Fw: Jan. 2010 Prevention magazine article

[Guest guest]

Subject: Jan. 2010 Prevention magazine article

Hi everyone,

For those of you that were unable to pick up a copy of the January 2010 issue of

prevention magazine, attached is the article called " Electoshocker " .

Please read and forward to all you love.

Kindest regards,

Charlie &

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34509513/ns/health-cancer//

Is 'electrosmog' harming our health?

Electrical pollution from cell phones and WiFi may be hazardous

By Segell

Prevention

updated 9:35 a.m. PT, Mon., Jan. 18, 2010

In 1990, the city of La Quinta, CA, proudly opened the doors of its sparkling

new middle school. Gayle Cohen, then a sixth-grade teacher, recalls the sense of

excitement everyone felt: " We had been in temporary facilities for 2 years, and

the change was exhilarating. "

But the glow soon dimmed.

One teacher developed vague symptoms - weakness, dizziness - and didn't return

after the Christmas break. A couple of years later, another developed cancer and

died; the teacher who took over his classroom was later diagnosed with throat

cancer. More instructors continued to fall ill, and then, in 2003, on her 50th

birthday, Cohen received her own bad news: breast cancer.

" That's when I sat down with another teacher, and we remarked on all the cancers

we'd seen, " she says. " We immediately thought of a dozen colleagues who had

either gotten sick or passed away. "

By 2005, 16 staffers among the 137 who'd worked at the new school had been

diagnosed with 18 cancers, a ratio nearly 3 times the expected number. Nor were

the children spared: About a dozen cancers have been detected so far among

former students. A couple of them have died.

Prior to undergoing her first chemotherapy treatment, Cohen approached the

school principal, who eventually went to district officials for an

investigation. A local newspaper article about the possible disease cluster

caught the attention of Sam Milham, MD, a widely traveled epidemiologist who has

investigated hundreds of environmental and occupational illnesses and published

dozens of peer-reviewed papers on his findings. For the past 30 years, he has

trained much of his focus on the potential hazards of electromagnetic fields

(EMFs) - the radiation that surrounds all electrical appliances and devices,

power lines, and home wiring and is emitted by communications devices, including

cell phones and radio, TV, and WiFi transmitters.

His work has led him, along with an increasingly alarmed army of international

scientists, to a controversial conclusion: The " electrosmog " that first began

developing with the rollout of the electrical grid a century ago and now

envelops every inhabitant of Earth is responsible for many of the diseases that

impair - or kill - us.

Milham was especially interested in measuring the ambient levels of a particular

kind of EMF, a relatively new suspected carcinogen known as high-frequency

voltage transients, or " dirty electricity. " Transients are largely by-products

of modern energy-efficient electronics and appliances - from computers,

refrigerators, and plasma TVs to compact fluorescent light bulbs and dimmer

switches - which tamp down the electricity they use. This manipulation of

current creates a wildly fluctuating and potentially dangerous electromagnetic

field that not only radiates into the immediate environment but also can back up

along home or office wiring all the way to the utility, infecting every energy

customer in between.

With Cohen's help, Milham entered the school after hours one day to take

readings. Astonishingly, in some classrooms he found the surges of transient

pollution exceeded his meter's ability to gauge them. His preliminary findings

prompted the teachers to file a complaint with the Occupational Safety and

Health Administration, which in turn ordered a full investigation by the

California Department of Health Care Services.

The final analysis, reported by Milham and his colleague, L. Lloyd , in

2008 in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine: Cumulative exposure to

transients in the school increased the likelihood a teacher would develop cancer

by 64%. A single year of working in the building raised risk by 21%. The

teachers' chances of developing melanoma, thyroid cancer, and uterine cancer

were particularly high, as great as 13 times the average. Although not included

in the tabulations, the risks for young students were probably even greater.

