Cell Phones and Microwaves                   

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To whom it may concern:

I am a 52 year old female who used cell phones for 15 years.  A little over two years ago I was diagnosed with two tumors and hydrocephalus.  Since then the tumors have been disclaimed, however I will let God take the credit, and I have been through two shunt installations in my brain to relieve the fluid, I had 10-12 times the amount of fluid on my brain than a normal person, and still had my mobile skills, which I believe was due to the progressive attacking of my brain over a period of time. 

There is no family history of Hydrocephalus and no indication till I started using cell phones.  Short term memory loss was my first symptom, in time my words became confused and mixed up, Then I thought I had sinus problems, so over a course of 7 years I actually had to get up and read every night for an hour or two till what I thought was my sinus draining, in actuality it was my brain draining.  

My body has also developed Electromagnetic Field Sensitivity, to the point I have had to sell my business because I can no longer be around cellular phones or wireless devices, and now even fluorescent lights are beginning to bother me.  I have had to sell one of my homes and am currently in route on my boat to a remote location in the Bahamas to attempt to heal my body. 

Thank you for reading this brief.  Hopefully it will help save lives.  I am trying to do so with each opportunity to tell someone about the dangers of cell phones.  They have ruined my life, I can no longer even worship at my church due to cell towers and units surrounding it.  My home in Houston has 4 towers within a mile and a half which makes it impossible for me to be comfortable in my home.  To add to it, there is a sleep disorder clinic behind my home and they leave their cell phones on and use all of that brain measuring equipment on all night.  Shielding has helped me to sleep to some extent as long as I sleep in my closet surrounded by shielding with all electrical power cut off. 

Some people laugh when I tell them I have a pump in my brain as a result of using phones for 15 years.  How do I know its from the cell phones?  I can actually feel the radiation attacking my brain, and the brain automatically tries to save itself, much like being hit over the head, therefore pumping out fluid.  I feel the pressure building, then the shunt kicking in to draw it out.   Pretty interesting.  Actually a year ago, two of my friends called me and asked if I had seen the TV news about a group of neurologist who had done a study on people with Hydrocephalus when they started having an influx of people my age coming in with it. 

I also have Hypothyroid, Chronic Fatigue, have been treated for Pituitary problems, now have circulation problems, and just had a skin cancer removed from my right arm.  All have been connected to the RFR exposure.  God has blessed me in my life and I hope to help others understand the hazards of the cell towers, cell phones and wireless industry.  If there is anything you are doing to get national attention and I can help, please advise.  God Bless,  Darlene Connolly,  Houston Texas.   email darlene1313@msn.com

Excellent resource for Microwave Hazards  http://members.aol.com/gotemf/emf

Busy Signals: Think Twice Before You Place That Call
by William Thomas

 Though intended for renovations, Chris Anderson would like all visitors to deposit their cellular phones in the cement mixer by his front door. This sounds excessive - until you step into Anderson's orchard, where the pegged needle of a shrieking electromagnetic radiation (EMR) meter placed beside a connected cell phone still shows significant exposure 100 feet away. 

 Much to the chagrin of this certified EMR-mitigation specialist, every day some 300 million cell phone users are "reaching out and touching someone you love. Yourself, and anyone else within range of the microwaves emitted by your phone."

 Mesmerized by magical gadgets, we have yet to count the costs of miniature radio transmitters that are transforming Marconi's invention into new possibilities for portable personal pollution. As entire nations reach for pocket communicators, the explosively emergent $40 billion a year mobile phone industry is poised to deliver a "Wireless Revolution" that over the next five years is expected to double the one-billion people connected by telephone lines over the past century.

 Silicon sensors are already calling to each other. Soon, countless communicating microchips embedded in everything from bumpers to brooms will be sending streams of encoded electrical energy through glass, steel, concrete, bone and flesh. 

 Exquisitely sensitive to subtle electromagnetic harmonies, human brains and bodies as intricate as galaxies depend on tiny electrical impulses to conduct complex life-processes - including the ability to read, recall and respond to these words. Acting as antennas, our anatomies just as easily tune into spurious signals from radio and microwave transmissions. Blake Levitt, author of Electromagnetic Fields, says that when it comes to cell phones, "a worse frequency could not have been chosen for the human anatomy." 

 As cell phones conquer consumer minds and markets, researcher Carolanne Patton notes that "the brain reaches peak absorption in the UHF bands, right where cellular telecommunications operate." British military scientists have discovered that cell phone transmissions disrupt the brain sites for memory and learning, causing forgetfulness and sudden confusion.

