The EON
DEEP DEMOCRACY
Interview Series
Ecological Options
Interview #1:
Environmental Consultant
Cindy Sage
on
The worldly amount for electromagnetic field is a broad one. And contained are the things that evolve around electric appliances and power lines, extremely low frequency fields.
And this EMF issue, also, encompasses radio frequency radiations and microwave radiations. And those are emissions that you get from cell phones, cell towers, Wi-Fi and Wi-Max wireless communications.
So it is really broadly, all those things that either gives us electric power or that give us the ability to communicate in a wireless fashion.
And there are emissions and they have important biological effects.
In 2006, a group of scientists met at the Bio Electromagnetic Society annual meeting in Mexico. And we presented a mini-symposium on electromagnetic fields and radio frequency radiations to highlight a couple of things, for several hundred scientists who meet at those meetings.
The first was to focus on science, to say: These are the studies we believe show an effect at levels that are everyday levels. And we might want to be concerned about this.
And secondly to talk about what kind of precautionary actions countries are taking around the world.
And my part of this was to summarise the world’s response to EMF issues, in terms of precautionary area and preventive actions.
The BioInitiative working group is a group that grew out of the meeting in Mexico. There was a lot of debate at that scientific conference about why it is that there are 30 years worth of scientific studies, documenting bio-effects and adverse health effects from these exposures, and yet, we are still living with the same old standards that we’ve had for years. They get tweaked every few years, but not in any substantial way. And not in a way that takes into account our growing knowledge about health risks.
So the BioInitiative working group originally had four members, from four organising groups. The meeting occurred in June in Mexico, and by October we had decided that we would write a state of the art report on EMF and health risks. And we would use this to alert people, in the world, who’s mission it is to translate science into good public health policy, and broadly to tell the public what these findings are.
So between October 2006 and August of 2007, which is a very short time, this group of 14 scientists and public health experts, did their very best work in science chapters and public health chapters, to evaluate and come up with recommendations.
So in a 9 months period, we had produced the only truly independent look at EMF fields, Radio Frequency radiations and health risks.
- Mary Beth Bragan, EON Producer – So in other word you synthesised the data that was out there?
We did, we did.
Each of these people, each of these participants on the BioInitiative working group, is in their own right a leading world expert.
We had Henry Lai, PhD Department of Bioengineering, University of Washington, doing the work on genome toxicity, or damage to the human genome. And, he also did the very large chapter on neurology, the effects on the central nervous system, cognition, our ability to think, effects on behaviour, judgment, sleep and so on, all of the neurological studies.
And I think in total, we as a group, probably looked at more than 2,000 studies. These are pure reviewed published science. They are not someone’s casual opinion.
Prof. Lennart Hardell, MD, PhD, University Hospital Orebro, Sweden did the work on brain tumour from cell phone use in cooperation with Prof. Kjell Hansson Mlld, PhD, Umea University, Umea, Sweden. They are highly respected in their fields.
Prof. Michael Kundi, PhD University of Vienna, Austria, worked on a chapter involving brain tumours that are none cell phone related, and there is a large literature on that.
We also had Eugene L. Sobel, PhD and Zoreh Davanipour DVM, PhD Friends Research Institute Los Angeles, CA USA, who are experts in the area of Alzheimer’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease or ALS. And they provided a large chapter on the effects of ELF and RF on Alzheimer and breast cancer, including much of the melatonin work. That was just vital.
Olle Johansson, PhD, Associate Professor, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden, provided with a very very detailed chapter on the immune system and how many people become electrically sensitive, become hyper-sensitive to exposures.
Many people are chemically sensitive to chemicals. There is a growing percentage of people in the world estimated between 3 and 8 % of everyone in the world that is electro sensitive.
And this is a dysfunction of the immune system, that’s why Olle is involved, and the hyper sensitivity is going to be a very large societal issue with huge financial cost.
So this was another letch pen of the report.
- Mary Beth Bragan, EON Producer – You said the number of people is growing?
