W.E.E.P. News
Wireless Electrical and Electromagnetic Pollution News
12 May 2010
Goldhawk Fights Back
Magda Havas, Associate Professor of Environmental & Resource Studies at Trent University talks about the health effects produced by wind turbines.
Here is a link for the radio show on Zoomer Radio - Dale Goldhawk fights back - called "Turbine Trouble?" Tuesday May 11th, 2010.
http://zoomerradio.ca/blog/tag/health-effects/
http://zoomerradio.ca:80/blog/tag/health-effects/
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Opposition swarms Ashland cell meeting; decision delayed
AT&T wants to place a dozen antennas on theater building
http://www.dailytidings.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100512/NEWS/5120312/-1/NEWSMAP
May 12, 2010
Ashland's Planning Commission delayed voting Tuesday on an AT&T proposal to place cell phone antennas on the Ashland Street Cinemas after more than 100 people showed up at the meeting to show their opposition to the antennas.
The commission will address the issue at its June 8 meeting. Commissioners closed the public hearing at the end Tuesday's meeting, but people can submit letters to the commission on the matter until 4:30 p.m. on May 19.
More than 30 community members spoke at the meeting and about 20 submitted letters on the issue prior to the meeting. Most speakers and letter writers said they were opposed to the plan to place 12 antennas on the theater.
The antenna opponents said they were concerned that radiation from the antennas could harm their health, that the antennas could drive away business and that the antennas would be unsightly.
The owners of the Hidden Springs Wellness Center, located in the same shopping center as the movie theater, said they have collected about 250 signatures from people opposed to the antennas.
"We have 13 holistic health care practitioners at Hidden Springs and none of them have said that they're willing to work close to a microwave tower," said Rod Newton, who owns the wellness center with his wife, Brooks.
"Without practitioners we can't continue to do business and we'd have to close our door and sell the property," he said.
Three people at the meeting spoke in favor of the antennas.
Judi Johnston, a registered nurse, said she would like the antennas to be installed at the theater, because they would provide her with cell phone coverage at her home.
Commissioners did not weigh in on the issue Tuesday. However, several commissioners asked city planners to do more research on the antennas and to bring information to the June 8 meeting.
AT&T wants to put antennas on the theater because its cell phone and wireless internet coverage is spotty in south Ashland.
AT&T's plan calls for increasing the height of the Cinema building's pointed façade to 40 feet and placing the antennas inside the new façade.
—Hannah Guzik
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UK to kill off Internet cafes
Edward Berridge
The Inquirer
Mon, 01 Mar 2010 09:53 EST
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1594048/uk-kill-internet-cafes
The Glorious British Government, upon which the sun finally set almost 100 years ago, has decided that having open WiFi networks is bad for the general population and it wants them all shut off.
The move, which will kill off using your laptop in an Internet cafe or coffee shop without getting a password from the owner, is part of the Digital Economy Bill.
The government has issued a clarification of the Bill which will mean that many organisations will be open to the same penalties for copyright infringement as individual subscribers, potentially including disconnection from the Internet.
Some legal experts say it will become impossible for small businesses to offer WiFi access to their customers.
Lord Young, a minister at BIS and apparently a flaming twit, said libraries and universities could not be exempted because "this would send entirely the wrong signal and could lead to 'fake' organisations being set up, claiming an exemption and becoming a hub for copyright infringement". The idea is anyone could set themselves up as the University of Pirate Bay and they'd then be safe, Lord Young fears.
Universities will need to work out if they are an ISP or a subscriber. Subscribers can be switched off for piracy. ISPs have to store user data and hand it over to rights holders when ordered to do so. If you are a coffee shop then storing data for three years on your punter's doings might be a bit like hard work.
What might let Internet cafes off the hook is that they tend to be too low-bandwidth to support file-sharing and, under the Bill, "such a service is more likely to receive notification letters as a subscriber than as an ISP."
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Warning: Your Cell Phone May Be Hazardous to Your Health
Ever worry that that gadget you spend hours holding next to your head might be damaging your brain? Well, the evidence is starting to pour in, and it's not pretty. So why isn't anyone in America doing anything about it?
