W.E.E.P. News
Wireless Electrical and Electromagnetic Pollution News
1 September 2010
Brock University staff get Wi-Fi warning
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
http://www.cbc.ca:80/consumer/story/2010/08/31/con-wi-fi-warning.html
CBC News
Employees of Brock University in St. Catharines are being warned to be wary of Wi-Fi by a former member of the school's joint health and safety committee.
Wi-Fi is convenient for students, but some worry the electromagnetic radiation may be harmful. (iStock)Prof. David Fancy, head of the drama department, took the unusual step of issuing a news release to warn staff about Wi-Fi dangers.
"There have been some, what I consider to be false and misleading statements made by public health officials recently about wireless and the fact that they don't cause a public health risk, and I think that that's incorrect," Fancy said in an interview with CBC News.
Last year, Fancy sat on a Brock sub-committee that looked into health issues involving electromagnetic safety, and came away with deep concerns.
"We came to the conclusion that unlike Health Canada's assertion that says that Canada's safety code protects us, we felt that there was more evidence out there to suggest that this isn't necessarily correct."
In response to concerns about radiation from wireless internet connections, Health Canada issued a statement on Aug. 18 dismissing suggestions the electromagnetic radiation could be harmful.
"Based on scientific evidence, Health Canada has determined that exposure to low-level radiofrequency energy, such as that from Wi-Fi systems, is not dangerous to the public," the department said.
'I knew straight away that there were hidden dangers to the young children.'— Barrie Trower, British scientist.
But many are unconvinced, including a British scientist who spoke on the issue in Toronto last week. Barrie Trower, a microwave expert during the Cold War era, maintains that the level of microwave radiation emitted by dozens of computers accessing Wi-Fi is enough to damage the health of humans.
"When I saw Wi-Fis being put in schools at the same powers and the same levels that were used in the 1960s for experiments, I knew straight away that there were hidden dangers to the young children," Trower said in a recent interview on CBC Radio's Metro Morning.
Scientist Barry Trower is concerned that using several wireless computers in a classroom elevates the amount of electromagnetic radiation to harmful levels. (iStock)With schools, colleges and universities beginning classes soon, Wi-Fi has become a hot-button issue. Earlier this month a school in Simcoe, Ont., refused to turn off its Wi-Fi system, despite demands from a parents group.
The parents believed the Wi-Fi system was making their children sick.
Trower says it's the amassed radiation of several computers operating at the same time the boosts the level of radiation.
"With Wi-Fi you have 20 to 30 sets in a classroom, they are exposed for a long time, and probably in the next classroom and the next classroom. It's like taking a microwave transmitter outside the school for mobile phones and putting it inside the classroom."
Public health officials adamantly deny there is any danger from Wi-Fi.
However, Fancy said he believes there are enough questions to merit a public warning about W-Fi at Brock.
"It's not necessarily up to me to say that they cause harm," he said. "I think there's a lot of evidence to suggest that they do. But we certainly can't say with any conclusive level that they're safe."
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Researcher has a wake-up call about wireless
B.C. author promotes consumer guide to reducing electromagnetic radiation
By Pamela Fayerman, Vancouver Sun August 31, 2010
Kerry Crofton travels with a land line phone, purposely stays in hotels that don't offer wireless Internet in rooms and when she gives her talk tonight on the topic of wireless radiation, it will be in a downtown Vancouver venue selected because it purportedly has no such radiation.
The Victoria-based health researcher is speaking at the wireless network-free St. Andrew's-Wesley Church, where she's promoting her new book, Wireless Radiation Rescue, said to be the first consumer guide to reducing levels of electromagnetic radiation in homes, offices and schools.
Crofton does practise what she preaches. Hence, arranging a phone interview to take place while she was en route to Vancouver was a bit of a challenge since she owns a cellphone but prefers not to use it except in emergencies. The interview took place during her sailing; she called from a pay phone on the ship.
Some would argue Crofton's beliefs are extreme. A B.C. study a few years ago concluded there may be one extra case of childhood leukemia every two years because of power lines.
Health Canada, meanwhile, has issued statements denying the health threat from wireless technology and cellphones.
"Based on scientific evidence, Health Canada has determined that exposure to low-level radio-frequency energy, such as that from Wi-Fi systems, is not dangerous to the public," said a statement from the federal agency.
On another occasion, Health Canada said it "currently sees no scientific reason to consider the use of cellphones as unsafe ... and there is no convincing evidence of increased risk of disease from exposure to radio frequency electromagnetic fields from cellphones."
But Crofton, who has a doctoral degree in health psychology, has spent the last five years collecting research on radiation from power lines, cellphones, cordless phones, wireless Internet, computers, baby monitors and microwaves.
