they generated comparable results: Male rats in both studies (but
not mice or female animals) developed schwannomas of the heart at
statistically higher rates than control animals that were not
exposed.
Taken
together, the findings “confirm that RF radiation exposure has
biological effects” in rats, some of them “relevant to
carcinogenesis,” says Jon Samet, a professor of preventive medicine
and dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, who did not
participate in either study. Samet, however, cautioned the jury is
still out as to whether wireless technology is similarly risky to
people. Indeed, heart schwannomas are exceedingly rare in humans;
only a handful of cases have ever been documented in the medical
literature.
When
turned on, cell phones and other wireless devices emit EF radiation
continually, even if they are not being actively used, because they
are always communicating with cell towers. The dose intensity tails
off with increasing distance from the body, and reaches a maximum
when the devices are used next to the head during phone calls or in
front of the body during texting or tweeting.
Launched
at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s request 10 years ago,
the NTP study dosed rats and mice of both sexes with RF radiation at
either 1.5, 3 or 6 watts of radiation per kilogram of body weight, or
W/kg. The lowest dose is about the same as the Federal Communications
Commission’s limit for public exposure from cell phones, which is
1.6 watts W/kg. The animals were exposed nine hours a day for two
years (about the average life span for a rat), and the exposures were
cranked up steadily as the animals grew, so the absorbed doses per
unit body weight remained constant over time.
Initially
leaked in 2016,
results from that $25-million study provided the most compelling
evidence yet that RF energy may be linked to cancer in lab rodents.
The strongest finding connected RF with heart schwannomas in male
rats, but the researchers also reported elevated rates of lymphoma
as well as cancers affecting the prostate, skin, lung, liver and
brain in the exposed animals. Rates for those cancers increased as
the doses got higher but the evidence linking them with cell phone
radiation specifically was weak by comparison, and the researchers
could not rule out that they might have increased for reasons other
than RF exposure. Paradoxically, the radiation-treated animals also
lived longer
than the nonexposed controls. The study results were reviewed by a
panel of outside experts during a three-day meeting that ended on
March 28. They concluded there was "clear evidence"
linking RF radiation with heart schwannomas and "some evidence"
linking it to gliomas of the brain. It is now up to the NTP to
either accept or reject the reviewer's conclusions. A final report
is expected within several months.
Limited
to rats only, the Ramazzini study tested three doses expressed as the
amount of radiation striking the animal’s bodies: either 5, 25 or
50 volts per meter. The exposure measures therefore differed from the
absorbed doses calculated during the NTP study. But the Ramazzini
scientists also converted their measures to W/kg, to show how the
doses compared with RF limits for cell phones and cell towers set by
the FCC and the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation
Protection; they ranged down to a 1,000 times lower. The exposures
began when the rats were fetuses and continued for 19 hours a day
until the animals died from natural causes.
As
in the NTP study, Ramazzini investigators detected statistically
elevated rates of heart schwannomas in male rats at the highest dose.
They also had weaker findings linking RF exposure to cancer of glial
cells in the brain, which were limited to females. Ronald Melnick, a
retired NTP toxicologist who designed the NTP study, says a measure
of consistency between the two studies is important, because
“reproducibility in science increases our confidence in the
observed results.”
Just
why Schwann and glial cells appear to be targets of cell phone
radiation is not clear. David Carpenter, a physician who directs the
Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany,
S.U.N.Y., explained the purpose of these cells is to insulate nerve
fibers throughout the body. These are electrical systems, so that may
be some sort of factor, he wrote in an e-mail. “But this is only
speculation.”
A
few epidemiology studies have reported higher rates of tumors inside
the skull among people who use cell phones heavily for 10 years or
more. Of particular concern are benign Schwann cell tumors called
acoustic neuromas, which affect nerve cells connecting the inner ear
with structures inside the brain. These growths can in some instances
progress to malignant cancer with time. But other studies have found
no evidence of acoustic neuromas or brain tumors in heavy cell phone
users.
Samet
adds a major challenge now would be to draw a biologically relevant
connection between acoustic neuromas and other glial tumors in the
brains of humans with Schwann tumors in rat hearts. “The mechanism
is uncertain,” he says. “There’s a lot of information we still
need to fill in.”
Since
2011 RF radiation has been classified as a Group 2B “possible”
human carcinogen by the International Agency on Cancer (IARC), an
agency of the World Health Organization. Based on the new animal
findings, and limited epidemiological evidence linking heavy and
prolonged cell phone use with brain gliomas in humans, Fiorella
Belpoggi, director of research at the Ramazzini Institute and the
study’s lead author, says IARC should consider changing the RF
radiation designation to a “probable” human carcinogen. Even if
the hazard is low, billions of people are exposed, she says, alluding
to the estimated number of wireless subscriptions worldwide.
