Article on electrosmog

Is 'electrosmog' harming our health?
By Michael Segell for Prevention Magazine [Comments in
brackets are Shivani's.]
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34509513/ns/health-cancer
updated 12:35 p.m. ET Jan. 18, 2010

In 1990, the city of La Quinta, CA, proudly opened the doors of its
sparkling new middle school. Gayle Cohen, then a sixth-grade teacher, recalls the
sense of excitement everyone felt: "We had been in temporary facilities for2
years, and the change was exhilarating."

But the glow soon dimmed.

One teacher developed vague symptoms - weakness, dizziness - and didn't
return after the Christmas break. A couple of years later, another developed
cancer and died; the teacher who took over his classroom was later diagnosed
with throat cancer. More instructors continued to fall ill, and then, in
2003, on her 50th birthday, Cohen received her own bad news: breast cancer.

"That's when I sat down with another teacher, and we remarked on all the
cancers we'd seen," she says. "We immediately thought of a dozen colleagues
who had either gotten sick or passed away."

By 2005, 16 staffers among the 137 who'd worked at the new school had been
diagnosed with 18 cancers, a ratio nearly 3 times the expected number. Nor
were the children spared: About a dozen cancers have been detected so far
among former students. A couple of them have died.

Prior to undergoing her first chemotherapy treatment, Cohen approached the
school principal, who eventually went to district officials for an
investigation. A local newspaper article about the possible disease clustercaught
the attention of Sam Milham, MD, a widely traveled epidemiologist who has
investigated hundreds of environmental and occupational illnesses and published
dozens of peer-reviewed papers on his findings. For the past 30 years, he
has trained much of his focus on the potential hazards of electromagnetic
fields (EMFs) - the radiation that surrounds all electrical appliances and
devices, power lines, and home wiring and is emitted by communications devices,
including cell phones and radio, TV, and WiFi transmitters.

His work has led him, along with an increasingly alarmed army of
international scientists, to a controversial conclusion: The "electrosmog" that first
began developing with the rollout of the electrical grid a century ago and
now envelops every inhabitant of Earth is responsible for many of the
diseases that impair - or kill - us.

Milham was especially interested in measuring the ambient levels of a
particular kind of EMF, a relatively new suspected carcinogen known as
high-frequency voltage transients, or "dirty electricity." Transients are largely
by-products of modern energy-efficient electronics and appliances - from
computers, refrigerators, and plasma TVs to compact fluorescent lightbulbs and
dimmer switches - which tamp down the electricity they use. This manipulation of
current creates a wildly fluctuating and potentially dangerous
electromagnetic field that not only radiates into the immediate environmentbut also can
back up along home or office wiring all the way to the utility, infecting
every energy customer in between.

With Cohen's help, Milham entered the school after hours one day to take
readings. Astonishingly, in some classrooms he found the surges of transient
pollution exceeded his meter's ability to gauge them. His preliminary
findings prompted the teachers to file a complaint with the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration, which in turn ordered a full investigation by the
California Department of Health Care Services. [The school did not cooperate
with Milham, a world-class epidemiologist offering to investigate, pro bono,
their cancer cluster. They tried to keep him from doing it.]

The final analysis, reported by Milham and his colleague, L. Lloyd Morgan,
in 2008 in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine: Cumulative exposure
to transients in the school increased the likelihood a teacher would develop
cancer by 64%. A single year of working in the building raised risk by 21%.
The teachers' chances of developing melanoma, thyroid cancer, and uterine
cancer were particularly high, as great as 13 times the average. Although not
included in the tabulations, the risks for young students were probably
even greater.

"In the decades-long debate about whether EMFs are harmful," says Milham,
"it looks like transients could be the smoking gun."

The case against EMFs

Cancer and electricity
Could a disease whose cause has long eluded scientists be linked to perhaps
the greatest practical discovery of the modern era? For 50 years,
researchers who have tried to tie one to the other have been routinely dismissed by a
variety of skeptics, from congressional investigators to powerful interest
groups - most prominently electric utilities, cell phone manufacturers, and
WiFi providers, which have repeatedly cited their own data showing the
linkage to be "weak and inconsistent."

Recently, however, in addition to the stunning new investigations into
dirty electricity (which we'll return to), several developments have highlighted
the growing hazards of EMF pollution - and the crucial need to address
them.

The evidence showing harm is overwhelming

In 2007, the Bioinitiative Working Group, an international collaboration of
prestigious scientists and public health policy experts from the United
States, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, and China, released a 650-page report citing
more than 2,000 studies (many very recent) that detail the toxic effects of
EMFs from all sources. Chronic exposure to even low-level radiation (like
that from cell phones), the scientists concluded, can cause a variety of
cancers, impair immunity, and contribute to Alzheimer's disease and dementia,
heart disease, and many other ailments. "We now have a critical mass of
evidence, and it gets stronger every day," says David Carpenter, MD, director of
the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany and
coauthor of the public-health chapters of the Bioinitiative report.