 Other studies show that electromagnetic signals from cellular phones reduce the ability to concentrate, calculate and coordinate complicated activities such as driving a car. Startled by $4 billion a year in extra claims among cell phone-wielding drivers, North American insurers did a double-take that found simply juggling 'phones is not causing a 600% increase in accidents over other drivers busy shaving, applying makeup, tuning radios, taming pets, making out, pouring coffee, retrieving dropped cigarettes, talking and gesturing to passengers, or actually steering the vehicle. 

 Instead of just another dangerous distraction, tests conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy found that using a cell phone severely impairs memory and reaction times. "Hands-free" mobile speaker-phones cause even more crashes because they typically emit 10-times more brainwave interference than handheld units.

 For all drivers dialing out, University of Toronto investigators report that the heightened probability of cracking up your car persists for up to 15-minutes after completing a call. 

 That's comparable to the risk of crashing while driving dead drunk exclaims Dr. Chris Runball, chairman of the B.C. Medical Association's emergency medical services committee. Reeling from "dial-a-collision" costs, the government of British Columbia may join England, Spain, Israel, Switzerland and Brazil in restricting or banning the use of cell phones by drivers.

 In New Zealand, cell phone towers are prohibited on school property because of possible health effects. But Health Canada regulations ignore the hidden hazards of cell-wrenching cell phones, which send pulsed  signals through the skull in a process one expert likens to "jackhammers on the brain." 

 "Safety Code 6" looks only at microwaves burning skin. "Basically, Health Canada claims if it can't cook you, it can't hurt you," says Walter McGinnis. "It's like saying cigarettes aren't dangerous unless they burn you."

 One of a handful of licensed electricians who understand  electromagnetic fields well enough to eliminate them from household wiring, McGinnis has been testing EMFs and collaborating with fellow testers and researchers for nearly a decade. In Victoria, where he has helped residents defeat six cell phone towers, there was dancing in the streets after Microcell Connexions withdrew its application to erect  a microwave transmission tower against the Wishart Elementary School fence in the spring of 1998. 

 Microcell spokesman Colin McCrae points out that emissions from the company's towers carry about the same energy as a 50-watt lightbulb - well within federal guidelines. 
This is hardly reassuring, retorts the former president of the Wisehart parents advisory council. Tania Berenuik observes that Health Canada "also told us thalidomide, asbestos and the blood supply were safe." 

 Carrying similar risks of long-term lethality, and strangely just as legal, cell phone addiction mirrors the prestigious early allure of smoking  - as well as an immensely profitable industry's steadfast denial of risk and responsibility. As poisonous as cigarette smoke and even harder to corral, the cell phone's "second-hand" microwave and radio-frequency (RF) pollution pose invisible but significant risks to bystanders - particularly children riding in cars that transmit amplified cell phone signals through their steel structure. Reporting the conclusions of a 12-person British study team, scientist Sir William Stewart told London's Financial Times that "children may be more vulnerable because of their developing nervous system, the greater absorption of energy in the tissues of the head and a longer lifetime of exposure."

 Roger Coghill became a long-standing advocate for health warnings to be affixed to mobile phones after this biologist found that cell phone transmissions damage the ability of white blood cells to ward off infectious disease by disrupting the immune system's electromagnetic communications.

 Dr. Neil Cherry has measured accelerated aging, increased cell death and cancers caused by radio frequency microwaves from cell phones and their relay towers. With the brain's electro-chemical communications repeatedly zapped by lightning-like cell phone pulses, this Ph.D. biophysicist warns that headaches, fatigue, lethargy, nausea, dizziness, depression, arteriosclerosis and even Alzheimer's can result from frequent or prolonged calls. 

 "There is also a higher incidence of cardiac problems," Cherry comments, "in terms of the timing function in hearts. You get more heart attacks and more heart disease - it has now been shown in many studies."

 The biophysicist from Lincoln University in Christ Church, New Zealand has also found that cell phones can murderously modify moods. In brains and bodies seriously derailed by tiny imbalances in trace minerals and hormones, depression, suicide, anger, rage and violence can result when calcium and serotonin levels are disrupted by cell phone transmissions.

  In 1995, mobile phone sales in North America exceeded the birth rate. Hired by the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association to condone cell phones, public health scientist George Carlo found that rare tumors on the outside of the brain are more than doubled among cell phone callers - particularly on the right side of the head where 'phones are usually held. Carlo told ABC's "20/20" that cell phone causes genetic damage that leads to cancer.