That number appears to be growing. And given that we are continuing to deploy technologies that expose people on a chronic, on a daily basis to these emissions, we can expect that it will increase.
Importantly I think, we also need to say there were two key people involved in this, who come at the issue from of a public health aspect. One of them is a pre eminent public health expert, David O. Carpenter, MD, University at Albany East Campus Rensselaer, NY USA, he is now the head of an institute of health and the environment at the University of Albany, New York.
And he provided very key information for us analysing the science and try to tell us what it meant and in comparison with other things like smoking and cancer or environmental tobacco smoke or second hand smoke and cancer. And he was able to say: We regulate some of these other things, we have enough evidence now to move from arguing the science as if does it or does it not cause cancer and neurological problems to what is the appropriate public health response given what we have and what do we need to do now.
The other key person I want to mention is David Gee, Coordinator European Environmental Agency, Copenhagen, Denmark, he is one of the primary authors of
Late Lessons from Early Warnings. Which is a book analysing the failures of governments around the world to respond to early indications in terms of lead and gasoline, [***] that is a carcinogenic agent, BSC, over fishing in the Atlantic stock of fisheries and so on, where really important public health and environmental issues have been debated because there is industry influence preventing action, until action comes so late that the side costs are huge.
Well, we asked David Gee to work with us. To look at EMF issues today and the science and to say do we have enough now as an early warning, and are the consequences of doing nothing so great that we should be doing more. His chapter, of course, has been a pivot in getting international attention to our report, because in fact, the answer is yes.
The response in Europe has been massive. We were overwhelmed with response, request for interviews, media coverage, really excellent coverage in the news press from European countries. In part this was due to the fact that David Gee’s home agency, the European Environmental Agency, decided that this is so important an issue to them that they haven’t quite recognised until they saw the report that they took this on as their own cost.
And within two weeks, I think it is fair to say that it is unprecedented that a single report, you know a dry science report, would cause a major environmental and public health agency to call for new policy, and new studies and new preventative actions.
So in Europe it’s been very large. The International air tribune has carried excellent analysis and response. And almost every other major European newspaper in all European countries has carried an article or two or three.
In the United States we have seen absolutely no coverage. It is very disappointing to see that the silence in our media, our print, and our broadcast media is absolute. We will be continuing to see a change on this front because these are not just European health issues. These are also issues in the United States, African countries, Asian countries and Australia. And they are going to cost our society dearly if we don’t pay attention.
- Mary Beth Bragan, EON Producer – You are talking about the European countries what about the south, the response from their press or their governments?
There have been media enquiries from every continent and many countries but the preponderance has been in the European countries where there has been, there is interesting enough a large public concerns that is expressed that is very evident in their press already. And that may be in part why.
Probably the next largest response comes from Australia. Where in fact, while we’re in the BioInitiative working group, are recommending standards that are thousands of times below where they are today from public safety limits. Australia’s government are proposing to relax their standards to make it possible for people to be exposed to far more EMF field exposures.
So we’ve had quite a response from the public and the government agencies there.
There has been a big industry push to either keep the status quo, or to relax standards in general. Among industries from the electric utility in Australia to almost all the telecom organisations that lobby throughout the world and in fact even in the United States.
It is amazing today, that in the United States, the IEEE which is the body that recommends new standards for radio frequency for example from cell phones, is proposing to loosen, or to make less tough, the radio frequency standards emissions from cell phones. They want to allow the amount of heat of phone that can put into your brain to be calculated over 10 grams of tissue rather than 1 gram, like it is today. That means you can have far higher exposures.
Now this proposal comes at a time where the BioInitiative working group has pointed out in our report that we are seeing brain tumor risks increase at 10 years and less of use.
What you need to know with that is that almost that everything else that can cause a brain tumour, mostly chemical exposures or ionizing radiations, take 20 years to show up.
Why is it we are seeing this increase start at 10 years for cell phones? Well that means cell phones are a very very effective way of creating brain tumours and it is happening in half the time.
