Cell towers= Deathtowers?

[kola]

There "towers" will have more use than telephone transmission. IMO this is the new weaponry.

http://www.geocities.com/ultraknown/5.html

[Perilous]

That site looks reputable.

[kola]

Electromagnetic Fields and Cell Phones
  http://www.mercola.com/2002/dec/28/electromagnetic_fields.htm

By Dr. Mae-Wan Ho

The current debate over the health hazards of mobile phones is a continuation of the debate over the health hazards of weak electromagnetic fields in the entire frequency spectrum that began in the 1950s.

The first experiment on the biological effects of electromagnetic fields dates from the end of the 19th century when Russian scientist Danilevsky observed effects of radio-frequency fields on a muscle preparation that included the nerve supplying the muscle. Investigations peaked simultaneously with the development of radar between 1930 and 1940 but ended abruptly with World War II.

Interest in the subject was rekindled by the discovery that animals and plants failed to thrive and even died in areas exposed to radio waves beyond a certain minimum power density; and also by complaints of workers at radar stations. Research resumed in the 1950s in the former Soviet Union and the United States, as well as in Poland, Italy, and later, Britain.

Public debate over the health hazards of electromagnetic fields began in the United States. In 1973, biologist Robert Becker was approached by the U.S. Navy Commander Paul Tyler to serve on a panel of experts to evaluate some experiments that the Navy had funded. These were in connection with an antenna system the Navy was planning to build in northern Wisconsin that involved grids of buried wires that would extend over thousands of square miles of land. It was to be used for communication with submerged submarines.

Because of the large size of the antenna system, and fears that the non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation (NIEMR) it would emit, might have impacts on health and the environment, Congress had ordered the Navy to carry out the studies.

The New York Academy of Sciences had sponsored a conference on "Electrically Mediated Growth Mechanisms in Living Systems," and Becker had delivered a brilliant keynote paper that summarized his work up to then, which revealed how electrical fields and currents produced by the body are controlling growth and regeneration. By the 1960s, Becker had already proposed a theory that an electrical communication system exists within all living things, and also showed that externally applied fields could influence the processes of growth and regeneration.

But Becker was also worried about the undesirable, harmful effects that could come from exposures to external electromagnetic fields that were often orders of magnitude stronger than the fields within the living body. He had taken on a graduate student, Andrew Marino, to conduct some studies on mice and rats.

Marino had indeed found that animals exposed to NIEMR suffered adverse effects when Becker was asked to review the studies that the Navy had funded.

There were seven scientists on the panel reviewing more than 30 studies. Nearly two-thirds of the studies had found biological effects from exposure to NIEMR; and these were in a variety of species, including slime-mould, rats, birds and humans. The upshot was that all the panel members thought the proposed antenna was a potential hazard to human health, and they drew up a long list of recommendations and further studies.

In the middle of deliberations, someone pointed out that the Navy's proposed antenna produced NIEMR similar to that produced by high-voltage power lines, and that in the largest lines carrying 765 000 volts, the strength of the NIEMR might be as much as a million times stronger. That threw the panel into disarray. The discussions became heated, but, eventually, the scientists agreed they had to recommend some action: that the Navy should inform a special committee advisory to the President that many Americans might be "at risk" from NIEMR from power lines.

Marino, who told his story in a book published years later had no idea that he and his supervisor were about to be drawn into one of the most acrimonious and lonely battle against the industrial-military complex, and prominent figures in the scientific establishment were to play the key role in victimizing him and his supervisor. When it was all over, Becker would lose all grant support, and would have to close his laboratory in Syracuse, New York, after 20 years of pioneering research on the electromagnetic basis of living organisms.

Marino had found that animals exposed to NIEMR of 60Hz from the wall outlet gained less weight and drank less water. The exposed animals also had altered levels of blood proteins and enzymes. That was precisely the same NIEMR that would come from power lines. He had repeated the experiment twice, with the same results.

By then, at least two 765 000 volt lines were being planned, and Marino and Becker were called to give evidence at a power line hearing, which arose from Becker's warnings. Their experiments had confirmed what the Navy's own studies had found. Becker had no doubt that the power line was a potential health risk.

Unfortunately, they were up against Herman Schwan and other scientists who would be defending the industry and their own prestige in the scientific establishment.