February 2010
http://www.gq.com/cars-gear/gear-and-gadgets/201002/warning-cell-phone-radiation?currentPage=1
Readers Comments
My partners Story Until last summer I was, like most people nowadays, very fond of all my modern communication gadgets from wifi to mobile, from Palm to laptops and all their advantages. From 2006 onwards I went several times to see a doctor for heart palpitations, but they couldn’t find anything wrong with me. Then in July 2008 I suddenly started experiencing dizziness on numerous occasions, till it got so bad one night, suffering even from speech problems, that I ended up in A&E thinking I had a stroke or heart attack; in the following weeks I underwent many tests.
The results showed I was absolutely fine, but the symptoms stayed. The doctors told me I just had been stressed, but the thing is I wasn't stressed at all prior to this. To my own shock and confusion I realized that my dizziness always occurred, when I was in close vicinity to Wifi, mobiles, Blackberries and mobile masts. Other symptoms added themselves to the list:
Headaches, excessive sweating during the night, memory and concentration problems, a pain in my head, and discomfort either side of my neck [Glands] pins and needles in my hands, a feeling of being static (I gave people electric shocks in that early period, when I shook their hands), prickly skin and even skin rashes.
The latter, when I was sitting in front of my computer or the tv. Even certain light sources (energy saving light bulbs and neon lights) caused the skin problem to occur.
After medical professionals weren’t able to help, I started my own research and found many websites and blogs by people, with exactly the same problems as mine. They are sufferers of electro-sensitivity (ES), a condition fully recognized in Canada and Sweden as a medical impairment (with 250.000 sufferers in Sweden alone) but unfortunately ridiculed in the UK. I had never heard of it (this to show I am not a hypochondriac), but once I realized that this was the source of my problems, I started clearing my home environment from Wifi, DECT phones and non-essential electrical items. My problems immediately started to get noticeably better. Since I am suffering from this condition, I have spoken to many people about it and even if not everyone has fully blown symptoms of ES, I have encountered many people who have some of the described symptoms. So the problem might lie on a bigger scale than the assumed 3-5% of sufferers worldwide. This is the main reason of me contacting you, as I have the feeling that more awareness needs to be raised, as many many people suffer of a small portion of ES symptoms. Especially prevalent seems the following: Most men carry their mobile in their jacket or trousers for easy access. I used to carry mine in my motorbike jacket’s front left pocket. When I stopped doing that the unexplained palpitations I suffered from for 2 years vanished immediately. In conversations with friends, colleagues and fellow bikers I heard that many of them experience similar symptoms like pain or tremors in the chest area or what the American media refers to as ‘phantom text messages’.
Every now and then I’d think I had a text message, when carrying my phone in my trouser pockets, but when I checked there was nothing there. According to Swedish scientist and ES expert Olle Johansson this is caused by high intensity bursts of extremely-low frequency electromagnetic field charges that your phone is producing and (that are) affecting your nervous system. This seems to affect mainly men, as men are more likely to carry their phone on their body than women, who mainly carry them in their handbags. Of course I don?t know, if carrying your mobile is a cause of ES or if these phantom text messages are just another symptom and the causes could lie somewhere else, like problems with your immune system for example, which could to make you more susceptible to all the electromagnetic radiation around us, but in any case I guess it can?t be good to have heart palpitations. I know: I have heard every joke about ‘vibrating pockets’ and have been many times referred to Ben Goldacre’s ‘Bad Science’ column. There are definitely pseudo-scientists out there making a lot of money from scaremongering, but we have to distinguish between those and the victims in all this.
