Subject: No Need to Cook up a Medical Scare (Newton) (Curry).... Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 174652 -0500 (CDT) From: "Roy L. Beavers"To: emfguru -------------------------------------------------- ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 16:40:00 -0500 From: "Bill P. Curry" To: "Roy L. Beavers" Subject: Re: No Need to Cook up a Medical Scare (Newton) Roy, I too have replied to the Time article by Joshua Quittner. I doubt that Time will publish my letter, so I am sending it to your list, if you want to use it. Dear Editor: Joshua Quittner's satirical article about his annoyance with cell phone users inflicting their conversations on everyone within earshot certainly rang true. I have often been in train cars in which 5 or more cell phone conversations were taking place simultaneously. The article missed the real point, however, that it is not 'second hand noise' but microwave radiation from the phones that is the real culprit. The news media has ignored the possibility that there may be real radiation hazards associated with cell phones. In addition, the public welfare is ill served by a Federal Communications Commission whose guidelines for health and safety are based on the incorrect notion that only ionizing radiation or radiation that heats tissues can cause biological harm. Further, the standards setting commissions that advise the FCC have ignored the research done in the entire decade of the 1990's in arriving at their previous decisions and their tentative recommendations for the year 2002. Some of that ignored research includes momentous work that shows breaking of DNA molecules by simulated cell phone radiation. DNA breaking is usually considered a precursor to cancer. Further, the cellular phone industry's own research organization, the Wireless Technology Research organization, recently announced that some of their studies indicated that a rare form of brain cancer may be associated with heavy use of cell phones. Shortly before this announcement, their funding was canceled by the cellular telephone industry. At a time when much more research into the health implications of cell phones is clearly needed, both the industry and the federal government have stopped funding such research, and many top notch biolectromagnetics laboratories capable of studying these health implications have now been closed. For the multi-billion dollar telecommunications industry to foster a technology with such adverse potential for human health on 70 million users in America (not to mention the users in the rest of the world) without adequate research to establish the level of these hazards is inexcusable, and is reminiscent of the irresponsible tactics of the tobacco industry! -- Bill P. Curry, Ph.D. (retired physicist) Glen Ellyn, Illinois -- ---- Bill P. Curry, Ph.D. |Physics is fun. EMSciTek Consulting Co. |Trying to make a living! 22W101 McCarron Road, |Phone: (630) 858-9377 Glen Ellyn, IL 60137 |Fax: same, but require prior notice Home page: http://www.EMSciTek.com ____________________________________________________ | Analysis, experiment design & software development | | for engineering and the physical sciences | ---------------------------------------------------- Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.emfguru.com