Okay, so here we have this paradox, this dilemma, where the people that develop our standards are proposing to make it possible for far more radiation into the head. Probably because cell phones today by a large don’t meet the existing standards, so they have to be made less restrictive.
It is a really unwarranted move, and we hope that our report will have the effect in this country of dissuading our decision makers of the federal communication commission from even looking at these proposed less restrictive standards.
Some of other members of BioInitiative working group that contributed science chapters, Carl, F. Blackman, Ph.D. Founder, Former President and Full Member of the Bioelectromagnetics Society, Raleigh, NC USA, [opinions expressed are not necessarily those of his employer, the US Environmental Protection Agency], and he contributed a chapter on modulation effects, it has to do with the way that pulsed radio frequency or electromagnetic fields can be received by the body as different kinds of signals. And modulation is important because in some deliveries of radio frequencies are more bioactive than others. This was a key chapter.
Martin Blank, PhD Associate Professor Former President and Full Member of Bioelectromagnetics Society Dept. Of Physiology, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University New York, NY USA, contributed the chapter on heat chopped proteins or stress proteins.
And a very important finding that is brought out in our report is that when you see stress proteins produced in the body, this is always, this is a very ancient response of all cells, literally in plants, animals and people.
When you see heat chopped proteins being expressed by cells, being created, it means the cells are in trouble, and it is hollering help. It has problems with the environment around it that it is not good for it.
What Martin has been able to show, is that when you are exposed to very low levels of electromagnetic fields we see stress proteins created. What that tells us, is that maybe in the short term the body will get over or will adapt.
But if you do this day after day, chronically, these things have very serious consequences for the body. And they are actually a part of the possible biological mechanism that we talk about for ultimate chronic health problems and diseases and threats to health which can be carcinogens or they can be neurotoxins.
So Martin Blanks’ work, of course, has just been a key for this. And the levels at which she is finding the effect on stress proteins are at environmental levels. They are levels to which most people in urbanised countries are exposed. Cell phones, cell towers, power lines, appliances and more.
Cordless phones as well as cell phones are implicated not only in stress protein responses but they look to be just as deadly as cell phones when you look at brain tumours and acoustic neuromas, another form of tumour in the head.
So importantly, people need to know that it isn’t just mobile phones but it is also cordless phones that are showing increase risks of brain tumours.
The final group working with our team on the BioInitiative is from China, and we had two doctors from Bejing (Zhengping Xu, PhD and Guangdi Chen, PhD Bioelectromagnetics Laboratory, Zhejiang University, School of Medicine Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China) who did some very interesting work on the effective electromagnetic fields on the human genome, brand new area of science called Transcriptomics and Probeomics. These are just big words for actually looking into what these fields do down at the DNA level, at the gene level.
And there are studies reporting lots of positive effects, negative and positive both. So we were very happy to have their collaboration.
And my role in this, other than being one of the founding members of the BioInitiative working group, was to be the person who wrote about preventative action, precautionary, public health planning, public policy issues, and I’m also a co-editor with David Carpenter on the report.
The studies that were produced in the chapter by our Chinese participants, talked about studies that reported effects and studies that reported no effect. So we have some of each kind.
But overall, we should not be seeing any studies reporting effects on the human genes from these levels of exposures and if we are, what it means our standards are not good enough, they are inadequate.
The general conclusions of the BioInitiative report are these:
The existing standards that we have worldwide for electromagnetic fields, including power lines, cell phones, cell towers, cordless phones, basically all of these things that we looked at, these standards that we have today are thousands of times too high.
It is inescapable. If you look at the studies in aggregate, if you look at all the science studies, they clearly tell us that we are living in world today where the standards that we have do not protect public health.
And the consequences of not doing something about this are going to be huge in terms of public health, in terms of sickness for people, in terms of lower quality of life, because people don’t feel well and they don’t work well in these environments. And the cost of society, over time if we do nothing, is going to be enormous.
So we have all the makings of early warnings here. And we don’t just need trivial or do nothing kinds of cures. We are so far down the road and understanding the problem that we are calling for very substantial changes.