Schwan had come to United States from Germany in 1947 under Project Paperclip, a controversial government program to import German scientists after WWII. He worked for the U.S. Navy until 1950 when he became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Schwan had done some research on NIEMR in Germany during the war. After arriving in the U.S., he began to publish papers saying that 'the laws of physics' showed that the only effects of NIEMR on living things would be through heating or electric shock.

Schwan's writings were bound up with the federal government's concern, which surfaced in the 1950s, over military employees who were reporting various injuries from working around radar -- eye injuries, temporary and permanent sterility, internal bleeding and other problems. In response to these complaints, an Air Force surgeon, Colonel George Knauf was asked to determine how much NIEMR was safe. Knauf and Schwan began to work together, with Schwan being the expert on biological effects.

Schwan regarded the stories of non-thermal injuries anecdotal and unreliable. Accordingly, he regarded NIEMR safe if it did not cause heating. What was the maximum level? Schwan's answer was that the body could handle a certain amount of heat, for example by sweating, but if the heat reached the point at which the body's regulatory mechanisms broke down, temperature would rise and injury would result. According to his calculations, the 'safe' level would be 10 milliwatts per square centimetre (mW/cm2).

This level was adopted provisionally by the Department of Defense in 1955, and Knauf got the go-ahead to fund a series of animal experiments to verify Schwan's calculations.

One of the researchers funded was Solomon Michaelson at the University of Rochester, who used beagle dogs as a test animal, and, "in a revolting series of experiments, he literally cooked dogs alive with NIEMR at levels of 50 to 100mW/cm2". He recorded burns, fluid oozing from the brain and eyes and body temperatures rising to 106-108F.

Other investigators confirmed Michaelson's work. Gross acute effects had been observed at NIEMR levels only slightly above the safety limit set by Schwan. There was not one instance of an experiment funded by the program that was conducted at power densities below the limit. In other words, non-thermal effects were never investigated.

Schwan was subsequently appointed chair of a committee of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), whose goal was to set a NIEMR limit or industry. It came as no surprise that ANSI accepted Schwan's position and 10mW/cm2 became the "safe" level for such industries as radar and radio and others whose employees would be exposed to electrical equipment.

Over the next 20 years, Schwan published dozens of papers and gave hundreds of lectures, which culminated in his election to the National Academy of Engineering.

What Schwan said in most of his papers was that there were no known biological effects of NIEMR below 10mW/cm2. There were in fact such reports, particularly from the former Soviet Union, that were never acknowledged by Schwan. Schwan's limit came solely from calculations based on non-biological models, or dead tissues; and all subsequent experiments were simply rationalizations of it, as Marino pointed out.

Michaelson, too, declared that so long as NIEMR levels were below Schwan's limit, they were completely safe. He was especially critical of Soviet scientists who found non-thermal effects below that threshold, and had set safety limits far more stringent that that in the U.S. He said that the harm done to industry and the military from such stringent limits would outweigh any proposed public-health benefit.

In 1965, the safe exposure limit set for the general public in Czechoslovakia was in the range of microwatts/cm2, 1,000 times smaller than that in the United States.

Michaelson's public declarations brought him many important appointments to committees of the National Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, President's Office of Telecommunication Policy, Electric Power Research Institute, etc.

Both Schwan and Michaelson were to be major witnesses on behalf of industry against Marino and Becker.

It turns out that in the mid-1960s, the power industry in the U.S. had already obtained copies of Soviet studies on the biological effects of NIEMR from powerlines. The American Electric Power Company (AEP), one of the largest in the U.S., commissioned a study by scientists in Johns Hopkins University, the results of which were released in 1967. In a survey involving 11 linemen, two were found with reduced sperm count. In a second study, mice exposed to NIEMR were not harmed, but their offspring, which were not exposed, were stunted. No more follow-up studies were carried out, and request by the John Hopkins team for further funding was turned down.

At an international conference on high-voltage power lines in Paris in 1972, Soviet engineers announced for the first time to the West that they had performed investigations on the effects of NIEMR on workers and concluded they needed protective clothing. They reported reduced sexual potency and adverse effects on the central nervous system, the heart and circulatory system.