" In the decades-long debate about whether EMFs are harmful, " says Milham, " it

looks like transients could be the smoking gun. "

The case against EMFs

Cancer and electricity

Could a disease whose cause has long eluded scientists be linked to perhaps the

greatest practical discovery of the modern era? For 50 years, researchers who

have tried to tie one to the other have been routinely dismissed by a variety of

skeptics, from congressional investigators to powerful interest groups - most

prominently electric utilities, cell phone manufacturers, and WiFi providers,

which have repeatedly cited their own data showing the linkage to be " weak and

inconsistent. "

Recently, however, in addition to the stunning new investigations into dirty

electricity (which we'll return to), several developments have highlighted the

growing hazards of EMF pollution - and the crucial need to address them.

The evidence showing harm is overwhelming

In 2007, the Bioinitiative Working Group, an international collaboration of

prestigious scientists and public health policy experts from the United States,

Sweden, Denmark, Austria, and China, released a 650-page report citing more than

2,000 studies (many very recent) that detail the toxic effects of EMFs from all

sources. Chronic exposure to even low-level radiation (like that from cell

phones), the scientists concluded, can cause a variety of cancers, impair

immunity, and contribute to Alzheimer's disease and dementia, heart disease, and

many other ailments. " We now have a critical mass of evidence, and it gets

stronger every day, " says Carpenter, MD, director of the Institute for

Health and the Environment at the University at Albany and coauthor of the

public-health chapters of the Bioinitiative report.

Fears about the hazards of cell phones seem justified

" Every single study of brain tumors that looks at 10 or more years of use shows

an increased risk of brain cancer, " says Sage, MA, coeditor of the report.

A recent study from Sweden is particularly frightening, suggesting that if you

started using a cell phone as a teen, you have a 5 times greater risk of brain

cancer than those who started as an adult. The risk rises even more for people

who use the phone on only one side of the head. While defenders of cell phone

safety claim no scientist can explain why EMFs may be harmful in humans, a body

of reliable and consistent animal research shows that electromagnetic fields,

equal to those generated by mobile phones, open the blood-brain barrier, causing

blood vessels to leak fluid into the brain and damage neurons. Ironically, that

research (by renowned Swedish neuro-oncologist Leif G. Salford, MD, PhD) began

with the goal of finding a way to deliver chemotherapy to brain tumors.

Other countries are revising exposure standards

Members of the European Union, which has led the way on EMF investigations, are

moving quickly to protect their citizens, particularly children and pregnant

women. In the past 2 years alone, France, Germany, and England have dismantled

wireless networks in schools and public libraries, and other countries are

pressing to follow suit. Israel has banned the placement of cellular antennae on

residences, and Russian officials have advised against cell phone use for

children under 18.

Electrical hypersensitivity (EHS) is becoming more widespread

Symptoms of EHS, a recently identified condition, include fatigue, facial

irritation (resembling rosacea), tinnitus, dizziness, and digestive

disturbances, which occur after exposure to visual display units, mobile phones,

WiFi equipment, and commonplace appliances. Experts say up to 3% of all people

are clinically hypersensitive, as many as one-third of us to a lesser degree.

Electrical pollution is increasing dramatically

" For the first time in our evolutionary history, we have generated an entire

secondary, virtual, densely complex environment - an electromagnetic soup - that

essentially overlaps the human nervous system, " says Persinger, PhD, a

neuroscientist at tian University who has studied the effects of EMFs on

cancer cells. And it appears that, more than a century after Edison

switched on his first light bulb, the health consequences of that continual

overlap are just now beginning to be documented.

A history of harmful effects

Until Edison's harnessing of electricity, humans' only sources of EMF exposure

were the earth's static magnetic field (which causes a compass needle to point

north) and cosmic rays from the sun and outer space; over our long evolution,

we've adapted to solar EMFs by developing protective pigment. " But we have no

protection against other EMF frequencies, " says Marino, PhD, JD, a

pioneer in bioelectromagnetics who has done extensive EMF research and a

professor in the department of orthopedic surgery at the Louisiana State Health

Sciences Center. " How quickly can we adapt our biology to these new exposures?

