Category Archives: Arthur Firstenberg

Saving the Planet – Next Step by Arthur Firstenberg – Cell Phone Task Force – May 03, 2022

https://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Saving-the-Planet-1.pdf

(click on photo to enlarge)

The Earth is dying before our eyes. Most insects — bees, butterflies, crickets, spiders — have already disappeared, even from rainforests and protected nature areas. Titmice, sparrows, and other small birds no longer grace our yards and bird feeders. Our lakes and ponds starve for frogs and salamanders. Our forests are no longer net producers of oxygen. Our oceans may soon contain more plastics than fish.

The most surprising thing about the responses to my request for an administrative assistant was not that 154 people applied for the job, but that almost all of them called me from a cell phone. That revealed not only how much ground we have lost in the past 26 years, but the enormous obstacles looming before us in our quest for real change — change that must happen fast enough and be widespread enough to ensure that babies born today will still have a planet to live on when they turn ten.

Of the many assaults on the atmosphere, oceans, forests, wildlife, and human life, the cell phone is unique. It is unique because it is destroying the Earth faster than any other threat — faster than fossil fuels, pesticides, radioactivity, plastics, or any other assault. And because the pollution it emits — radio frequency (RF) radiation — is the only pollutant that is being spread everywhere deliberately and not inadvertently: in order for a cell phone to work when you want it to, every square inch of the Earth must be heavily irradiated at all times.

The manufacture of cell phones relies on:                                                          • child slavery in the Democratic Republic of Congo                                       • genocide against the indigenous people of the Ituri forest                      • extermination of the lowland gorilla

Cell phones contain:                                                                                                         • dozens of toxic metals, and                                                                                       • hundreds of toxic chemicals

Cell phone manufacture, wherever it occurs, produces:                           • massive groundwater pollution

Cell phone radiation today is the cause of most:                                           • heart disease,                                                                                                                    • diabetes, and                                                                                                                     • cancer

The 15 billion cell phones in the world, together with the 7 million cell towers, are the biggest cause of:                                                                     • the disappearance of insects                                                                                   • the decimation of bird populations                                                                      • the extinction of amphibian species                                                                    • the dying of forests

These facts must become known — known to the public, to mainstream medicine, and to mainstream environmental organizations campaigning to save insects, birds, wildlife, forests, oceans, and atmosphere. And getting rid of one’s cell phone must quickly change from “impossible” to routine and widespread. The reasons for it are more compelling than the reasons so many lifestyle changes that once seemed “impossible” became routine and widespread, worldwide, during the pandemic….

continued:  https://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Saving-the-Planet-1.pdf

 

 

 

 

Organizations from 34 States and 29 Countries Join Amicus Brief to U.S. Supreme Court – November 23, 2021

(click on photo to enlarge) – https://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Organizations-worldwide-sign-amicus-brief-to-U.S.-Supreme-Court.pdf

….You can read all of the filed documents on the Supreme Court’s website: the petition we filed on October 25, 2021; the amicus brief that was filed on November 23, 2021 in support of our petition; and the list of all the amici.

We have about one and a half months to circulate these three documents far and wide, in order to get publicity and widespread support from around the world, before our petition goes before the Supreme Court for consideration. We want the general public to start talking about our petition, so that the Supreme Court hears about it from many sources, and knows that it is important. The Petitioners are Santa Fe Alliance for Public Health and Safety, Arthur Firstenberg, and Monika Steinhoff. The Respondents are the City of Santa Fe, the Attorney General of New Mexico, and the United States of America. The Respondents have until December 29, 2021 to answer our petition. We then have until January 12, 2022 to reply to them. The petition then goes to the Court for its consideration, to decide whether or not to hear our case.