The power industry released translations of the Soviet reports, which were prefaced by Howard Barnes, an engineer for AEP involved in the John Hopkins studies. The Soviet scientists had studied hundreds of linemen, compared to the 11 in the American study. And while the American study involved only physical examinations, the Soviets had performed psychological and neurological tests as well.

But Barnes, in his introduction, invoked an argument that's all too familiar in the current GM debate. He pointed out that there were then 500,000 miles of high-voltage lines in the U.S., and there wasn't a single report, not one confirmed case, of anyone being killed or made ill by the NIEMR from such lines, so they must be safe.

As in the case of GM food, that statement was based on there having been no studies on the effects of living near the power lines.

The story that unfolded makes riveting reading. Research findings were suppressed and falsified. Important scientific witnesses failed to turn up or were not contactable. Committees were stacked with industry-friendly scientists.

Marino, Becker and citizens won in the end, at tremendous personal costs to themselves. They prevented one of the two big power lines from being built, and the company that built the first announced it would not build another 765,000-volt line.

Most revealing in the entire episode was the way Schwan defended the indefensible orthodoxy. He denied all scientific evidence that went against his a priori calculation based on the 'known laws of physics' and the utterly false assumption that the living organism was to be regarded as no different from dead or inanimate matter.

As Marino wrote, "...Schwan seemed to view the studies [reporting non-thermal NIEMR effects] as weeds in the garden of known physical laws. Because the know laws did not predict the results of the studies, Schwan's reaction was to denigrate them, rather than assume that there existed unknown laws, or unknown interpretation of known laws.."

Schwan was not alone, the scientific establishment had thrown its weight behind his position until it became untenable. But there has been little change in scientific outlook since.

To this day, the 'safe' exposure limits recommended by the international authority, International Committee for Non-Ionizing Radiation (ICNIRP) take no account of non-thermal effects, despite the mounting evidence of health hazards from such effects.

By the 1980s, Marino could already point to the studies reporting NIEMR links to depression and suicides in England, to cancers in both children and adults in Colorado in the United States. Housewives in Oregon who lived in houses with radiant electric heating were subject to increased cancer risk. In Sweden, a correlation was reported between cancer in juveniles and proximity to high-voltage power lines in the Stockholm area. A cluster of rare and lethal ovarian tumors was found in five young girls living near a 69,000-volt line in Florida.

Similar association between NIEMR and cancer was reported in Wichita, Kansas. Men and women living in counties containing cities near Air Force bases were more likely to get cancer than people in similar counties not located near Air Force bases.

Finally, a correlation between electric blankets and miscarriages was also reported.

Successive reports since then, including the latest from the UK National Radiological Protection Board that accepts the links to childhood leukemia, stops short of drawing any firm conclusions because of the absence of "any proven biological mechanisms."

Institute of Science in Society


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr. Mercola's Comment

Quite a fascinating read on the history of how many of the now controversial dangers from EMF came to light. If you are interested in this fascinating topic, you would likely enjoy Dr. Becker's book, "The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life."

However, while I once discouraged the use of cell phones because of EMF concerns, new technological innovations have all but eliminated these concerns.

One such innovation, introduced only a few months ago, is Bluetooth wireless technology. Essentially, this is a completely wireless headset that enables you to place the cell phone up to 30 feet away from your body while making calls. This is more than sufficient distance to minimize the potential dangers from EMF.

Aside from the wireless headset, cell phone dangers can be minimized by using a wired headset and keeping the phone away from your body while it is in standby mode -- keep the phone in a purse or holster on your belt instead of in a pocket.

Because this technology eliminated my safety concerns, and because cell phones are obviously quite useful when the health concerns are subtracted, I decided it is time to own one again. And so I delved into researching the phones.

After 10 solid hours of reading, contacting experts and more, I've found that the Samsung cell phones are the most innovative, dependable and useful ones currently available.

You can see the top cell phones currently on the market at CNet.

I have previously recommended the Samsung S105 as it was free at Amazon. Now it is $100 and the best bargain going is the LG LX5350. However, you will have to act fast to get the discount as it expires at the end of the year. This is the phone I ordered on December 24, and it came to my office delivered on December 26 with no shipping charges. Amazing.