The biological effects that we see are occurring thousands of times lower than our standards, we need new standards. It is fine to keep the old ones because the old standards protect us against being burned, or being cooked or being electrocuted.
What they don’t do is protect us against cancer, and diseases like Alzheimer’s, and Lou Gehrig’s disease, miss carriage and the other constellation of things that we strongly suspect are occurring.
So we think we need an entirely new set of standards to address these new technologies and they need to be biologically based.
What that means is we will look at these 2,000 studies or more and we are to see what kind of biological effects are occurring and we have to design new standards that protect us and provide a safety factor below the levels where we are seeing we start.
So for childhood leukemia which is a done deal, there are really no more questions, power line exposures, EMF field exposures, cause childhood leukemia, at least some part of it and maybe a very big part of it.
And we are looking at levels of one miligauss, maybe one in a little milligauss, we are not looking at a hundred or a thousand and our current limit is 904.
In terms of radio frequency radiation, we don’t yet know the lower limit of health risks. Every time we get a new technology that drops the level of exposure down lower, we still find people getting sick.
Some fraction of the population, or some special groups, children are particularly vulnerable, the ill are particularly vulnerable, and the aged are particularly vulnerable.
So we do not know the lower limit. We are going to recommend new biologically based standards being develop and the key to these studies where these effects were seeing. But we are not yet prepared to say how low. Because it maybe in the worse case there is no lower limit.
If it is truly informational content rather than the amount of energy and heating, if that’s true, then some of these technologies may not be possible, and at the same time maintain our own wellbeing and health.
You know, one of the things that I think we’ve seen clearly now and I’m looking at all the science, it is not the amount of heat that matters, it’s not the amount of heat from the cell phone, it’s not a thermal effect.
It’s not like if you cut out the heat, you don’t have a biological effect that can lead into a brain tumour. Somehow, because these levels now that are causing these effects, they are creeping lower and lower.
The way better to describe it is that it is the informational content of the signal coming at you, the radio frequency signal, or the EOF signal, is somehow being detected by the body, being amplified by the body, and the body is responding to it in a way that says I’m in distress or I can’t metabolise properly, my heart is not operating properly, I’m not sleeping properly.
And then you have a constellation of effects that follow on, all of which create ill health, or your wellbeing, your ability to function is impaired. So if it is the kind of signal you are getting, the way it interacts with the body, heating is irrelevant, it is the information of the signal that counts.
In talking to people about why we are not able yet to say with authority what the lower limit should be for radio frequency radiation, I tell them this: In the year 2000 when I went to Saltsburg to an international conference to talk about radio frequency health effects and scientific studies, at that time we thought that about one microwatt per centimetre squared might be a good number even though the standard was up here at a thousand, we thought that maybe one was going to be okay for chronic exposure.
Well we are now in 2007 and I personally think that we have to be down at about a nanowatt, one thousand times lower than one microwatt, in order to begin to say, it’s possible that’s okay for chronic exposure.
And when we see technologies, perhaps in the future, that are emitting at something lower than a nanowatt we’ll have to wait and see what happens.
One of the things that we have learn recently in looking at John’s work on ionizing radiation at low dose, particularly related to mammograms, that there is really no low limit at which things are safe. There is always an effect and it is always adverse. So no lower limit when ionizing harms.
I think we may be in the same area with none ionizing radiation and in fact part of the literature that you can find on this subject that we have worked on, the bystander effect. The bystander effect says that if you hit one cell precisely with ionizing radiation, somehow, cells that are not even connected that are more distant in location are also damaged or die.
What that means is that the way this works it is not fully explained, we don’t know everything yet. So standards that we derived based with very limited understanding of the body’s inner-workings are not protective. And it is really scientific arrogance to think that because science can’t explain an effect, it does not exist.
One of the things that the report suggests is that cell phones should be entirely redesigned. So they do not work when you put them to your head. They work only in speaker mode, or you have to have a wired ear piece to use them, and you also should not wear them.