Please forward the three documents
the petition the amicus brief,  and  the list of all the amici —  to everyone you know.

https://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Organizations-worldwide-sign-amicus-brief-to-U.S.-Supreme-Court.pdf

Click to access Organizations-worldwide-sign-amicus-brief-to-U.S.-Supreme-Court.pdf

Open Letter to Elon Musk and SpaceX

https://stop5ginternational.org/an-open-letter-to-elon-musk-spacex/

(click on photo to enlarge)

Open Letter to Elon Musk & SpaceX

Open Letter to Elon Musk & SpaceX

SUBJECT: Of bees, humans, and satellites

Dear Elon Musk, Kimbal Musk and all SpaceX Board Members, Officers, and Lead Investors,

In 1962, when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, insects were so thick upon this Earth that you could not drive a car very far, anywhere in the world, without its windshield becoming splattered with their bodies.

Ms. Carson would not recognize the world today: Windshields are clean. Birds are starving. Crops have no pollinators. A solution has been suggested for farmers: robotic bees, which are being developed at Harvard University. But that is not a solution for the world, because as the insects go, so go we.

And the world knows this. Why have millions of people joined environmental organizations? Why did Jeff Bezos just create a $10 billion-dollar environmental fund? Why are wealthy people signing up to go live on Mars and leave the Earth behind? Because our home is being destroyed, and on some level everyone knows this. But they do not know why. Yes, there are climate change, habitat destruction, and insecticides, but those cannot explain the 76 to 82 percent decline in flying insects in 63 nature preserves in Germany. Those cannot explain the 97 to 98 percent decline in crawling insects in a pristine rainforest in Puerto Rico.

If you expose honey bees to an ordinary cell phone for just ten minutes, their metabolism shuts down. Carbohydrates, fats, and proteins build up in their blood. They can no longer metabolize their food or utilize the oxygen they breathe. And since the same radiation is bathing us all, to a greater or lesser degree, everywhere on Earth, the same thing is happening to every living thing. It happens faster in bees than in us because bees have a much higher metabolism. The radiation comes from all forms of wireless technology, on Earth and in space, and it is being treated as if it is not there.

We are writing to you at this time because SpaceX is in process of surrounding the Earth with a network of thousands of satellites whose very purpose is to irradiate every square inch of the Earth. SpaceX, like everyone else, is treating the radiation as if it were not there. As if the mitochondria in our cells do not depend on electrons moving undisturbed from the food we digest to the oxygen we breathe. As if our nervous systems and our hearts are not subject to radio frequency interference like any piece of electronic equipment. As if the cancer, diabetes, and heart disease that now afflict a majority of the Earth’s population are not metabolic diseases that result from interference with our cellular machinery. As if insects everywhere, and the birds and animals that eat them, are not starving to death as a result.

We write to you today to ask you to halt the Starlink project because it is so destructive. Although the satellites are a few hundred miles high, even the tiny levels of radiation that will reach the surface of the Earth are higher than levels from solar storms that have been correlated with beachings of whales — whales that live in oceans which until now have hardly been subject to manmade radiation at all. And the satellites are being located in the Earth’s ionosphere, which controls the global electric circuit that we all evolved with, and that travels through the bodies of all living things on its way from sky to Earth, through Earth and oceans, and back up to the sky during thunderstorms. We pollute this circuit with billions of electronic frequencies at our peril.

We ask you to halt this project and sit down and meet with us, and with our scientific colleagues, and with our colleagues from the astronomical community, who have just formed the Safeguarding the Astronomical Sky Foundation (SASF). The sky belongs to everyone. The consequences of filling it with thousands — potentially tens of thousands — of disposable satellites are many:

  • radiation
  • visible pollution of the night sky
  • interference with astronomy & meteorology
  • rocket exhaust, contributing to ozone depletion and climate change
  • ground and water pollution from intensive use of increasingly many spaceports
  • accumulating space debris
  • continual deorbiting and burning up of aging satellites, polluting the atmosphere with toxic dust and smoke
  • ever-increasing likelihood of collisions
  • increasing risk of the Kessler syndrome

Do we really want to build learning gardens at our schools, that will be pollinated with robotic bees? Do the oceans and Antarctica and all rainforests and wildlife preserves really need the Internet? Do the immutable stars in the unchanging heavens really need competition from ten thousand or more moving lights? We believe in something better. For us. For our children. For insects and for all of life.