 Warning of "the potential for a global health disaster," ABC recommended "prudent avoidance" of cell phones after finding that every cell phone they lab-tested exceeded the Federal Communication Commission's standards for EMF absorption rates. EMF researcher Dave Ashton cautioned 20/20 viewers that because cell phones constantly search for the nearest repeating tower, "long-term damage comes from cell phones in the stand-by mode." Cell phone "shields" and headsets "cannot adequately address these problems," Ashton added.

  Dr. Carlo later told London's Express newspaper that cell phones cause genetic damage following a dose-response curve. That is, the more a person uses a cell phone, the more cellular destruction and health risks they incur. Cell phone-confused cells can go crazy, Carlo cautioned. Experiments on captive animals show that this cumulative DNA damage is passed on to succeeding generations.

 Addicted as we are to a culture of convenience, we forget how inconvenient it is to contract cancer. An Adelaide Hospital study confirmed Carlo's conclusions after finding B-cell lymphomas doubled in mice within 18 months of one-hour daily exposure to power densities experienced by a cell phone user. B-cell lymphomas are implicated in 85% of all cancers. 

READY OR NOT

 As magazine-size "cellular" relay antennas hidden in church steeples and rooflines keep popping up just about everywhere, more and more communities are declaring their airspace a "No Fry Zone". But in Canada, where cell phone towers come under federal jurisdiction, municipalities are only "advisers' to a process in which no permits are required to erect transmitter towers deemed necessary for "national security." Cell phones do save a lot of lives. FCC Chairman William Kennard reports that every day more than 98,000 people make 911 calls from wireless phones.

 Many more lives are involuntarily imperiled by non-emergency calls. Pat Irwin was working in a Colwood health food store when she noticed a truck unloading metal framework. The next morning, a new cell phone tower was ready to add its emissions to another BC Tel tower already operating down the street. There had been no announcement, no public hearings - just a quiet notification to the municipality that a tower was going up, literally overnight.

 The intruder radiated for a month when Irwin felt her immunity dropping. She wondered if other changes in her energy and menstrual cycle were "not from the moon or something that I ate."

 Irwin also seemed more irritable after her central nervous switchboard began receiving round-the-clock cell phone calls. With cellular relay towers in Kansas and Oklahoma being shut down because they interfered with passing aircraft, Irwin sensed how the same transmissions plucked her own electrical circuitry, inflicting a "chronic edginess" that "twangs human nerves." Sleep disorders, she learned, are common among people exposed to high levels of electromagnetic pollution. 

 After several other women in the same business centre reported similar symptoms, Irwin quit her job. "I saw it as something that was there to stay and I'd be daily exposed to it over a long period of time," she told Alive. "All this stuff is what we're playing with on a daily basis, and we don't know the long-term health effects."

 Implying recognized hazard, cell phone companies such as B.C.'s FIDO insist that the new digital phones operating at 1/50 the power of older analog models are safer. But there is nothing "safe" about the new 1.9 gigahertz broadcasting frequency. Much like a boxer taking repeated blows to the head, rapidly pulsing cell phones signal permanent brain damage. A study by Dr. Peter Franch found unequivocally that "cells are permanently damaged by cellular phone frequencies." This cellular damage, Franch noted, is maximized at low dosage - and "inherited unchanged, from generation to generation." 

 Attempting to explain a 25% increase in asthma and a 5% increase in asthma-related death rates throughout rapidly "mobilizing" metropolitan Sydney, Franch found that the production of histamine, which triggers bronchial spasms, is nearly doubled after exposure to mobile phone transmissions. Cell phones also reduce the effectiveness of anti-asthmatic drugs, and retard recovery from illness.

 Katharina Gustavss, a certified Building Biology consultant with 25 years experience, explains that CDMA's 217 Hz spikes are very close to the frequencies of human cell membranes. Gustavss accompanied a Microcell technician to the Colwood microwave relay tower Irwin and others had complained about. When he waved a spectrum analyzer, Gustavss checked the display and saw "pretty scary" energy spikes. 

 "What's that?" she asked the tech.

 "I've never seen that before," he told her. It turned out that this cell phone tower tester only set his meter to an averaging mode. Switching to "real time" froze the readings at "scary" maximum output levels.

 How dangerous are cell phones? "The risk is extremely high," declares Dr. Cherry. "There are 66 epidemiological studies showing that electromagnetic radiation across the spectrum increase brain tumors in human populations. Two of those studies are for particular brain tumors from cell phones." 