One of the big reasons I selected it was based on the user comments on Amazon which seem to rate the quality of the reception of the Sprint system as superior. It also uses CDMA rather than GSM which is a major big plus.

[kola]

http://www.cell-phone-radiation.org/cellphonetowers.html



"......Two-time Nobel Prize nominee Dr. Gerald Hyland, a physicist, had this to say about cell phone towers. "Existing safety guidelines for cell phone towers are completely inadequate. Quite justifiably, the public remains skeptical of attempts by governments and industry to reassure them that all is well, particularly given the unethical way in which they often operate symbiotically so as to promote their own vested interests."


Dr. Bruce Hocking did a study in Syndey, Australia, of children living near TV and FM broadcast towers that are very similar to cell phone towers. He found that these children had more than twice the rate of leukemia as children living more than seven miles away from these same towers.

Results in another recent study conducted on inhabitants living near or under a mobile phone base station antenna yielded the following prevalence of neuropsychiatric complaints: headache (23.5%), memory changes (28.2%), dizziness (18.8%), tremors (9.4%), depressive symptoms (21.7%), and sleep disturbances (23.5%). In this study the participants were given a neurobehavioral test battery measuring such things as problem solving, visuomotor speed, attention and memory. Symptoms of exposed inhabitants were significantly higher than control groups. (Reference: "Neurobehavioral effects among inhabitants around mobile phone base stations," Neurotoxicology, 2006, Aug. 1, Abdel-Rassoul, et.al.)


Furthermore, Europe's top environmental watchdog group, European Environment Agency (EEA), is calling for immediate action to reduce exposure to mobile phone masts. EEA suggests action to reduce exposure immediately to vulnerable groups such as children.


The government of Germany has already warned its citizens against using WiFi and is encouraging use of landline phones and wired internet connections.

[erisian]

It's the phones, not the towers. Unless you climb the tower and stick your head in front of an antenna. Or unless you live in a city where the FCC only considers the radiation from each proposed antenna, not the cumulative radiation from all of them. There's this thing called the inverse square law. The signal strength is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source.
Signal = 1/Distance².
Towers are a long way from your head. Your phone isn't.

[kola]

and the signal to your phone comes from where??   

and your phone gets hot...why??

btw tinfoil would not do anything but help conduct. I would imagine something like lead would work better.

tell me which study to you oppose and specifically why?

leadhead,
Kola

[kola]

Towers are a long way from your head. Your phone isn't.

did you read all of ithe articles? some towers are/were located directly on school and office roofs... have you ever walked close to a tower and read the warnings? Why do you think the fences are sometime painted black?

[Faber]

Why do you think the fences are sometime painted black?

For style, of course.

[KBCraig]

and the signal to your phone comes from where??

Much further than the inch or so between the phone and skull.
 

and your phone gets hot...why??

Thin film lithium-ion battery, of course. It's certainly not because of RF radiation.

btw tinfoil would not do anything but help conduct. I would imagine something like lead would work better.

True. Please let us know how many pounds of lead you have to chew and eat before the voices stop bothering you.

[kola]

KB, congrats, you got all 3 answers incorrect.

try again?

Kola

[KBCraig]

KB, congrats, you got all 3 answers incorrect.

You got all 1 rebuttal incorrect.

Don't bother trying again, since science isn't your field.

[Puke]

That first website is a real beauty!
Don't cellphones use radio waves just like, um, radios? I haven't died yet.
I'll live my life with the conveniences of modern technology. I don't want to live forever anyway.


I wonder if luddites claimed that indoor plumbing was somehow dangerous, back in the day?

[mvpel]

The government of Germany has already warned its citizens against using WiFi and is encouraging use of landline phones and wired internet connections.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/10/wifi_warning_german/

Federal Office for Radiation Protection makes its recommendations on the basis that a possible risk has not been ruled out, rather than because an actual threat has been determined. It recommends avoiding exposure to Wi-Fi "because it is a new technology and all the research into its health effects has not yet been carried out", the IoS says.

[Faber]

I'm getting tired of all the rationality on the last half of this thread 

[Puke]

I'll also mention hands free devices.

BAM! Problem solved. Just keep the phone in your pocket and watch the sperm count soar!

But don't use bluetooth wireless headsets! RADIATION!!