Fears about the hazards of cell phones seem justified

"Every single study of brain tumors that looks at 10 or more years of use
shows an increased risk of brain cancer," says Cindy Sage, MA, coeditor of
the report. A recent study from Sweden is particularly frightening, suggesting
that if you started using a cell phone as a teen, you have a 5 times
greater risk of brain cancer than those who started as an adult. The risk rises
even more for people who use the phone on only one side of the head. While
defenders of cell phone safety claim no scientist can explain why EMFs may be
harmful in humans, a body of reliable and consistent animal research shows
that electromagnetic fields, equal to those generated by mobile phones, open
the blood-brain barrier, causing blood vessels to leak fluid into the brain
and damage neurons. Ironically, that research (by renowned Swedish
neuro-oncologist Leif G. Salford, MD, PhD) began with the goal of finding away to
deliver chemotherapy to brain tumors. [To this day, the mechanism by which
tobacco smoke causes cancer is not known. The mechanism/s need not be known to
know there is harm and take appropriate action. However, in fact several
mechanisms are known. In addition to four more besides the effect on blood
brain barrier mentioned above, please see info. below, following this
article. -Shivani]  

Other countries are revising exposure standards

Members of the European Union, which has led the way on EMF investigations,
are moving quickly to protect their citizens, particularly children and
pregnant women. In the past 2 years alone, France, Germany, and England have
dismantled wireless networks in schools and public libraries, and other
countries are pressing to follow suit. Israel has banned the placement of cellular
antennae on residences, and Russian officials have advised against cell
phone use for children under 18.

Electrical hypersensitivity (EHS) is becoming more widespread

Symptoms of EHS, a recently identified condition, include fatigue, facial
irritation (resembling rosacea), tinnitus, dizziness, and digestive
disturbances, which occur after exposure to visual display units, mobile phones, WiFi
equipment, and commonplace appliances. Experts say up to 3% of all people
are clinically hypersensitive, as many as one-third of us to a lesser degree.

Electrical pollution is increasing dramatically

"For the first time in our evolutionary history, we have generated an
entire secondary, virtual, densely complex environment - an electromagneticsoup
- that essentially overlaps the human nervous system," says Michael
Persinger, PhD, a neuroscientist at Laurentian University who has studied the
effects of EMFs on cancer cells. And it appears that, more than a century after
Thomas Edison switched on his first lightbulb, the health consequences of that
continual overlap are just now beginning to be documented.

A history of harmful effects

Until Edison's harnessing of electricity, humans' only sources of EMF
exposure were the earth's static magnetic field (which causes a compass needle to
point north) and cosmic rays from the sun and outer space; over our long
evolution, we've adapted to solar EMFs by developing protective pigment. "But
we have no protection against other EMF frequencies," says Andrew Marino,
PhD, JD, a pioneer in bioelectromagnetics who has done extensive EMF research
and a professor in the department of orthopedic surgery at the Louisiana
State Health Sciences Center. "How quickly can we adapt our biology to these
new exposures? It's the most important environmental health question - and
problem - of the 21st century."

Research into the hazards of EMFs has been extensive, controversial - and,
at least at the outset, animated by political intrigue. A sampling:

The Russians first noticed during World War II that radar operators (radar
operates using radio frequency waves) often came down with symptoms we now
attribute to electrical hypersensitivity syndrome. In the 1960s, during the
height of the Cold War, they secretly bombarded the US embassy in Moscow with
microwave radiation (a higher-frequency RF used to transmit wireless
signals), sickening American employees. Radio wave sickness - also called
microwave sickness - is now a commonly accepted diagnosis.

When television (also radio wave) was introduced in Australia in 1956,
researchers there documented a rapid increase in cancers among people who lived
near transmission towers.

In the 1970s, Nancy Wertheimer, PhD, a Denver epidemiologist (since
deceased), detected a spike in childhood leukemia (a rare disease) among kids who
lived near electric power lines, prompting a rash of studies that arrived at
similar conclusions.

In the 1980s, investigators concluded that office workers with high
exposure to EMFs from electronics had higher incidences of melanoma - a disease
most often associated with sun exposure - than outdoor workers.

In 1998, researchers with the National Cancer Institute reported that
childhood leukemia risks were "significantly elevated" in children whose mothers
used electric blankets during pregnancy and in children who used hair
dryers, video machines in arcades, and video games connected to TVs.

Over the past few years, investigators have examined cancer clusters on
Cape Cod, which has a huge US Air Force radar array called PAVE PAWS, and
Nantucket, home to a powerful Loran-C antenna. Counties in both areas have the
highest incidences of all cancers in the entire state of Massachusetts.