It's the most important environmental health question - and problem - of the

21st century. "

Research into the hazards of EMFs has been extensive, controversial - and, at

least at the outset, animated by political intrigue. A sampling:

The Russians first noticed during World War II that radar operators (radar

operates using radio frequency waves) often came down with symptoms we now

attribute to electrical hypersensitivity syndrome. In the 1960s, during the

height of the Cold War, they secretly bombarded the US embassy in Moscow with

microwave radiation (a higher-frequency RF used to transmit wireless signals),

sickening American employees. Radio wave sickness - also called microwave

sickness - is now a commonly accepted diagnosis.

When television (also radio wave) was introduced in Australia in 1956,

researchers there documented a rapid increase in cancers among people who lived

near transmission towers.

In the 1970s, Wertheimer, PhD, a Denver epidemiologist (since deceased),

detected a spike in childhood leukemia (a rare disease) among kids who lived

near electric power lines, prompting a rash of studies that arrived at similar

conclusions.

In the 1980s, investigators concluded that office workers with high exposure to

EMFs from electronics had higher incidences of melanoma - a disease most often

associated with sun exposure - than outdoor workers.

In 1998, researchers with the National Cancer Institute reported that childhood

leukemia risks were " significantly elevated " in children whose mothers used

electric blankets during pregnancy and in children who used hair dryers, video

machines in arcades, and video games connected to TVs.

Over the past few years, investigators have examined cancer clusters on Cape

Cod, which has a huge US Air Force radar array called PAVE PAWS, and Nantucket,

home to a powerful Loran-C antenna. Counties in both areas have the highest

incidences of all cancers in the entire state of Massachusetts.

More recently, the new findings on transients - particularly those crawling

along utility wiring - are causing some scientists to rethink that part of the

EMF debate pertaining to the hazards of power lines. Could they have been

focusing on the wrong part of the EMF spectrum?

Transients: the post-modern carcinogen

Some earlier, notable - albeit aborted - research suggests this may be the case.

In 1988, Hydro-Québec, a Canadian electric utility, contracted researchers from

McGill University to study the health effects of power line EMFs on its

employees. Gilles Theriault, MD, DrPH, who led the research and was chair of the

department of occupational health at the university, decided to expand his focus

to include high-frequency transients and found, even after controlling for

smoking, that workers exposed to them had up to a 15-fold risk of developing

lung cancer. After the results were published in the American Journal of

Epidemiology, the utility decided to put an end to the study.

That research commenced at a time when energy-efficient devices - the major

generators of transients - were beginning to saturate North American homes and

clutter up power lines. A telltale sign of an energy-efficient device is the

ballast, or transformer, that you see near the end of a power cord on a laptop

computer, printer, or cell phone charger (although not all devices have them).

When plugged in, it's warm to the touch, an indication that it's tamping down

current and throwing off transient pollution. Two of the worst creators of

transient radiation: light dimmer switches and compact fluorescent light bulbs

(CFLs). Transients are created when current is repeatedly interrupted. A CFL,

for instance, saves energy by turning itself on and off repeatedly, as many as

100,000 times per second.

So how does the human body respond to this pulsing radiation? " Think of a

magnet, " explains Dave Stetzer, an electrical engineer and power supply expert

in Blair, WI. " Opposite charges attract, and like charges repel. When a

transient is going positive, the negatively charged electrons in your body move

toward that positive charge. When the transient flips to negative, the body's

electrons are pushed back. Remember, these positive-negative shifts are

occurring many thousands of times per second, so the electrons in your body are

oscillating to that tune. Your body becomes charged up because you're basically

coupled to the transient's electric field. "

Keep in mind that all the cells in your body, whether islets in the pancreas

awaiting a signal to manufacture insulin or white blood cells speeding to the

site of an injury, use electricity - or " electron change " - to communicate with

each other. By overlapping the body's signaling mechanisms, could transients

interfere with the secretion of insulin, drown out the call-and-response of the

immune system, and cause other physical havoc?