Retrospectively I am convinced that my heart palpitations were an early warning sign for what was happening later on. I might have been able to avoid to come to down with electro-sensitivity, if I had known more about it. And believe me: ES is not an easy thing to live with. During all this happening I thought for a short period of time, that it might just be my ancient phone causing trouble, so I opted for an iphone, but that just made things far worse, which brings me to another issue of widespread problems nobody seems willing to be talking about. Now I know that the radiation emitted from an iphone/ Blackberry is far higher than the one of my old Nokia. (Measured in SAR ratings: iphone a whopping 2.0, the ancient Nokia a mere 0.57) In the US for example the guidelines are much tighter, the iphone on the market there has a lower rating. Since then I have spoken to many proud owners of their Powerful 3G Phones. Many of them experience sleep problems (most of them seem to wake up in the early hours of the morning (around 4.30 am) and find it difficult to get back to sleep) and/ or feel ill. Even though some of them admitted, that their problems started shortly after acquiring their new gadget, they are of course unwilling to put two and two together. As I was when it all started happening to me. Our fast communication tools are just so wonderfully convenient, that we are very reluctant to think, there might be a problem. And I?m not talking about some weird conspiracy theory. Just the reluctance to let go of something making our lives so much easier. But maybe the price we are all paying on the long run will be too high? Even though it should be said, that of course the revenue of the communications industry is vast. But smoking used to be a relaxing pastime, didn’t it? If you are still sceptical, while reading this, maybe you can suspend your disbelief and convey an easy test: Maybe ask around in your office, if people are experiencing sleep problems and/ or the phantom text messages? Maybe ask willing participants to switch off their mobile and Wifi during the night, remove the DECT phone from the bedroom and not to carry the mobile on their bodies for a period to see if it makes any difference? The phones, if kept switched on by your bed (i.e. used as an alarm clock) will not let your brain go into a proper sleep pattern and thus not allowing for your body’s necessary recuperation process to work over night.
There should be warnings on phones: Do not keep by your bed. I am sure that the results of such a test will be very convincing. Since all this has happened to me I have spoken to many fellow sufferers, as well. Many people, completely left alone by the NHS, forced to leave their jobs and in some cases even their homes. I am in writing contact with a woman who is now living in a tent, as it is the only place, where she can be symptom free. A desolate and lonely existence. The people I have spoken to come from all walks of life: lawyers, bankers, actors, lighting technicians, librarians etc. They all suffer the same symptoms. If they were all hypochondriac, how come they all have the same set of symptoms? Surely this can’t be some sort of mass hallucination or hysteria.
Even the though numbers are growing ES sufferers and anyone trying to ask for more research are being ridiculed. So far research hasn’t come up with any conclusive results, but as a sufferer of ES I know, that has just to do with the fact that the scientists undertaking the trials don’t understand (or worse don’t take it seriously) and so the lab environment is a problem in itself for most sufferers. The whole scenario reminds me very much of the case of ME (especially because of some of the similarities in symptoms between the two illnesses). Sufferers of ME were ridiculed for years as having ‘yuppie flu’.
Maybe there is even a link? Other problems to come include the widespread ideas of rolling out wifi over whole cities and the installation of so-called smart-meters, that will send your electricity usage reading wirelessly to the providers. I am already scared, how I will be able to live my life and cope at my job with the increasing EMFs and Wifi everywhere. Looking back it would have been great, if I had known more about the possible problems of overexposure to modern communication.
We all should be more careful until it is really proven that there are no dangers involved in using wireless technology to the extent we do at the moment. Personally I'm really worried for the future of all my friends and family living in this country. I believe we are sleep walking into a really big problem for our health. Please take the time to look at the sites above, and talk to others!
Posted 2/27/2010 4:11:49am
by spinneyhorse
It's really quite simple. 20 years ago, almost NOBODY had brain tumors, and brain cancer was completely uncommon. Brain surgeons could barely sustain themselves financially because there was very little demand for their services. Now, 20 years later, almost everyone knows somebody who had a brain tumor or who has died of brain cancer, and brain surgeons are in high demand. This is no coincidence. This is evidence that cell phones are killing us, yet people don't even give a sh**.
Posted 2/25/2010 10:47:39am
by scotty321
It is easy to dismiss anecdotal evidence, but when the proper monitoring is not being carried out it is what we have to rely on. Michael Thun, the director of the American Cancer Society spoke at the 9/2009 Cell Phones and Health Conference in Washington, DC. He said that there is no monitoring of non malignant brain tumors.
But we do have doctors telling us that they have seen a great increase and just about everyone now knows someone who has had one. Russia has RFR exposure limits that take into account the cumulative non thermal effect. They have determined that there is a threshold effect. Limited exposure to RFR may be beneficial, but at a certain point all future exposure becomes pathological. This is what has happened to those of us who have been tipped over into electrohypersensitivity. I foolishly kept a WiFi router in my bedroom and then had the unhappy circumstance of moving to a home next to antennas on a two story building. My sensitivity is not due to cell phone use. While RFR has not been shown to break DNA there are other mechanisms by which it can cause an increase in cancers. These are: The magnetic fields in RFR have been shown to twist the polarity in our cell membranes.