If they aren’t redesigned, we can’t see a safe way for them to operate, at the levels they emit today and in the fashion they work today. For people who say: I can’t imagine ever be able to give up my cell phone, my blackberry or my trio.
What we can do is to say to them: Look, you can tremendously minimise your exposure, use a wired earpiece,
do not use a wireless earpiece, do not use a Bluetooth type mechanism, because the cumulative dose from these is going to be very large and you are not being informed of that.
Cordless phones again, should be considered just like cell phones and every design change should apply to cordless phones as well.
We are a little concerned that in some states including California we’re going to have a new law that says you cannot drive while holding a cell phone. And that is going to drive people to use these new wireless devices, which in themselves are going to have bio effects.
We need a complete top to bottom review and in the interim, I think we need to halt the deployment and proliferation of base stations or cell towers until we are able to say with some better certainty, we know how to do it right, because right now it is clear we are doing it wrong.
If you look at this issue in terms of what we should have learn from smoking and lung cancer, and second hand radiation and cancer, I would simply do this for parents: I you would not buy these for your kids, and these are candy cigarettes, you certainly would not want to buy a candy toy cell phone.
Because I think in ten years, we are going to be looking at these two as equally harmful, meaning the real McCoy, real cigarettes, and real cell phones.
And there is no excuse to start children off using these cell phone devices at an early age and probably even into young adulthood. Considering their brain is still hardwiring and brain development and neurological development isn’t complete until you are early twenties.
We have no business providing kids with things that are probably turning out to be more dangerous than cigarettes, certainly in short term the brain tumour risks are going to be higher.
- James Heddle, EON Producer – What would you say to parents that are dubious about wireless things being setup in their children’s school?
Wireless internet is another area where we get a lot of inquiries. And in schools it becomes popular to install wireless internet connections for children’s laptop.
The exposure that a child would get in a school, going through a school like this, and from elementary, middle and high school, would be very considerable over a lifetime. And we really recommend against it now, because it appears that, it’s an experiment we don’t know the health result, and it is not worth the risk.
Can we quantify the risk yet? No, because we are not allowed to make experiments on children. But every indication is that if wireless technologies and their emissions have such a big impact on adults from the studies we have, it would be worse on children.
So we have good alternatives, you can have great internet connections with cable modem, a wired alternative. So we don’t need it, why take the chance?
The scientific evidence today is stronger than it was for environmental tobacco smokers, second hand smoke and cancer. So, you know, if parents would ignore health warnings for cigarettes, then I can see why they might ignore, the health studies we have today for cell phones.
It would be a very bad idea to ignore these warnings, but the evidence is there. The industry would like you to think that we have to have conclusive scientific evidence, which is ridiculously high level of proof before we do anything at all.
And this is just not the case. In smart public health policy, you react when you began to see the evidence going up and the trend is toward showing an effect.
You don’t wait until the industry is finally willing to admit that it can’t hide the fact anymore, that they are selling a carcinogen.
So if you buy the argument that you need proof, absolute proof, and proof according to the industry that you have harmful substances with these devices, then you would wait.
But I can’t imagine any parent saying a cell phone is so important to my child, to my family that we will risk this and wait for proof. They are going to act on evidence.
And we are really hoping that school districts are going to do the same thing. Because when children are mandated to go to school and you can afford only a public school, you can’t afford a private school, you are stuck as a family with whatever that district decides to install in terms of wireless.
So this is an area we really hope that parents and administrators will get together and air on the side of caution, and not go wireless for now.
- Mary Beth Brangan, EON Producer – Can you give any exposure comparisons between wireless exposures in a school and say from a cell phone?
There are some estimates by Alister Philipps, he is an expert in the United Kingdom. He is a man who runs an organisation called Power Watch, which is technically very good.
And he has estimated that for students sitting in a classroom, where you have 20 or 30 students all working on wireless computers, twenty minutes of cell phone use is equivalent to one hour in that classroom.
It seems high, but those are the numbers. And certainly, this wireless exposure in this classroom is not trivial. If you have everybody working on their wireless computers, a couple of hours is a huge exposure.
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