Some preliminary research implies the answer is yes. Over the past 3 years,

Magda Havas, PhD, a researcher in the department of environmental and resource

studies at Trent University in Ontario, has published several studies that

suggest exposure to transients may elevate blood sugar levels among people with

diabetes and prediabetes and that people with multiple sclerosis improve their

balance and have fewer tremors after just a few days in a transient- free

environment. Her work also shows that after schools installed filters to clean

up transients, two-thirds of teachers reported improvement in symptoms that had

been plaguing them, including headache, dry eye, facial flushing, asthma, skin

irritation, and depression.

Transients are particularly insidious because they accumulate and strengthen,

their frequency reaching into the dangerous RF range. Because they travel along

home and utility wiring, your neighbor's energy choices will affect the

electrical pollution in your house. In other words, a CFL illuminating a porch

down the block can send nasty transients into your bedroom.

Something else is sending transients into your home: the earth. From your high

school science texts, you know that electricity must travel along a complete

circuit, always returning to its source (the utility) along a neutral wire. In

the early 1990s, says Stetzer, as transients began overloading utility wiring,

public service commissions in many states told utilities to drive neutral rods

into the ground on every existing pole and every new one they erected. " Today,

more than 70% of all current going out on the wires returns to substations via

the earth, " says Stetzer - encountering along the way all sorts of subterranean

conductors, such as water, sewer, and natural-gas pipes, that ferry even more

electrical pollution into your home.

A pragmatic proposal

Of course, these small studies - from Milham, Hydro-Québec, and Havas - hardly

constitute a blanket indictment of transients. " We're still early in this part

of the EMF story, " says Carpenter. Does that mean as evidence of their harm

accumulates, officials will raise a red flag? Not likely, if past EMF debates

are any indication. Power companies have successfully beaten back attempts to

modify exposure standards, and the cell phone industry, which has funded at

least 87% of the research on the subject, has effectively resisted regulation.

One good reason has had to do with latency - how long it takes to develop a

particular cancer, often 25 years or more. Cell phones have been around only

about that long.

But does that mean we avoid any discussion of their possible dangers? Again, if

the past is a guide, the answer appears to be " probably. " American scientists

worried about the hazards of smoking, the DES (diethylstilbestrol) pill (given

to pregnant women, it caused birth defects), asbestos, PCBs (polychlorinated

biphenyls) - the list is lengthy - but officially warned about exposure only

after they could say with absolute certainty that these things were harmful. As

for protecting ourselves from toxic radiation, we have a lax - and laughable -

history. In the 1920s, just a few years after medical imaging devices were

invented, physicians were known to entertain their guests by X-raying them at

garden parties. In the 1930s, scientists often kept radium in open trays on

their desks. Shoe stores used X-ray machines in the 1940s to properly fit

children's feet, and radioactive wristwatches with glowing hour hands were

popular in the 1950s.

All of which means that, absent prudent safety standards from both public

officials and manufacturers (adding a protective filter would add 5 cents to the

cost of making a CFL and $5 to the cost of a laptop), you'll have to protect

yourself from EMFs. Here's a reasonable proposition: Practice what is known in

Europe as the precautionary principle, which is pretty much what it sounds like.

Don't expose yourself unnecessarily to EMF hazards. Don't buy a home next to a

WiFi tower. Get a corded telephone instead of a cordless one. Don't let your

teenager sleep with a cell phone under her pillow. Don't use your laptop

computer in your lap. Treat your EMF-emitting devices with the same cautious

respect you do other invaluable modern devices, like your car, which is also

dangerous - and can kill. You don't drive in an unnecessarily risky fashion - at

high speed or while talking on a cell phone (right?).

The sad truth is that until we have more epidemiologic evidence - whether from

disease clusters like the ones at La Quinta and on Cape Cod or from long-term

analyses of the health of the world's 4-billion-and-growing cell phone users -

we won't know definitively whether electrical pollution is harming us. And even

then, we are unlikely to know why or how. " In this country, our research dollars

are spent on finding ways to treat disease, not on what causes it - which is to

say, how we can prevent it, " says Marino. " And that's a tragedy. "

But that's also another story.

Copyright© 2010 Rodale Inc. All rights reserved. No reproduction, transmission

or display is permitted without the written permissions of Rodale Inc.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34509513/ns/health-cancer//