We await your response.

Sincerely,

Arthur Firstenberg, Scientist & Author, The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life, (2020)

(Signatures) – https://stop5ginternational.org/open-letter-to-elon-musk-spacex/

The Flames of Progress by Arthur Firstenberg – March 07, 2020

From: “Arthur Firstenberg” <info@cellphonetaskforce.org>
Sent: March 7, 2020
Subject: Legal update; Decline in bat populations; Help needed

www.cellphonetaskforce.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/The-Flames-of-Progress.pdf

THE FLAMES OF PROGRESS

I have been entrusted with the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space, but I find myself bewildered — bewildered by the devastation around me; by the destruction of the cathedral of life into which I was born; by the silencing of the songs of the fifty million other species with whom I was raised; by the failure of my fellow human beings to care or to notice. How can they not miss their brothers and sisters? How can they not miss the magnificent symphony? How is it possible?

“The oceans are dying,” wrote Jacques Cousteau in 1970. “Can anyone believe it is possible,” wrote Rachel Carson in 1962, “to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life?” “I have seen too much,” said microwave researcher Allan Frey in 1969, explaining why he did research on animals and not humans. “I do not feel that I can take people into these fields and expose them and in all honesty indicate to them that they are going into something safe.”

Yet here we are half a century later: there will soon be more plastics than fish in the oceans, the world uses four times more pesticides per year than in 1962, and five billion people are holding open sources of microwave radiation in their hands.

The Earth is burning, yet no firefighters come. In the face of certain catastrophe, everyone is going about their business as if everything is fine, as if by magic the synthetic fibers in our clothing and the rubber tires on our automobiles will stop becoming microplastics in the sea; as if the few insects left in the world will magically escape the pesticides that we apply to our lawns and the radiation from the cell phones into which we speak. Everyone is still going about their business as if everything is fine. Isn’t it time that we stop? And since the most immediate threat to life comes from our cell phones, isn’t it time to throw them away?

….

A worldwide organization needs to be created, whose members do not own cell phones, whose purpose is to end the use of cell phones on Earth.

For most people this seems like an impossibility, but that is because they do not remember that only 25 years ago almost no one owned a cell phone, and that young people did not get cancer, diabetes, heart attacks and strokes like they do today. And the air was full of butterflies and birds, and the streams were full of tadpoles and frogs. It is because no one has explained to them what radiation is. No one would willingly use a radioactive phone, but that is essentially what everyone is doing. Radio waves and gamma rays are only two ends of a continuous spectrum; they are essentially the same phenomenon and have the same disastrous effects on our bodies and our planet.

The train that we are on is a train to nowhere. On either side, through the windows, can be seen insects, and birds, and frogs, and if we listen we can hear them buzzing, chirping, and croaking.

Please contact me if you would like to participate in the creation of an organization that will get us off this train.

Arthur Firstenberg
P.O. Box 6216
Santa Fe, NM 87502
USA
phone: +1 505-471-0129
info@cellphonetaskforce.org
https://www.5gSpaceAppeal.org

A pdf of this [complete] newsletter is available here:  www.cellphonetaskforce.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/The-Flames-of-Progress.pdf

Honey bees on the Isle of Wight; Slovenia postpones 5G; More satellites are launched by Arthur Firstenberg – January 29, 2020

(click on photo to enlarge)

 

Please Sign – https://www.5gspaceappeal.org/

THE HONEY BEE’S PLEA

The honey bee in the banner at the top of this newsletter has been speaking to us for over one hundred and fourteen years. Its numbers ever diminishing, its message ever more urgent, it waits for a sleeping world to finally listen. “Now!” it says. “Wake up before it’s too late, there is no more time!”

On the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England, Giuglielmo Marconi built the world’s first permanent radio station. And the bees’ first warning to humanity was heard. “They are often to be seen crawling up grass stems, or up the supports of the hive, where they remain until they fall back to the earth from sheer weakness, and soon afterwards die,” wrote Augustus Imms of Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1906. Ninety percent of the bees had already vanished from the entire island. Unable to find a cause, he called it, simply, Isle of Wight disease. Swarms of healthy bees were imported from the mainland, but it was of no use: within a week the fresh bees were dying off by the thousands.