And she's convinced that government standards meant to be protective are too lenient and while cellphone industry-sponsored research may show no impacts, other studies do show biological effects causing symptoms such as headaches, heart effects, decreased fertility and neurological disorders.
Crofton has three decades of experience devising wellness and heart health programs for air traffic controllers, pilots, nurses, teachers and others. Until she started doing her research, Crofton was like most people: she wanted the latest, fastest technology.
"It's not that I am against technology now. The Internet is extraordinary. Computers are essential. I just make sure that I have mine set up as a fully wired system, without the wireless mouse, without the wireless monitor and without the wireless router."
She acknowledges that not all people will experience symptoms of such radiation.
"Absolutely, there are some people who are more electro-sensitive than others.," she said.
Recently, a British scientist waded into the issue of wireless networks in Canadian schools, warning generations could face genetic disorders because of prolonged exposure to low-level microwaves.
"Children are not small adults, they are underdeveloped adults, so there are different symptoms," said Barrie Trower, who specialized in microwave "stealth" warfare during the Cold War.
Crofton will be joined tonight by American cardiologist Dr. Stephen Sinatra.
Hillar
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A Pushback Against Cell Towers
The following article appeared in the August 27, 2010 New York Edition of the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/realestate/29Lizo.html?_r=1&ref=realestate
By MARCELLE S. FISCHLER
Published: August 27, 2010
TINA CANARIS, an associate broker and a co-owner of RE/MAX Hearthstone in Merrick, has a $999,000 listing for a high ranch on the water in South Merrick, one of a handful of homes on the block on the market. But her listing has what some consider a disadvantage: a cell antenna poking from the top of a telephone pole at the front of the 65-by-100-foot lot.
"Even houses where there are transformers in front" make "people shy away," Ms. Canaris said. "If they have the opportunity to buy another home, they do."
She said cell antennas and towers near homes affected property values, adding, "You can see a buyer's dismay over the sight of a cell tower near a home just by their expression, even if they don't say anything."
By blocking, or seeking to block, cell towers and antennas over the course of the last year, Island homeowners have given voice to concerns that proximity to a monopole or antenna may not be just aesthetically unpleasing but also harmful to property values. Many also perceive health risks in proximity to radio frequency radiation emissions, despite industry assertions and other evidence disputing that such emissions pose a hazard.
Emotions are running so high in areas like Wantagh, where an application for six cell antennas on the Farmingdale Wantagh Jewish Center is pending, that the Town of Hempstead imposed a moratorium on applications until Sept. 21. That is the date for a public hearing on a new town ordinance stiffening requirements.
At a community meeting on Aug. 16 at Wantagh High School, Dave Denenberg, the Nassau county legislator for Bellmore, Wantagh and Merrick, told more than 200 residents that 160 cell antennas had been placed on telephone poles in the area in the last year by NextG, a wireless network provider.
"Everyone has a cellphone," Mr. Denenberg said, "but that doesn't mean you have to have cell installations right across the street from your house."
Under the old town code, installations over 30 feet high required an exemption or a variance. But in New York, wireless providers have public utility status, like LIPA and Cablevision, and they can bypass zoning boards.
Earlier this month in South Huntington, T-Mobile was ordered to take down a new 100-foot monotower erected on property deemed environmentally sensitive (and thus requiring a variance). Andrew J. Campanelli, a civil rights lawyer in Garden City, said a group of residents had hired him to oppose the cellular company's application.
"They were worried about the property values," Mr. Campanelli said. "If your home is near a cell antenna, the value of your property is going down at least 4 percent. Depending on the size of the tower and the proximity, it is going down 10 percent."
In January, in an effort to dismantle 50 cell antennas on a water tower across from a school in the village of Bayville, Mr. Campanelli filed a federal lawsuit that cited health risks and private property rights.
In a statement, Dr. Anna F. Hunderfund, the Locust Valley superintendent, said that in February 2009 the district had engaged a firm to study the cellphone installations near the Bayville schools, finding that the tower "posed no significant health risks," and she noted that the emission levels fell well below amounts deemed unsafe by the Federal Communications Commission.
In June 2009, Sharon Curry, a psychologist in Merrick, woke up to find a cell antenna abutting her backyard, level to her 8-year old son's bedroom window.
Puzzled by its presence, particularly because she lives next to an elementary school, she did research to see if there was cause for concern.
What she learned about possible health impacts, she said, led her to seek help from civic associations and to form a group, Moms of Merrick Speak Out, to keep new cell towers out. She said she was seeking the "responsible" placement of cell antennas, away from homes and schools.