More recently, the new findings on transients - particularly those crawling
along utility wiring - are causing some scientists to rethink that part of
the EMF debate pertaining to the hazards of power lines. Could they have
been focusing on the wrong part of the EMF spectrum?

Transients: the post-modern carcinogen

Some earlier, noteable - albeit aborted - research suggests this may be the
case. In 1988, Hydro-Québec, a Canadian electric utility, contracted
researchers from McGill University to study the health effects of power line EMFs
on its employees. Gilles Theriault, MD, DrPH, who led the research and was
chair of the department of occupational health at the university, decided to
expand his focus to include high-frequency transients and found, even after
controlling for smoking, that workers exposed to them had up to a 15-fold
risk of developing lung cancer. After the results were published in the
American Journal of Epidemiology, the utility decided to put an end to the study.

That research commenced at a time when energy-efficient devices - the major
generators of transients - were beginning to saturate North American homes
and clutter up power lines. A telltale sign of an energy-efficient device is
the ballast, or transformer, that you see near the end of a power cord on a
laptop computer, printer, or cell phone charger (although not all devices
have them). When plugged in, it's warm to the touch, an indication that it's
tamping down current and throwing off transient pollution. Two of the worst
creators of transient radiation: light dimmer switches and compact
fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). Transients are created when current is repeatedly
interrupted. A CFL, for instance, saves energy by turning itself on and off
repeatedly, as many as 100,000 times per second.

So how does the human body respond to this pulsing radiation? "Think of a
magnet," explains Dave Stetzer, an electrical engineer and power supply
expert in Blair, WI. "Opposite charges attract, and like charges repel. When a
transient is going positive, the negatively charged electrons in your body
move toward that positive charge. When the transient flips to negative, the
body's electrons are pushed back. Remember, these positive-negative shifts are
occurring many thousands of times per second, so the electrons in your body
are oscillating to that tune. Your body becomes charged up because you're
basically coupled to the transient's electric field."

Keep in mind that all the cells in your body, whether islets in the
pancreas awaiting a signal to manufacture insulin or white blood cells speeding to
the site of an injury, use electricity - or "electron change" - to
communicate with each other. By overlapping the body's signaling mechanisms, could
transients interfere with the secretion of insulin, drown out the
call-and-response of the immune system, and cause other physical havoc?

Some preliminary research implies the answer is yes. Over the past 3 years,
Magda Havas, PhD, a researcher in the department of environmental and
resource studies at Trent University in Ontario, has published several studies
that suggest exposure to transients may elevate blood sugar levels among
people with diabetes and prediabetes and that people with multiple sclerosis
improve their balance and have fewer tremors after just a few days in a
transient- free environment. Her work also shows that after schools installed
filters to clean up transients, two-thirds of teachers reported improvementin
symptoms that had been plaguing them [and their students], including headache,
dry eye, facial flushing, asthma, skin irritation, and depression.  
[Melrose-Mindoro, WI school nurse reported to the school board that after transients
were filtered from the school's electricity the number of students with
medically diagnosed asthma fell from 37 to 5, and she never again had to use
the nebulizer to enable a student to breathe when their pocket inhalator was
not sufficient help.]

Transients are particularly insidious because they accumulate and strengthe
n, their frequency reaching into the dangerous RF range. Because they travel
along home and utility wiring, your neighbor's energy choices will affect
the electrical pollution in your house. In other words, a CFL illuminating a
porch down the block can send nasty transients into your bedroom.

Something else is sending transients into your home: the earth. From your
high school science texts, you know that electricity must travel along a
complete circuit, always returning to its source (the utility) along a neutral
wire. In the early 1990s, says Stetzer, as transients began overloading
utility wiring, public service commissions in many states told utilities todrive
neutral rods into the ground on every existing pole and every new one they
erected. "Today, more than 70% of all current going out on the wires returns
to substations via the earth," says Stetzer - encountering along the way
all sorts of subterranean conductors, such as water, sewer, and natural-gas
pipes, that ferry even more electrical pollution into your home.

A pragmatic proposal

Of course, these small studies - from Milham, Hydro-Québec, and Havas -
hardly constitute a blanket indictment of transients. "We're still early in
this part of the EMF story," says Carpenter. Does that mean as evidence of
their harm accumulates, officials will raise a red flag? Not likely, if past EMF
debates are any indication. Power companies have successfully beaten back
attempts to modify exposure standards, and the cell phone industry, which has
funded at least 87% of the research on the subject, has effectively
resisted regulation. One good reason has had to do with latency - how long it takes
to develop a particular cancer, often 25 years or more. Cell phones have
been around only about that long.