The description, more than a century later, is exactly the same. On November 19, 2019, a 5G antenna was placed 250 meters from Angela’s house in Melbourne, Australia. “I photographed the new mast going onto the cell tower,” she writes, “and the next day, I was in the driveway talking to our carpenter, and we saw bees dropping on the driveway then dying. I managed to film one trying to collect pollen, but it was hanging upside down and could not seem to make it to the centre of the flower, then it rolled off the petals to the ground.”

Today, two months later, their beautiful garden, full of old world trees and plants, is silent and barren. “We have no insects — none,” wrote Angela last week. “Our cumquat once laden all year has no new fruit coming. No olives on the way on our olive tree so laden last year. We dug soil yesterday — no worms either — nothing — all gone. I walked the dog late tonight, it was dark and a poor magpie was down the street under a street lamp hoping for a cricket I think. It was silent. I took birdseed back but the bird had gone — it must be hungry to be out at night.”

In the midst of plenty the bees are starving to death. In 2009, Neelima Kumar, at Panjab University in India, placed cell phones in some bee hives and turned them on for ten minutes. The concentrations of glucose, cholesterol, total carbohydrates, total lipids and total proteins rose precipitously in the bees’ blood. After just ten minutes’ exposure to a cell phone, the bees were not able to digest their food, or use the oxygen they were breathing. Their metabolism had come to a standstill.

“Wake up!” say the bees.

“Wake up!” said parents with their children who assembled last Saturday at the Church on the Roundabout in Newport on the Isle of Wight to protest plans to turn their island into a Smart Island — to bring Isle of Wight disease back to the island of its birth.

Radio waves are poison to life. They penetrate skin and bones, cell walls and mitochondria. They prevent electrons from our food from combining with the oxygen we breathe. They give us diabetes, and heart disease, and cancer. They disorient migratory birds, and they kill outright tiny forms of life that pollinate flowers and have high rates of metabolism.

In the mid-1990s, the invisible fire that Marconi had lit became a conflagration. For the first time in human history, radio waves began to be broadcast not only from tall towers scattered widely across the landscape, but from the hands of men, women and children everywhere. And in 2020 this has brought us to the brink of extinction — not just of bees, and not just of humanity, but of all life on Earth.

I asked, in a previous newsletter, “which do we want more: our phones or our planet?” There is only one sane answer. I ask all of you who are reading this newsletter to join with me in putting this world back on a path to survival by throwing away your cell phones, now, today. Not next year, and not tomorrow. Today. There is no other option. Tomorrow we can deal, if we dare, with climate change. But if we are to have time to answer that urgent call, we must first deal with this emergency. We must extinguish this fire.

I vote for life. Do you?

SLOVENIA VOTES FOR LIFE, AT LEAST FOR NOW

…. https://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/The-Honey-Bees-Plea.pdf

= = =

Please Signhttps://stopsmartmetersbc.com/international-appeal-by-professional-astronomers-safeguarding-the-astronomical-sky/

20,000 Satellites for 5G to be Launched Sending Focused Beams of Intense Microwave Radiation Over Entire Earth

5G Wireless Internet Service Satellite Signal 3d Illustration

by John P. Thomas
Health Impact News

Public attention about 5G has been focused on the plans of telecom companies to install millions of small cell towers on electric utility poles, on public buildings and schools, on bus stop shelters, in public parks, and anywhere they want in national parks and on federally owned land.

In local urban communities there would be a cell tower approximately every 500 feet along every street.

As bad as these small cell towers might seem from the standpoint of constant exposure to radio frequency (RF) radiation in close proximity to the source, perhaps an even more alarming prospect will be the beaming of millimeter length microwaves at the earth from thousands of new communication satellites.