The Federal Communications Act of 1996 says health concerns are not a valid reason for a municipality to deny zoning for a cell tower or antenna. Property values and aesthetics, however, do qualify, according to the act.
Frank Schilero, an associate broker with RE/MAX Innovations in Wantagh, has a listing on a $629,000 home down the street from the Farmingdale Wantagh Jewish Center, where the application is pending to put six cell antennas on the roof.
"People don't like living next to cell towers, for medical reasons or aesthetics," Mr. Schilero said. "Or they don't want that eyesore sticking up in their backyards." There is an offer on his listing, he added, but since the buyer heard about the possible cell antennas she has sought more information from the wireless companies about their size and impact.
Charles Kovit, the Hempstead deputy town attorney, said that under the proposed code change any new towers or antennas would have to be 1,500 feet from residences, schools, houses of worship and libraries.
The town recently hired a consultant, Richard A. Comi of the Center for Municipal Solutions in Glenmont, to review antenna applications.
Under the new ordinance, applications for wireless facilities would require technical evidence that they had a "gap" in coverage necessitating a new tower.
"If not, they will get denied," Mr. Kovit said. The wireless companies would also have to prove that the selected location had "the least negative impact on area character and property values." If another location farther away from homes can solve the gap problem, "they are going to have to move."
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How Dirty Electricity Causes Diseases
Is this silent killer playing a significant factor in the development of chronic diseases?
http://emf.mercola.com/sites/emf/archive/2010/08/31/how-dirty-electricity-causes-diseases.aspx
Jolanta
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'Homeopathic' Signals from DNA
This is very interesting research showing that DNA from viruses and bacteria, in dilute solutions (similar to what is used in homeopathy), generate electromagnetic signals. If this is indeed the case, then those signals may be providing information to nearby cells if those cells have receptors tuned to the same frequency. By mimicking the same signals or interfering with those signals scientist can control different mechanisms including potentially harmful toxic microbes. This fits in with our exposure to digitally pulsed electromagnetic frequencies at very low intensities.
Once we understand the message that is sent and how it is received we can manipulate cells and organelles (by providing them with electromagnetic signals) and thus we can use this energy to harm or heal in subtle ways.
Scientists are beginning to understand (decode) the genetic code and now what we need to decode the electromagnetic code and how to translate electromagnetic signals into information at the cellular and subcellular level.
Very exciting development with "unimaginable" applications and consequences!!!!!
-magda
drmagdahavas@gmail.com
From: press-release@i-sis.org.uk
Date: August 31, 2010 7:01:47 AM PDT
Subject: 'Homeopathic' Signals from DNA
This article can be found on the I-SIS website at
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/homeopathicSignalsFromDNA.php
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ISIS Report 31/08/10
'Homeopathic' Signals from DNA
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Nobel Laureate who discovered the HIV presents controversial but well-documented findings that electromagnetic signals can be detected from highly diluted solutions of DNA. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho
"Luc Montagnier, the French virologist who won a Nobel prize in 2008 for linking HIV with AIDS, last week made controversial claims that highly dilute solutions of harmful viruses and bacteria emit low-frequency radio waves, allegedly from watery nanostructures formed around the pathogens. Similar claims have been made for homeopathic remedies." New Scientist [1]
Latest round of attack on homeopathy
Homeopathy has been subject to periodic attacks from the mainstream medical and scientific community aided and abetted by uninformed journalist in the mainstream press eager to create a good impression with the scientific establishment.
The latest round was initiated by a damning report from the UK Parliament Science and Technology Committee released in February 2010, Evidence Check 2: Homeopathy [2], which concludes that the existing scientific literature shows no evidence that that homeopathy is efficacious beyond the placebo effect, and that "explanations for why homeopathy would work are scientifically implausible."
Therefore, the National Health Service should stop funding homeopathy and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency should not allow homeopathic product labels to make medical claims without evidence of efficacy.
In July, the British Medical Association passed a resolution to stop homeopathy being made available on the National Health Service (NHS), and to have all homeopathic remedies to be placed in a special area marked 'Placebos' in health shops and pharmacies. However, the UK government is not taking action to ban homeopathy from the NHS [3], which has funded homeopathy from its inception in 1948. So homeopathy is safe, at least for now.
Lack of plausible explanation the major hurdle in gaining public acceptance
The most difficult hurdle in getting general acceptance for homeopathy is without doubt the lack of an explanation, based on contemporary science, on why it would work. In my view, that is more important than getting double-blind, placebo-controlled data on efficacy. Such an explanation is beginning to emerge, and Luc Montagnier's research team may have provided some key observations.