But does that mean we avoid any discussion of their possible dangers?
Again, if the past is a guide, the answer appears to be "probably." American
scientists worried about the hazards of smoking, the DES (diethylstilbestrol)
pill (given to pregnant women, it caused birth defects), asbestos, PCBs
(polychlorinated biphenyls) - the list is lengthy - but officially warned about
exposure only after they could say with absolute certainty that these things
were harmful. As for protecting ourselves from toxic radiation, we have a lax
- and laughable - history. In the 1920s, just a few years after medical
imaging devices were invented, physicians were known to entertain their guests
by X-raying them at garden parties. In the 1930s, scientists often kept
radium in open trays on their desks. Shoe stores used X-ray machines in the
1940s to properly fit children's feet, and radioactive wristwatches with glowing
hour hands were popular in the 1950s.

All of which means that, absent prudent safety standards from both public
officials and manufacturers (adding a protective filter would add 5 cents to
the cost of making a CFL and $5 to the cost of a laptop), you'll have to
protect yourself from EMFs. Here's a reasonable proposition: Practice what is
known in Europe as the precautionary principle, which is pretty much what it
sounds like. Don't expose yourself unnecessarily to EMF hazards. Don't buy a
home next to a WiFi tower. Get a corded telephone instead of a cordless
one. Don't let your teenager sleep with a cell phone under her pillow. Don't
use your laptop computer in your lap. Treat your EMF-emitting devices with the
same cautious respect you do other invaluable modern devices, like your
car, which is also dangerous - and can kill. You don't drive in an
unnecessarily risky fashion - at high speed or while talking on a cell phone (right?).

The sad truth is that until we have more epidemiologic evidence - whether
from disease clusters like the ones at La Quinta and on Cape Cod or from
long-term analyses of the health of the world's 4-billion-and-growing cell phone
users - we won't know definitively whether electrical pollution is harming
us. And even then, we are unlikely to know why or how. "In this country, our
research dollars are spent on finding ways to treat disease, not on what
causes it - which is to say, how we can prevent it," says Marino. "And that's
a tragedy."

But that's also another story.

Copyright© 2010 Rodale Inc. All rights reserved. No reproduction,
transmission or display is permitted without the written permissions of Rodale Inc.
(end article)

Four more mechanisms by which EMF/EMR harms humans, as mentioned in a
letter to We Energies electric utility company of Wisconsin, written 1/4/2005 by
my physician, Roy Ozanne M.D.:

1.) It is established from multiple, independent studies that EMR from
ELF to RF/MW reduces melatonin in animals and human beings. Melatonin is
not only vital for healthy sleep, it is the most potent naturally produced
antioxidant that helps to protect cells from genetic damage that leads to
cancer, neurological, cardiac and reproductive damage, illness and death.

2) Exposure to intensities and field strengths that are extremely low
cause a biological effect called calcium ion efflux. Calcium ion
alteration of cells by EMR is linked to neurological degeneration, to cancer and many
other health effects. The heart is also an electromagnetic organ, with an
electric pulse initiating a cascade of calcium ions that cause the cells in
the heart to contract and produce a heartbeat. Exogenous electromagnetic
signals can interfere with this regular electrical pulse leading to heart
disease and heart attack of the arrhythmic kind.

3) Physiological changes that are bedrock indicators of allergic
response and inflammatory conditions that are stimulated by EMF exposures
include: overreaction of the immune system; morphological alterations of immune
cells; profound increases in mast cells in the upper skin layers, increased
degranulation of mast cells and larger size of mast cells in EHS individuals;
presence of biological markers for inflammation that are sensitive to EMF
exposure at non-thermal levels; changes in lymphocyte viability; decreased
count of NK cells; decreased count of T-lymphocytes; negative effects on
pregnancy (uteroplacental circulatory disturbances and placental dysfunction);
suppressed or impaired immune function; and inflammatory responses that can
result in cellular, tissue and organ damage if exposure occurs on a continuing
basis over time.
Mast cells are also found in the brain and heart, and this might accou
nt for some of the other symptoms commonly reported: headache, sensitivity
to light, cardiac arrythmias and other cardiac symptoms.

4.) Many studies have shown that RF/MW radiation and ELF fields cause
increased DNA strand breakage and chromosome aberrations.

Neither the utility company nor the Wisconsin PSC will respond to
information we have sent them about the health effects of EMR/EMF. They just
parrot that the RF-broadcasting meters they are installing are safe because
they conform to FCC guidelines. The electrically sensitive people who know
from painful experience how we are affected by exposure to RF have been
told that if we do not accept a RF-broadcasting meter on our home by April
15th, our power will be turned off.

Please see my website about the health effects of manmade electromagnetic
frequencies and some info. about the politics involved. Dirty, dirty.

Shivani Arjuna
www.LifeEnergies.com









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