The FCC gave approval to SpaceX on March 29, 2018, to launch 4,425 satellites into low orbit around the Earth. [1]

The total number of satellites that is expected to be put into low and high orbit by several companies will be 20,000 satellites. [1]

5G will use Phased Array Antennas to shoot Beams of Radiation at Cell Phones

See full article at

http://healthimpactnews.com/2019/20000-satellites-for-5g-to-be-launched-sending-focused-beams-of-intense-microwave-radiation-over-entire-earth/

 

Collaborative on Health and the Environment – 2018 OCT 19

See this very informative site for those of you that are inquisitive and wish to understand what is going on in this precious world of ours
see https://www.healthandenvironment.org

CHE has a section on the health problems related to RF Radiation see https://www.healthandenvironment.org/environmental-health/environmental-risks/technology-environment/radiation-environment

Here is the latest email from Joel MOSKOWITZ at CHE

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For the U.S. version of this story see the following reports:

Mark Hertsgaard and Mark Dowie. “The inconvenient truth about cancer and mobile phones.” The Guardian, July 14, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/14/mobile-phones-cancer-inconvenient-truths

Mark Hertsgaard and Mark Dowie. “How big wireless made us think that cell phones are safe: A special investigation.” The Nation, March 29, 2018. https://www.thenation.com/article/how-big-wireless-made-us-think-that-cell-phones-are-safe-a-special-investigation/

Alster, Norm. Captured agency: How the Federal Communications Commission is dominated by the industries it presumably regulates. Cambridge, MA:  Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University.  2015. http://bit.ly/FCCcaptured

Note: The International Commission for Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection will soon issue an inaccurate summary of the science to reaffirm its obsolete safety guidelines for wireless radiation exposure. See  ICNIRP’s Exposure Guidelines for Radio Frequency Fields.

Mobile Phone Cover-up? Gov’t advisory body disbanded – inaccurate and misleading conclusions remain

Annelie Fitzgerald, TruePublica (United Kingdom), Oct 17, 2018

TruePublica recently ran a piece highlighting the most censored stories in Britain. One story that never made it into the mainstream media or even any independent media outlets in the UK at the time was the disbanding of the UK Advisory Group on Non-Ionising Radiation (AGNIR) in May 2017. This followed the revelation in December 2016 that AGNIR’s latest assessment of the science on the health impacts of radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMFs)—the type emitted by modern wireless technologies—was inaccurate and subject to conflicts of interest, a story that elicited no media interest in the UK either.

AGNIR’s role was to provide Public Health England with objective, science-based recommendations and advice on safe public exposure levels to man-made RF-EMFs. PHE is the agency from which the devolved UK nations take their advice, and other public health agencies from around the world also referred to AGNIR’s recommendations.

In 2012 AGNIR published what turned out to be its last report: Health Effects from Electromagnetic Fields (RCE-20).

The report’s executive summary included the following definitive-sounding statement on RF-EMF safety: ‘Taken together, these studies provide no evidence of health effects of RF field exposures below internationally accepted guideline levels.’

While this conclusion might appear to justify the dissolution last year of AGNIR, close examination reveals that the final AGNIR report was a partial one—in every sense of the word.

In December 2016 UK neuroscientist Dr Sarah J. Starkey published a peer-reviewed paper, ‘Inaccurate official assessment of radiofrequency safety by the Advisory Group on Non-Ionising Radiation’, roundly criticising the AGNIR report.

Accuracy, Starkey pointed out, ‘is vital when most people only read the executive summary and overall conclusions from a 348-page report and national and international public health decisions and exposure levels are based on them’ (p. 494).

In reality, as Starkey demonstrates, the conclusions drawn by AGNIR did not accurately reflect the scientific evidence available: the report contained ‘incorrect and misleading statements’ and omitted significant quantities of relevant research.

For some reason, AGNIR set the cut-off date for research to be considered in its report as December 2010. This meant that it excluded reference to the classification in May 2011 of RF-EMFs as a 2B possible human carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and to a paper by the IARC Monograph Working Group published in The Lancet in July 2011.