The Nobel Laureate has entered the fray, bravely picking up on work done by his fellow countryman, the recently deceased immunologist Jacques Benveniste, who became the centre of a major international controversy in 1988, when Benveniste and his research team published a paper in the journal Nature describing the apparent homeopathic action of very high dilutions of anti-IgE antibody on the human blood cells basophils. As condition for publishing the paper, the then journal editor John Maddox organised and subjected Benveniste and his team to a farcical and damaging public trial [4] that included illusionist and well-known sceptic James Randi and fraud expert Walter Stewart .
Montagnier's recent work, summarily dismissed in the New Scientist [1] and elsewhere, has been published in two papers in 2009, and the evidence presented is clear and informative.
"A novel property of DNA"
The first paper reports the capacity of some bacterial DNA sequences to induce electromagnetic waves at high dilutions in water [5], and appears to be a "resonance phenomenon" triggered by the ambient electromagnetic background of very low frequency waves. Interestingly, genomic DNA of most pathogenic bacteria contain sequences that are able to generate such signals, suggesting that highly sensitive detection system might be developed for chronic bacterial infections in human and animal diseases. The second paper follows up this suggestion, showing that it is indeed possible to detect the presence of HIV DNA even when the RNA of the virus has disappeared from the blood of people infected with HIV and undergoing antiviral therapy (see [6] Electromagnetic Signals from HIV, Prospects for a Science of Homeopathy, SiS 48).
Montagnier and his colleague Claude Lavallee initially observed that filtering a culture supernatant of human lymphocytes infected with the bacterium Mycoplasma pirum (about 300 nm in diameter) through filters with pore size of 100 nm or 20 nm gave apparently sterile fluid. However, the sterile fluid was able to regenerate the original mycoplasma when incubated with a mycoplasma-negative culture of human lymphocytes within 2 to 3 weeks. Similarly, filtering an infective fraction of HIV particles (120 nm) through 20 nm filter failed to retain the infective agent.
Furthermore, the infectious filtrate produced electromagnetic waves of low frequency in a reproducible manner after appropriate dilutions in water. They suspected a "resonance phenomenon" depending on excitation by the ambient electromagnetic fields such as the 50/60 Hz signals from the mains. The infectious signal appeared associated with "polymeric nanostructures of defined size" present in the diluted filtrate. The supernatant of uninfected eukaryotic cells used as controls did not have those infectious effects.
EM signals associated with nanostructures
Given the initial clues, the researcher team set out to investigate the phenomenon more thoroughly, to characterize the electromagnetic (EM) signals and the nanostructures produced by the purified bacteria.
In addition to M. pirum, they looked at E. coli. The supernatants of deliberately infected human lymphocytes containing 106 or 107 infectious units per ml were filtered twice first through 450 nm Millipore filters to remove debris, and then 100 or 20 nm filters to remove mycoplasma cells. The filtrates were confirmed sterile by incubation for several weeks in enriched growth medium. Repeated search for traces of mycoplasma DNA by polymerase chain reactions (PCR) was also consistently negative.
However, when the filtrates were incubated for two weeks or three weeks with a culture of human activated T lymphocytes, the mycoplasma was recovered in the medium with all its original characteristics.
The filtrates were analysed just after filtration for production of EM waves of low frequency. For this purpose, a devise previously designed by Benveniste and Coll was used for the detection of signals produced (see Figure 1).
Figure 1 Detecting EM signals with Benveniste and Coll's device
The filtrates were serially diluted 1 in 10, after each dilution, the tube is tightly stopped and strongly agitated on a Vortex apparatus for 15 seconds. This step, which is equivalent to homeopathic 'succussion', has been found critical for the generation of signals.
After all dilutions have been made (15 to 20), the stopped tubes were read one by one on an electromagnetic coil (copper wire on a bobbin, impedance 300 Ohms), connected to a Sound Blaster Card, itself connected to a laptop computer powered by its 12 volt battery. Each emission is recorded twice for 6 seconds, amplified 500 times and processed with different softwares to visualise the signals on the computer screen. The main harmonics of the complex signals were analysed by softwares for Fourier transformations. In each experiment, the internal noise generated by the different pieces of the reading system was first recorded (coil alone, coil with a tube filled with ordinary water). Fourier analysis shows that the noise was predominantly very low frequencies probably generated at least in part by the 50/60 Hz ambient electric current. Using the 12 volt battery to power the computer reduced the noise, but did not abolish it altogether; as the noise was found to be necessary for the induction of the resonance signals from the specific nanostructure.
Read the rest of this report at the ISIS website
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/homeopathicSignalsFromDNA.php
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