Véronique Terrasse, an IARC spokesperson, says a reevaluation may
occur after the NTP delivers its final report.
Stephen
Chanock, who directs the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics
at the National Cancer Institute, remains skeptical, however. Cancer
monitoring by the institute and other organizations has yet to show
increasing numbers of brain tumors in the general population, he
says. Tracking of benign brain tumors, such as acoustic neuromas, was
initiated in 2004 by investigators at the institute’s Surveillance,
Epidemiology and End Results program, which monitors and publishes
statistics on cancer incidence rates. According to Chanock’s
spokesperson, the acoustic neuroma data “haven’t accumulated to
the point that we can say something meaningful about them.”
Asked
if brain cancer’s long latency might explain why higher rates in
the population have not appeared yet, Chanock says, “Cell phones
have been around a long time. We are by no means dismissing the
evidence, and the Ramazzini study raises interesting questions. But
it has to be factored in with other reports, and this is still work
in progress.”
Epidemiology
studies investigating cell phone use patterns with human cancer risk
have produced inconsistent results. Some studies enrolled people who
already had tumors with suspected links to RF radiation, such as
gliomas, acoustic neuromas and salivary gland tumors. Researchers
compared the self-reported cell phone use habits of the cancer
patients with those of other people who did not have the same
diseases. Other studies enrolled people while they were still
healthy, and then followed them over time to see if new cancer
diagnoses tracked with how they used cell phones. All the
epidemiology studies, however, have troubling limitations, including
that enrolled subjects often do not report their cell phone use
habits accurately on questionnaires.
In
a February 2 statement, Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA’s
Center for Devices and Radiological Health, wrote that despite the
NTP study’s results, the combined evidence on RF exposure and human
cancer—which by now amounts to hundreds of studies—has “given
us confidence that the current safety limits for cell phone radiation
remain acceptable for protecting the public health.” Chonock says
that for him, evidence from the Ramazzini study does not alter that
conclusion. “We continue to agree with the FDA statement,” he
says.
This
is for Quorora writer to read;
This
should be read in conjunction with the experimental evidence of brain
tumour Schwanoma in rats and mice!
Radiation
From Cell Phones and WiFi Are Making People Sick-
Are
We All at Risk?
We
are now exposed to electromagnetic radio frequencies 24 hours a day.
Welcome to the largest human experiment ever.
December 2, 2011
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.
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.
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.
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 the Institute 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. At Loughborough 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."
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
Smartmeters.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."
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 the University 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.
1.
Training my Virtual Medical Secretaries (V.M.A)
I love the idea
of using a Virtual Medical Assistant (V.M.A for short.).
Thank
god I am in my twilight years and listening to birds singing is one
of my natural pastimes and trying to figure out which bird is calling
and which bird is answering is not an easy task.
But the idea of
voice activated cellphone is a welcome addition to an armory of
medically offensive gadgets that are springing by numbers.
Dictaphone
was in my armory when working abroad. I could do a very good
dictation without punctuation marks and my secretaries never bothered
to phone back and ask me for any clarifications. That was a very
positive effort on my part and my superiors very much like my
approach except a few, since I did not try to show off any accent but
pure and simple Queen's English, I dictated.
Mind you I was
taking to a voice machine and not a person.
The idiot, the
Dictaphone does not have any emotions and only records my voice.
I
tell them that putting fullstops, commas, semicolons and apostrophes
are her job and not mine.
When things were difficult unlike
S.M.S. I wrote down the specific stuff clearly to save their time.
I
hope and prey that smart-phone becoming intelligent and telling me
back you are creepy and some sort of a sob.
Advantages.
1.
After some time smart-phone will instantly know what you are trying
to do.
2. Unlike human secretaries who make the same mistakes
over over again smart-phone would never repeat mistakes.
3. One
can take home the Virtual Secretary unlike the human with bizarre
consequence at home boundary.
4. One can switch off the VMA with
just a push of a button unlike a jabbering soul with money / home
problems.
5. At worse I can thrash it on the floor.
I have
to think of the 6 to 10 as and when my lateral thinking make me to do
so.
For me it is a smart innervation.
6. If I see a
guy/girl I hate (on my war-path) to meet or talk or exchange any
greetings I can pretend I am very busy talking to it (of cause
switched off and with so many adversaries including politicians I do
not want to run dry the battery life) and escape harmlessly. I see
this happening evry day of my life since i do not still carry a
smartphone.
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.
2.
Training my Medical Secretaries
Oh, for the Good Old Days
of Rude Cellphone Gabbers
By NICK WINGFIELD
Published:
December 2, 2011
Is talking to a phone the same as
talking on it?
Enlarge This Image
Illustration by The New
York Times
Jimmy Wong, of Los Angeles, called an
overheard conversation with Siri on an iPhone “creepy.”