It is clear, however, that AGNIR’s official cut-off date was not always adhered to: for example, a paper co-authored by one of its members (Maria Feychting) and published in 2011 was included in the report. This paper concluded that there was no causal association between mobile phone use and brain tumours in children and adolescents. Including this ‘no-effect’ paper while excluding reference to the IARC classification might be considered an instance of ‘cherry-picking’.

Indeed, in her study Starkey notes that the executive summary and overall conclusions of the AGNIR report disregarded or excluded much of the evidence of harm to health from RF-EMFs (p. 493).

For example, although 78% of the studies cited on male fertility described significant adverse effects on sperm, male reproductive organs or changes in male testosterone concentrations, AGNIR’s conclusion was that there was ‘no convincing evidence that low-level exposure results in any adverse outcomes on testicular function’ (p. 495).

Starkey’s painstaking analysis of the way AGNIR’s review of the science had been conducted made clear that the report was unsuitable for determining safe public exposure levels, and her conclusion didn’t mince words: ‘Public health and the well-being of other species in the natural world cannot be protected when evidence of harm, no matter how inconvenient, is covered up’ (p. 500).

Starkey’s criticism of the accuracy of the AGNIR report was echoed by Dariusz Leszczynski, an expert on RF-EMFs from the University of Helsinki and a member of the IARC panel that classified RF-EMFs as a 2B possible human carcinogen. Describing reading the report as ‘surreal’, Leszczynski wrote that it appeared that ‘the authors would either not understand the studies they read or had pre-written conclusions. It was like reading a wish list written by someone claiming that there [are] not and will never be any problems related to cell phone exposures.’ He condemned the report as misleading, pointing out that it is ‘not a comprehensive review [as it claimed to be] but it is a biased review.’

According to the British Medical Journal’s website, biases in reviewing science and in conclusions reached can be considered scientific misconduct: the definition of falsification of data ranges from ‘fabrication to deceptive selective reporting of findings and omission of conflicting data, or willful suppression and/or distortion of data.’

Could AGNIR’s partial assessment of the evidence be considered scientific misconduct? Might the omissions and inaccuracies in the report having been brought to light by Starkey’s paper account—at least in part—for AGNIR’s sudden demise, just six months later?

AGNIR’s conflict of interest

As Starkey points out, the AGNIR report also was subject to conflict of interest: AGNIR’s chair, Anthony Swerdlow, and two of its members—Maria Feychting and Zenon Sienkiewicz—were also members of the controversial International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), whose contested RF-EMF exposure guidelines have been adopted by most of the western world, including the UK. In fact, in 2012 Swerdlow was chair of AGNIR and simultaneously chair of the ICNIRP standing committee on epidemiology.

There is an obvious conflict of interest in allowing scientists who are members of the body pronouncing on safe exposure guidelines to sit also on panels tasked with evaluating the science relating to the adequacy of the guidelines.

As Starkey asks:

‘How can AGNIR report that the scientific literature contains evidence of harmful effects below the current guidelines when several of them are responsible for those guidelines?’ (p. 493).

In a recent article George Monbiot pointed out that governments determine the conclusions of reviews in advance through the appointments they make to panels. Although AGNIR was represented as an ‘independent’ advisory body, Starkey revealed that 43% of its members were from the Health Protection Agency (now Public Health England), the government health agency which commissioned the report, and from the Department of Health. AGNIR could therefore hardly be thought of as ‘independent’.

Furthermore, ICNIRP and AGNIR’s Swerdlow and Feychting are both recognised as ‘leading sceptics’ about the existence of adverse health effects from RF-EMFs, while another member of AGNIR, psychiatrist James Rubin, has published a number of studies all concluding that RF-EMFs cause no adverse health effects.

Swerdlow and his wife also hold shares in wireless and telecommunications companies, an interest he declared in a 2011 paper downplaying brain tumour risks from mobile phone use, but such a disclosure did not feature in the AGNIR report. (The BMJ considers ‘failures of transparency to be forms of misconduct’.)

