Betreff:
Lack of Science /
terrible science / no science |
Von: Martin Weatherall |
Datum: Sun, 17 Jun 2007 15:45:49 -0400 |
|
|
RR3, Bright,
Ontario, Canada.
17 June 2007
Ben Goldacre
Doctor and writer
Bad Science
The Guardian Newspaper, UK.
Mr. Goldacre
I am not sure what type of doctor you are, but I hope
it is not a medical doctor. Your lack of knowledge and concern for terrible
health symptoms caused by exposure to electro magnetic fields indicates a
serious deficiency in your thinking and compassion. If your are in fact a
medical doctor, you should probably face a medical hearing to see if you are
fit to continue in that capacity. I have just read your article in the
B.M.J., which I assume is the British Medical Journal. I am very surprised that
they would allow such ignorant and useless gossip. You appear to have
abused the B.M.J. vision statement and their mission statement. I have also
read another article where you state - "people who believe their symptoms
are related to electromagnetic fields are almost certainly mistaken".
It would seem that you consider yourself knowledgeable
enough to make grand public statements in the press about bad science, yet the
subject of electro hypersensitivity (EHS), that you have written
about, has obviously not been researched properly. Your article has failed
to mention the extensive independent scientific research that shows extremely
serious health harm being caused by exposure to electro magnetic radiation. This
is a failing that makes your article worthless speculation which has no
links to the scientific process. Your article is not just bad science it is a
lack of science, terrible science and in fact no science. It provides a
dangerous false message to most people who read the article and who may fail to
protect themselves from a real and very severe environmental danger.
Four years ago I would have been ignorant, just
like you, about electro hyper-sensitivity, then I moved to a house that had
very high exposure to electro-magnetic radiation (EMR). I did not know what was
making me sick but I knew that it was electrical in nature. It took me a great
amount of suffering, time, effort and expert help, to discover why and how
I was being harmed, but I did eventually discover that it was caused by electro
magnetic radiation. For more than three years I have collected scientific
research and information about electro magnetic radiation and the harm it
causes to health. I have been in touch with scientists involved in EMR
research, experts, persons concerned with EMR exposure and many
other people who have become electro hypersensitive. The knowledge that I have
collected indicates that electro magnetic radiation is one of the most
dangerous environmental problems the world has ever faced.
Three years ago, after living in my house for several
months, I developed the condition known as being 'electro hypersensitive',
I also developed cancer at the same time. Scientific research has
shown greatly increased cancer levels near sources of strong electro
magnetic radiation. I was forced to move out of my home and find safe
accommodation, away from strong sources of EMR. Luckily, I am not as severely
affected as many people, I can still function normally, as long as I avoid
medium and strong sources of EMR.
I am aware of many people whose lives have been
severely harmed by EMR and have difficulty functioning because of it. All
people are sensitive and affected by electromagnetic radiation. Even if
you cannot see it or directly feel it, EMR is affecting everyone and other
living things, exposed to it. While there may not be a huge number of
people who are electrically hypersensitive, I am finding that a great
many people who claim to not suffer the effects of EMR are in fact
suffering adverse effects from a variety of sources of electromagnetic
radiation found in their homes and their workplaces. I have found that the
health of these 'ordinary people' can be improved considerably by simple
education and mediation techniques, such as moving electrical wires, cordless
telephones and appliances away from people where they spend most time and
specially when they sleep.
If you are going to publicly comment and influence
public thinking on such an important subject as this, please
conduct extensive research first, so that you do not provide false
information to the public. You have done a great disservice to the public. They
have a right to know about the dangers of electromagnetic radiation but you
have provided them with a false sense of security. I hope that you will conduct
realistic research about the health harm of EMR, write about the real dangers
and apologize to those who have been hurt and mislead because of your previous
articles. I have attached some further information to this message, that may
assist you to learn more about the dangers of EMR. I can provide much more
scientific research and information upon your request.
http://www.buergerwelle.de/pdf/mobile_telephony_lunacy_electrosensitivity.doc
[ http://www.buergerwelle.de/pdf/mobile_telephony_lunacy_victims_report.doc
]
[ http://www.buergerwelle.de/pdf/mobile_telephony_lunacy_victims_report.pdf
]
Yours sincerely
Martin Weatherall.