 Cherry says that because cancer takes decades to develop, it will be another 10 or 20 years before "mobiles" manifest a big bonanza in brain tumors. But he adds, we're already seeing "acute effects that are noticed within minutes of using a cell phone."

 After two minutes' conversation, a cell phone's digitized impulses disable the safety barrier that isolates the brain from destructive proteins and poisons in the blood. Professor Leif Salford, the neurologist who carried out the research for this finding, informed the Daily Mail: "It seems that molecules such as proteins and toxins can pass out of the blood, while the phone is switched on, and enter the brain. We need to bear in mind diseases such as MS and Alzheimer's which are linked to proteins being found in the brain."

DANCING WITH THE TELECOMONSTER

 If you must pack a cell phone, treat it like a loaded pistol. Keep it turned off. Don't carry it near ovaries, testicles, or the heart. For partial protection, buy an antenna shield. Limit calls to one-minute, six to 10 minutes a month. Never fire off a cell phone with children anywhere in sight.

 A better bet is to facilitate the growth of organic telephone networks with lots of fiber. Instead of more microwave towers, "We should be wiring up our cities with fiber-optic cables to provide Internet, fax, telephone, radio and television at very high quality," Cherry urges, "rather than saturating our cities with the microwave, radio wave and low frequency signals all the time." 

 When it comes to cells, consciousness and cell phones, every call is collect. How can convenience count more than cancer? What is gained by being in constant contact with disembodied voices, while being "out of touch" with the friends and neighbours around us? Are we comfortable having our location traced by monitoring authorities?

 Unless we start voting with our wallets, consumer complacency could prove as species-limiting as corporate cynicism. "Microwave frequencies are the same as those used in radar and your microwave oven," says Florida cell phone tower opponent Joe Chwick. "You wouldn't think of sticking your head in the oven, but there is no hesitation to putting the cell phone to your ear." 

 Having somehow survived three-million years of evolution without them, many contemporary hominids claim they cannot live without them. But can exquisitely sensitive electromagnetic beings live with cell phones - and the towers their signals ride in on? Like polyethylene food and water containers, plastic cookers and coffee-makers, microwave ovens and petroleum-powered vehicles, cell phones could be one of those brilliantly beguiling inventions we have to let go. Would hanging up on such an intrusive and hazardous addiction be so terrible? 

On Jan. 1, 2001 I cancelled my cell phone service...

Published in Alive magazine

Mobile Phones Cause Human Cell Changes: Study
Wed Jun 19, 2002

HELSINKI (Reuters) - A study by scientists in Finland has found that mobile phone radiation can cause changes in human cells that might affect the brain, the leader of the research team said Wednesday.

But Darius Leszczynski, who headed the 2-year study and will present findings next week at a conference in Quebec, said more research was needed to determine the seriousness of the changes and their impact on the brain or the body.

The study at Finland's Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority found that exposure to radiation from mobile phones can cause increased activity in hundreds of proteins in human cells grown in a laboratory, he said.

"We know that there is some biological response. We can detect it with our very sensitive approaches, but we do not know whether it can have any physiological effects on the human brain or human body," Leszczynski said.  [Editor's note: how much margin of safety do you prefer for your brain?]

Nonetheless the study, the initial findings of which were published last month in the scientific journal Differentiation, raises new questions about whether mobile phone radiation can weaken the brain's protective shield against harmful substances.

The study focused on changes in cells that line blood vessels and on whether such changes could weaken the functioning of the blood-brain barrier, which prevents potentially harmful substances from entering the brain from the bloodstream, Leszczynski said.

The study found that a protein called hsp27 linked to the functioning of the blood-brain barrier showed increased activity due to irradiation and pointed to a possibility that such activity could make the shield more permeable, he said.

"(Increased protein activity) might cause cells to shrink--not the blood vessels but the cells themselves--and then tiny gaps could appear between those cells through which some molecules could pass," he said.

Leszczynski declined to speculate on what kind of health risks that could pose, but said a French study indicated that headache, fatigue and sleep disorders could result.

"These are not life-threatening problems but can cause a lot of discomfort," he said, adding that a Swedish group had also suggested a possible link with Alzheimer's disease. [Editor's note: Smoker's cough was not considered life-threatening a few decades ago.  How long will you wait to find out?]

"Where the truth is I do not know," he said.

Leszczynski said that he, his wife and children use mobile phones, and he said that he did not think his study suggested any need for new restrictions on mobile phone use.