This interferes with the cell function. RFR has been shown to alter brain waves which interferes with our sleep patterns which leads to lower melatonin levels which is associated with higher incidents of cancer.
The resonance of RFR has been shown to knock calcium ions off of the cell membrane. Again interfering with cellular function. RFR has been shown to interfere with the recombining of DNA resulting in more double strand breaks, again associated with higher incidents of cancer.
RFR opens the blood brain barrier which allows toxins into the brain. I have written a report on cell towers which you can find here - CELL TOWERS AND WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS – LIVING WITH RADIOFREQUENCY RADIATION
http://www.scribd.com/doc/24352550/Cell-Tower-Rpt
Posted 2/22/2010 12:29:36pm
by angelaflynn
I am a former staffer for Senator Charles Schumer and I have a condition called electromagnetic (hyper) sensitivity. It has been called microwave illness or an allergy to electricity (or to the 21st century) -- it means that I am extremely sensitive to radiation from electromagnetic fields including electrical appliances, cell phones, wifi, cordless phones etc. Three years ago, I began noticing pressure in my ear and head when I spoke on my cell phone for more than five minutes. It was a strange feeling but it always abated within a few moments of ending the call. Over the next few months, I found that the amount of time I could speak on the cell phone without (what was becoming) pain went down to three minutes -- and eventually down to just one minute. Eventually, it felt like my eardrum was going to pop and I was getting a dizzy/nauseated feeling as well. As you might guess, I decided that cell phones were not for me. I was surprised when my cordless phone began giving me the same pain in my ears and heard and began making me feel nauseated -- but I had heard that DECT cordless phones also gave off radiation, and I understood that I was reacting to this kind of radiation. When the pain followed me in my use of a regular land line -- I began to really worry. Without any phone, I couldn't talk to my parents in the States. I couldn't imagine holding a job. As I researched the issue, I learned of a condition called electromagnetic hyper sensitivity. It explained the pain in my hands when I used my mouse and keyboard. It explained my growing anxiety/anger issues, foggy headedness and the stiff neck and back that I awoke with each morning. It explained my heart palipitations and sleeplessness. It explained my frequent upset stomach and twitching legs. It explained the tingling and pain I felt when holding electrical appliances.
Posted 2/8/2010 10:09:00am
by Paularb
My wife was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. She had 3 UNIQUE tumors very near each other in one breast only. She used to carry her cell phone in her bra while talking via her bluetooth. This went on for several years. Her oncology surgeon is convinced beyond any doubt that the phone caused this so much so that she wants to go public with the story. If the author of this article is interested in what happened to her feel free to email me.
Posted 2/7/2010 11:07:31pm
by cellphonebreastcancer
What your article did was help me connect a few more dots... It's surreal...my cousin-in-law was diagnosed with a tumour behind the ear recently and as a result found it hard to control her salivating. It's the first time I had ever heard or seen anyone with this condition. Cancer to me commonly affected lungs, livers, pancreas, breasts etc The ear was definitely a new one. She under-went a tough chemo-therapy programme, spent a mini-fortune in hospital fees and pulled through. At the time, I found it hard to accept such a vivacious lady could suffer in such a way. I couldn't help but notice it was on her right cheek...and yes she was a regular mobile phone user. Yet, I kept my thoughts to myself. Personally, I have always been wary of mobile phones unlike many of my family and friends who see it as an extension of their arm. I intend to be careful with my usage of these devices but recognise I will always be inevitably exposed in urban cafes, shopping , offices and the mass transit systems. Hobson's choice prevails as I can't afford to live like a rural hermit. My take-away from this is to make sure when I switch off my laptop, I also power off my wi-fi modem as a practical measure.
Posted 2/7/2010 6:56:36am
by Gra
As a former radio communications technician, we've known for decades that exposure to RF fields is potentially dangerous. I am electro-sensitive myself, and can detect strong radar and radio waves physically, just like the example in this article. My late mentor, who invented the hands-free speaker system for cellular phones, and a genuine genius, emphasized over and over for years that such exposure was indeed life-threatening. There seems to be a strong link of causation with certain cancers, so minimizing exposure to RF makes very good sense.
Posted 2/6/2010 2:26:50am
by Alexis777
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