Readers’
Comments
The sound of someone gabbing on a cellphone is
part of the soundtrack of daily life, and most of us have learned
when to be quiet — no talking in “quiet cars” on trains, for
example.
But the etiquette of talking to a phone — more
precisely, to a “virtual assistant” like Apple’s Siri, in the
new iPhone 4S — has not yet evolved. And eavesdroppers are becoming
annoyed.
In part, that is because conversations with
machines have a robotic, unsettling quality. Then there is the matter
of punctuation. If you want it, you have to say it.
“How
is he doing question mark how are you doing question mark,” Jeremy
Littau of Bethlehem, Pa., found himself telling his new iPhone
recently as he walked down the street, dictating a text message to
his wife, who was home with their newborn. The machine spoke to him
in Siri’s synthesized female voice.
Passers-by gawked.
“It’s not normal human behavior to have people having a
conversation with a phone on the street,” concluded Mr. Littau, 36,
an assistant professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh
University.
The technology behind voice-activated mobile
phones has been around for a few years — allowing people to order
their phones around like digital factotums, commanding them to
dictate text messages, jot down appointments on their calendars and
search for nearby sushi restaurants. Apple, though, has taken it to
another level with Siri.
“Happy birthday smiley face,”
was what Dani Klein heard a man say to his phone on the Long Island
Rail Road, using the command to insert a grinning emotion into a
message.
“It sounded ridiculous,” said Mr. Klein, 28,
who works in social media marketing.
Talking to your phone
is so new that there are no official rules yet on, say, public
transportation systems.
Cliff Cole, a spokesman for
Amtrak, said the train line’s quiet-car policy applied to any use
of voice with cellphones, though it explicitly bans only “phone
calls,” not banter with a virtual assistant. “We may have to
adjust the language if it becomes a problem,” Mr. Cole
said.
Voice-activated technology in smartphones first
appeared a few years ago when mobile phones running Google’s
Android operating system and other software began offering basic
voice commands to do Web searches and other tasks.
Apple’s
Siri, introduced this fall, is a more sophisticated iteration of the
technology; it responds to natural-sounding phrases like, “What’s
the weather looking like?” and “Wake me up at 8 a.m.”
Apple
gave Siri a dash of personality, too, reinforcing the impression that
the iPhone’s users were actually talking to someone. Ask Siri for
the meaning of life, and it responds, “I find it odd you would ask
this of an inanimate object.”
Technology executives say
voice technologies are here to stay if only because they can help
cellphone users be more productive.
“I don’t think the
keyboard is going to go away, but it’s going to be less used,”
said Martin Cooper, who developed the first portable cellular phone
while at Motorola in the 1970s.
Another irritant in
listening to people talk to their phones is the awareness that most
everything you can do with voice commands can also be done silently.
Billy Brooks, 43, was standing in line at the service department of a
car dealership in Los Angeles recently, when a woman broke the
silence of the room by dictating a text message into her
iPhone.
“You’re unnecessarily annoying others at that
point by not just typing out your message,” said Mr. Brooks, a
visual effects artist in the film industry, adding that the woman’s
behavior was “just ridiculous and kind of sad.”
James
E. Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at
Rutgers, said people who use their voices to control their phones are
creating an inconvenience for others — noise — rather than coping
with an inconvenience for themselves — the discomfort of having to
type slowly on a cramped cellphone keyboard. Mr. Katz compared the
behavior with that of someone who leaves a car’s engine running
while parked, creating noise and fumes for people surrounding
them.
While Apple has tried to enable natural-sounding
conversations with Siri, they are often anything but. Nirav Tolia, an
Internet entrepreneur, was riding a crowded elevator down from his
office in San Francisco recently when a man tried to use Siri to find
a new location of a cafe, Coffee Bar. The phone gave him listings for
other coffee houses — the wrong ones — forcing him to repeat the
search several times.
“Just say ‘Starbucks,’ dude,”
another passenger said, pushing past the Coffee Bar-seeker when the
elevator reached the ground floor.
When talking to their
cellphones, people sometimes start sounding like machines themselves.
Jimmy Wong, 24, was at an after-hours diner with friends in Los
Angeles recently when they found themselves next to a man ordering
Siri to write memos and dictate e-mails. They found the man’s
conversation with his phone “creepy,” without any of the natural
pauses and voice inflections that occur in a discussion between two
people.
“It was very robotic,” he said.
Yet the
group could not stop eavesdropping.
People who study the
behavior of cellphone users believe the awkwardness of hearing people
in hotels, airports and cafes treating their phones like
administrative assistants will simply fade over time.
“We’ll
see an evolution of that initial irritation with it, to a New Yorker
cartoon making fun of it, and then after a while it will largely be
accepted by most people,” said Mr. Katz from Rutgers.
But,
he predicted, “there will be a small minority of traditionalists
who yearn for the good old days when people just texted in public.”