In 2012, the Union of Concerned Scientists published an important report called Heads They Win, Tails We Lose. How Corporations Corrupt Science at the Public’s Expense. Noting that ‘Government agencies rely on independent scientific advisory panels to provide objective advice’, the report revealed that ‘panel members often have undisclosed financial conflicts of interest: ties to companies that stand to win or lose based on the findings of these advisory committees.’ Surely having a personal financial stake in a company while being responsible for assessing the safety of the technology developed and commercialised by that company constitutes a serious conflict of interest requiring disclosure.

Accumulating evidence

Any queries addressed to governments or public health bodies in the UK about the safety of wireless technologies continue to be dismissed through reference to the ‘authoritative’ AGNIR report from 2012. Recent research, however, has strengthened IARC’s 2011 classification of RF-EMFs as a 2B carcinogen.

In 2015 the replication of a German animal study from 2010 confirmed that the incidence of carcinogen-induced tumours (lung and liver) in mice was significantly higher with RF-EMF exposure. Lead author Alexander Lerchl (Jacobs University, Bremen) stated in a press release:

Our results show that electromagnetic fields obviously enhance the growth of tumours.’ Lymphomas, he observed, were also found to be significantly elevated by exposure. In the study, the authors noted: ‘The fact that both studies found basically the same tumour-promoting effects at levels below the accepted (and in most countries legally defined) exposure limits for humans is worrying.’

This conclusion was given added salience by the fact that Alexander Lerchl had previously been an outspoken sceptic regarding the existence of health effects from RF-EMFs.

Earlier this year, a $25m animal study on RF-EMFs—one of the world’s biggest to date—by the US National Toxicology Program (NTP) underwent peer-review. The peer-review panel concluded that the case-control study showed ‘clear evidence of carcinogenic activity’ (exposed rats developed rare heart tumours), and confirmed ‘some evidence’ of a link between RF-EMFs and brain cancer.

The findings made by the Bremen team and the NTP should contribute to a revision of permitted public RF-EMF exposure limits. The formulation of adequately protective public health policies requires the existence of an expert panel such as AGNIR—albeit with radically reformed membership and true scientific independence.

Following the disbanding of AGNIR, the assessment of health risks from RF-EMFs is now the responsibility of the Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE), another expert committee which is supposed to provide ‘independent’ advice about the health impacts of both ionising and non-ionising radiation.

The UK government website states that COMARE has a watching brief on non-ionising radiation and that Public Health England ‘remains committed to delivering expert review reports on non-ionising radiation topics as and when sufficient new evidence has accumulated.’ No review of research on non-ionising RF-EMFs appears to be on the horizon in COMARE’s work programme for 2018-19, the main focus of which remains ionising radiation.

In a lecture given at the National Education Union Conference in Northern Ireland, in May 2018, Starkey pointed out that the conflict of interest associated with membership of ICNIRP also exists for COMARE. The person responsible for deciding whether to advise COMARE to look at any new evidence of health impacts was an author of the inaccurate AGNIR report and is also a member of ICNIRP’s Scientific Expert Group.

There needs to be an expert advisory group independent of AGNIR, ICNIRP, the wireless communications industry and UK governments. Starkey is calling for the inaccurate 2012 AGNIR report (and government advice based on it) to be retracted and for there to be mechanisms put in place whereby incorrect government information can be corrected or removed, as can occur for peer-reviewed published scientific papers.

While evidence of adverse health effects from RF-EMF exposure below guideline levels continues to accumulate, chronic public exposure to RF-EMFs is also increasing: smart meters are being installed across the UK at the moment and the government is forging ahead with the development and deployment of 5G. Last year it awarded £16m to the universities of Surrey and Bristol and to Kings College, London, to develop and test new 5G networks. (These experimental test-beds appear to include no provision for assessing risks to public health, though ‘commercial risks’ are considered.)

As a scientific appeal of September 2017 made clear, 5G deployment will lead to a massive increase in mandatory exposure to RF-EMFs. Over 180 scientists from 35 countries called for a moratorium on the roll-out of 5G technology in the EU until potential hazards for human health and the environment have been fully investigated by scientists independent from industry.

