W.E.E.P. News
Wireless Electrical and Electromagnetic Pollution News
14 August 2010
Wireless phones cause cancer or other maladies. Or not
By WILLIAM BENDER
Philadelphia Daily News
Fri, Aug. 13, 2010
http://www.philly.com/dailynews/local/20100813_CELLPHONEOSCOPY.html
benderw@phillynews.com 215-854-5255
HAVE A HEADACHE? Do you talk on a cell phone? You might be dying of brain cancer!
Guys, are you having trouble getting your wife pregnant? Maybe that iPhone in your pocket is nuking your sperm!
Moms, are your kids misbehaving? Prenatal radiation from your BlackBerry may have caused them irreparable harm!
Or not.
Years of research into the potential dangers of cell phones - about 5 billion phones are in use worldwide - has produced a staggering amount of data.
The conclusion: Long-term, heavy exposure to cell-phone radiation may increase your risk of brain cancer, salivary-gland cancer, a reduced sperm count and other serious health effects.
Or they're completely harmless. It depends which physicist or epidemiologist you ask, which research you cite, and even which section of a particular study you believe.
It's enough to keep you awake at night. (That insomnia, by the way, probably has nothing to do with yakking away on the phone before bedtime. Then again, it might, according to one study).
"The solution here is not hard. This is not rocket science. Just keep it away from your brain," said epidemiologist Devra Davis, author of "Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry Has Done to Hide It, and How to Protect Your Family," due out next month.
Davis, who argues that the $153 billion wireless industry is blocking Americans' access to reliable information on cell-phone radiation, said that consumers should change their habits now - even if the science is inconclusive - to prevent a "catastrophe" years down the road.
"In my professional opinion, there are a number of cases of people with brain tumors today for which cell-phone radiation was a major contributing cause," she said.
Experts who believe that the radiation could be harmful recommend using a speaker phone or a hands-free device - preferably a wired headset - instead of holding the phone to your ear, and texting instead of talking.
"A Bluetooth [hands-free device] does reduce your exposure significantly," Davis said. "But if you have the Bluetooth on all the time and the phone is in your front pocket where it's radiating your gonads, that really is not a good idea. You want to keep the phone off of your body."
Bruce Stutz, whose report in Yale Environment 360 last week examined a decade of peer-reviewed studies, said it's difficult to assess the dangers of cell phones because brain cancers are slow-growing and the use of wireless devices is evolving.
"There's no real way to know at this point. There are indications both ways," Stutz said. "Most of the scientists that I spoke with are of the opinion that there is more research that needs to be done."
Inaccurate data on radiation exposure can wreak havoc on a study's results. The World Health Organization's 10-year, 13-country survey published this year actually found a reduced cancer risk among some cell-phone users, which researchers described as "implausible" and attributed to a flawed methodology.
Want reassurance that your phone is safe? Talk with Robert Park, a physics professor and former chairman of the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland. Even though he sets off a firestorm of controversy every time he says it, Park states unequivocally: "Cell phones don't cause cancer."
Park, who seeks to debunk pseudoscience, said the radiation emitted by cell phones is not nearly powerful enough to alter DNA, and therefore, is not harmful to humans.
"There's nothing else to say about it," he said. "There is no reason to do these damned studies."
Park speculates that the legal industry might be pushing the cancer connection, hoping to cash in on a "mass tort blitz."
"If they can show, however remote the possibility, just the tiniest evidence that every once in a great while a cell phone causes cancer, then everyone [who] uses a cell phone . . . that gets cancer can sue," Park said.
Kenneth Foster, a University of Pennsylvania bioengineering professor who studies the health and safety of electromagnetic fields, said that if phone radiation were dangerous, the studies probably would be more conclusive by now.
"People have been arguing about the health effects of electromagnetic fields for over 100 years," Foster said. But, he admits, cell phones are relatively new, so "realistically, nobody knows what's going to happen in the long run."
"It'll never die down," Foster said of the dispute. "Anyone who wants to worry can pick and choose some bits of evidence and say the world is coming to an end."
The research to date is not damning enough to concern heavy cell-phone users like Diane Rossi, 33, of Ridley Park. She burns through up to 3,000 minutes a month, and another study isn't going to slow her down.
"It's always something," said Rossi, who works at a lithium-battery research and development company. "I'm not really sold on the fact that a cell phone is going to up my risk. I feel like I'm exposed to these waves every day all the time anyway. I can't imagine a lot of people in my age group changing their habits."
But Davis, the epidemiologist, said independent studies of cell phones have shown a higher risk of cancer and other diseases than studies supported by the wireless industry. She's worried that the public is being misled by the "he said, she said" nature of the debate and the conflicting data.
In June, San Francisco passed a cell-phone "Right-to-Know" ordinance that would require stores to inform customers of how much radiation each cell phone emits. The industry group CTIA-The Wireless Association, which insists that cells phones are safe, filed a lawsuit last month seeking to block the law.
John Walls, CTIA's vice president of public affairs, said the law would mislead consumers by creating "the impression that there's a difference in safety between one device and another," even though all the phones on the market meet Federal Communications Commission safety standards.
"The FCC and science tells us they're all safe," Walls said.
Davis said the wireless industry appears to be "following the playbook" of big tobacco, which denied the risks of smoking until the evidence was incontrovertible. Walls calls the comparison "outrageous.
"It's a little frustrating, to be honest with you," Walls said. "We're being painted in some circles as being the bad guys in this scenario, when all we do is defer to the scientific conclusions of world-renowned public-health organizations and agencies."
So, should you be taking steps to limit your cell-phone radiation exposure, like using a headset or speaker phone or turning it off when you're not using it?
No need, said Walls.
"Science tells us those types of precautions aren't necessary," he said. "But if they provide a higher comfort level for people, certainly that's their prerogative and their right to do that."
But Davis said if you ignore her advice, "you're treating yourself and your children like lab rats."
"From a public-health point of view, we don't want to be in the position, 20 years from now, of proving that cell phones were dangerous," she said. "We want to avoid what could become a catastrophe by taking simple steps to reduce exposure now."
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Parents Bring U.S. Researcher To Simcoe County To Address WiFi Concerns In Schools
2010/08/13 | Shawne McKeown, CityNews.ca
STORY TOOLS
A group of parents in Simcoe County wants their local school board to pull the plug on WiFi claiming the wireless systems are responsible for negative health effects in some students.
Rodney Palmer's nine-year-old son and five-year-old daughter attend Mountain View Elementary School in Collingwood. He's one of the organizers of the Simcoe County Safe School Committee, a group of parents concerned about the potential dangers of wireless technology.
Palmer, a former journalist who now works in the health care industry, claims he's seen the negative effects of microwave radiation in his children -- symptoms that abate when they're away from school.
"She was coming out of school listless, shoulders hung and saying 'Daddy, carry me to the car' and she wouldn't make it home, she'd fall asleep in her car seat," he said, referring to his daughter who attended kindergarten in the 2009-10 school year.
Palmer said approximately 30 children throughout the large board have experienced similar symptoms, including nausea, headaches, vertigo, attention deficit, and a racing heart beat.
The Safe Schools Committee says students at 14 different schools have all reported these symptoms. The group invited American public health researcher Susan Clarke, who specializes in radio-frequency radiation bio-effects, to speak to parents at a local library in Thornbury Wednesday.
"Children's brains are much more penetrable by microwave radiation because their skulls are thinner, particularly younger children, and they absorb much more of the microwave radiation in an environment than an adult will," Clarke told CityNews.ca.
John Dance, superintendent of education for the Simcoe County District School Board, said he's heard from a few concerned parents, but hasn't received solid proof to indicate a child has suffered health problems due to the wireless systems.
"Nobody's ever given medical documentation to say that somebody is sick because of this," he said.
Health Canada's Safety Code 6, which was updated last year and sets out guidelines for safe exposure to microwave radiation, is the official frame of reference.
"My understanding is, is that the level of what we have in our schools is a fraction … of what Safety Code 6 says," Dance said.
A Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health heard two days of testimony in April on effects of radio frequency radiation.
Palmer expressed concern about a fraction of the schools' WiFi transmitters located in his daughter's kindergarten class. He asked to have them turned off, but the board denied the request because it said shutting the units down would affect wireless access throughout the entire school.
The father said the board also refused to tell him exactly when WiFi was turned on in his kids' school.
"There's no good reason to be delaying, delaying, delaying everything we do when we're trying to find out the health of our children," he said. "They're treating us like we somehow want to overthrow them when all we want to do is get a safe school for our children."
Every school Simcoe County has wireless access, Dance said. The first phase of the plan rolled out in 2006.
Seventy-four schools in the Toronto District School Board have WiFi access.
"Some of our staff are putting together a report that will be going to one of the committee meetings this fall, probably in September, about research that they've done regarding health effects of access to wireless," TDSB spokeswoman Kelly Baker said.
Palmer claims there would be no difference in quality of education if Simcoe schools offered hard-wired Internet. Dance said hard-wiring students' desks for Internet access isn't a feasible option and noted computer labs limit pupils' time to access to online materials.
"Our main premise for doing wireless communications is equity and accessibility," he said.
"I have a school in the south end of Barrie that has 15 portables. They'd never get scheduled into a lab."
Dance insists the board is aware of parents' concerns and is staying abreast of current information on the issue. He said he reviewed the materials presented at the Parliamentary hearings earlier this year and the board abides by Health Canada standards.
"We only have one regulatory body … if the Parliamentary hearings come out and say we need to tighten our regulations, we'll abide by that, without a doubt," he said.
"We would never do anything knowingly to put people in harm's way and if we were in a situation where people were able to show us, definitively, that we can fix it, we would."
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Dirty Electricity: Electrification and the Diseases of ...
By emily
After recently doing pioneering work linking cancer clusters in schools to Dirty Electricity, he is now especially concerned about a cluster of Boeing workers with Lou Gehrig's disease and would like to study the electromagnetic ...
http://electromagnetichealth.org/electromagnetic-health-blog/sam-milham/
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