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SCHOOLS AND HOSPITALS AGAINST MAST
EMISSIONS
Five
Studies Five Studies Showing Ill-Health Effects
From Masts 1 Study of the health of people living in
the vicinity of mobile phone base stations. Pathol
Biol (Paris) [Pathologie Biologie (Paris)] 2002; 50: 369 – 73 Conclusions include the recommendation: 2. Netherlands Organization for Applied
Scientific Research (TNO) Found significant effects on wellbeing,
according to a number of internationally-recognised criteria (including
headaches, muscle fatigue/pain, dizziness etc) from 3G mast emissions
well below accepted ‘safety’ levels (less than 1/25,000th of ICNIRP
guidelines). Those who had previously been noted as ‘electrosensitive’
under a scheme in that country were shown to have more pronounced
ill-effects, though others were also shown to experience significant
effects. 3. THE MICROWAVE SYNDROME FURTHER ASPECTS OF
A SPANISH STUDY This
study found significant ill-health effects in those living in the
vicinity of two GSM mobile phone base stations. They observed that: As their conclusion the research team
wrote: 4. INCREASED INCIDENCE OF CANCER NEAR A
CELL-PHONE TRANSMITTER STATION. Published
in: This study, based on medical records of
people living within 350 metres of a long-established phone mast, showed
a fourfold increased incidence of cancer generally compared with the
general population of Israel, and a tenfold increase specifically among
women, compared with the surrounding locality further from the mast. 5. Naila Study, Germany (November 2004) Following
the call by Wolfram König, President of the Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz
(Federal Agency for radiation protection), to all doctors of medicine to
collaborate actively in the assessment of the risk posed by cellular
radiation, the aim of our study was to examine whether people living
close to cellular transmitter antennas were exposed to a heightened risk
of taking ill with malignant tumors. The
basis of the data used for the survey were PC fi1es of the case histories
of patients between the years 1994 and 2004. While adhering to data
protection, the personal data of almost 1.000 patients were evaluated for
this study, which was completed without any external financial support. It
is intended to continue the project in the form of a register. In
the years 1999-2004, i.e. after five years’ operation of the transmitting
installation, the relative risk of getting cancer had trebled for the
residents of the area in the proximity of the installation compared to
the inhabitants of Naila outside the area. NOTE:
These are the only studies known of that specifically consider the
effects of masts on people. All five of these studies show clear and
significant ill-health effects. There are no known studies relating to
health effects of masts that do not show such ill-health effects. Dr
Grahame Blackwell Instant
Links BIOTECHNOLOGY SCIENCE of
the ORGANISM SCIENCE in
SOCIETY PUBLICATIONS Search the ISIS website ISIS members area log in Views
and goods advertized are not necessarily endorsed by Science in
Society or the Inst. of Science in Society. Electromagnetic
radiations are increasingly flooding our environment, as evidence of
health risks is mounting, suggesting that organisms are sensitive to very
weak electromagnetic fields. This requires a new
biology that understands organisms that has been systematically ignored
and excluded from mainstream discourse, to our peril. This miniseries is
in four parts: Also see our next fields of influence series Electromagnetic
fields too weak to heat up the body had been linked to cancer and other
illnesses since the 1960s. The current ‘safety’ limits are still
inadequate to protect workers and the public from these effects. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho exposes the bad science at the centre of the controversy. The complete document with references, is available
in the ISIS members site. Full details here 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 nineteenth 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 US 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-ionising
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 summarised 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 powerlines, 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
victimising 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 powerline 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 programme to import German scientists after
WWII. He worked for the US 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 US, 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 Defence 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 programme 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 twenty
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 rationalisations 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 US. 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, ie, a thousand 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 Organisation, 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 US 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 US,
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 powerlines 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 US, 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-Ionising 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 tumours 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 leukaemia, stops
short of drawing any firm conclusions because of the absence of "any
proven biological mechanisms". The complete document with references, is available
in the ISIS members site. Full details here Recent Publications GMO Free: Exposing the
Hazards of Biotechnology to Ensure the Integrity of our Food Supply The only radical science
magazine on earth I-SIS is a not-for-profit
organisation, depending on donations, membership fees, subscriptions, and merchandise sales to continue its work. Find out
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ON THIS SITE MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT EXPLICIT
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Document produced by Dr Grahame Blackwell 21 Feb 2005
Santini et al.
Found significant health effects on people living
within 300 metres of mobile phone base stations.
“… it is advisable that mobile phone base stations
not be sited closer than 300meters to populations”
Study for the Netherlands Ministries of Economic
Affairs, Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment,and Health,
Welfare and Sport
“ Effects of Global Communications System
Radio-Frequency Fields On Well Being and Cognitive Function of Human
Subjects With and Without Subjective Complaints”
(September 2003)
Oberfeld Gerd1, Navarro A. Enrique3, Portoles
Manue12, Maestu Ceferino4,
Gomez Perretta Claudio2
Presented at an International Conference in Kos (Greece), 2004
“The strongest five associations found are
depressive tendency, fatigue, sleeping disorder, difficulty in
concentration and cardiovascular problems.”
“Based on the data of this study the advice
would be to strive for levels not higher than 0.02 V/m for the sum total,
which is equal to a power density of 0.0001 µW/cni2 or 1 µW/m2, which is
the indoor exposure value for GSM base stations proposed on empirical
evidence by the Public Health Office of the Government of Salzburg in
2002.”
Ronni Wolf MD1, Danny Wolf MD2
the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv,
ISRAEL.
International Journal of Cancer Prevention Volume 1, No. 2, April 2004
Report by researchers (five medical doctors)
The result of the study shows that the proportion of newly developing
cancer cases was significantly higher among those patients who had lived
during the past ten years at a distance of up to 400 metres from the
cellular transmitter site, which bas been in operation since 1993,
compared to those patients living further away, and that the patients
fell ill on average 8 years earlier.
In this respect, any statement by industry or official sources that
claims (or suggests) that:
(a) There is no evidence of ill-health effects from masts;
or
(b) The overwhelming evidence is that masts do not cause ill-health
effects;
is completely and blatantly untrue.
ISIS miniseries
"Fields of Influence"
Non-Thermal Effects
Which Energy? ISIS energy report
2006.
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