A similar appeal was addressed this year to the new Secretary-General of the UN, António Guterres (an electrical engineer and former university professor of systems theory and telecommunications signals). Both appeals have fallen on deaf ears.

In this context of increasing public exposure to RF-EMFs, it seems strange indeed to decide that it is ‘no longer viable to support a dedicated standing advisory group to address non-ionising radiation.’

With 5G on the horizon, surely a dedicated, truly independent expert advisory group on RF-EMFs is now more necessary than ever.

Perhaps disbanding ANGIR can be understood as a clumsy bid to pre-empt any discredit or further criticism of AGNIR after the publication of Starkey’s study, despite the latter’s being ignored by the UK media.

Yet closing down AGNIR on the grounds that it had ‘completed its work’ also suggests that the UK government considers—or, more likely, wants—the case to be closed as far as RF-EMFs and health effects are concerned, something that clears the way for the planned deployment of 5G and other so-called ‘smart’ wireless technologies.

George Monbiot recently pointed out that ‘Agencies of the state, newspapers and broadcasters, campaign groups and charities that claim to restrain corporate power fall under its spell.’ Consequently, he noted, their ‘mission becomes confused and their purpose dissipates.’

Far from holding the government and public health agencies to account as they like to claim, the vast majority of the UK media—including outlets that think of themselves as independent—appears to be complicit in turning a blind eye to this vital public health and environmental issue by failing to cover stories such as AGNIR’s dissolution and its inaccurate assessment of the safety of RF-EMF exposures. As a result, the UK public remains largely ignorant of the real health risks that come with the convenience of wireless.

Annelie Fitzgerald is a member of the Safe Schools Information Technology Alliance. SSITA recently sent an open letter to Education Secretary Damian Hinds on the subject of AGNIR’s inaccurate conclusions about the safety of RF-EMF exposure, particularly as they relate to children’s health and well-being.

http://bit.ly/TruePublicWireless

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Recent Posts on Electromagnetic Radiation Safety

Scientific Evidence of Harm from Cell Phone Radiation: Two Years of Research
An annotated bibliography which contains 92 papers published in scientific journals during the last two years that report evidence of harm from cell phone radiation exposure.

5G Wireless Technology: Is 5G Harmful to Our Health?
 “Both oncologic and non-cancerous chronic effects have been suggested.”

5G Wireless Technology: Cutting Through the Hype
 News stories debunk exaggerated benefits of 5G cellular technology.

Research on Smart Phone and Internet Addiction
Recent studies on dependence or addiction to mobile devices, gaming, or the internet.

Hybrid & Electric Cars: Electromagnetic Radiation Risks

  Modern automobiles increasingly incorporate EMF-emitting devices that pose a risk to human health.

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Joel M. Moskowitz, Ph.D., Director
Center for Family and Community Health
School of Public Health
University of California, Berkeley

Electromagnetic Radiation Safety

Website:          https://www.saferemr.com

Facebook:        https://www.facebook.com/SaferEMR
Twitter:            @berkeleyprc

 

Few Health Studies Done on 5 G Risk. Sharon Noble – The Goddard Report with Jim Goddard – January 25, 2018

(audio 25:21) Few Health Studies Done on 5 G Risk. Sharon NobleJanuary 25, 2018 – The Goddard Report with Jim Goddard by talkdigitalnetwork – YouTube – January 25, 2018:
(Still no government response to damning smart meter fire report
– Guest’s website: https://stopsmartmetersbc.com/
&
(podcast 25:04) January 25, 2018 | Few Health Studies Done on 5G Risk – The Goddard Report with Jim Goddard – HoweStreet.com – January 11, 2018:

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Read – https://stopsmartmetersbc.com/2018-01-22-please-read-5g-is-going-to-be-much-worse-than-we-have-been-told/

See BCUC & Smart Meter Fires Report (July 2017): https://stopsmartmetersbc.com/bcuc-smart-meter-fires-the-failure-to-protect/)

The Goddard Report Video Archives of Interviews with Sharon Noble, Director, Coalition to Stop Smart Meters re Smart Meters and Health Issues from Wireless Technologies: