Subject:  Mad cow/mobile telephones? (Sodergren).
Date:     Sun, 03 Dec 2000 053126 -0600
From:     Roy Beavers 
To:       guru 
--------------------------------------------------

.........From EMF-L.......

Here is a 'well stated' candle......guru......

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Mad cow?
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2000 12:48:31 +0100
From: leif.sodergren@if.se
To: roy@emfguru.com

MOBILE TELEPHONES: 
WILL THE GOLDEN GOOSE BECOME THE MAD COW?
A British government expert panel recently recommended that children should
refrain from using mobile telephones. In december this year, there will be
leaflets warning mobile phone buyers about the uncertainty over mobile
phone's potential health risks. This might prove a very sound measure. But
why is it that the Swedish or the Finnish governments, usually progressive
and eager to prohibit harmful substances, have said nothing about the
possible dangers of microwaves and mobile phones? Why so quiet on the
Northern front? 

The answer is simple. The British health warnings could
simply not have been issued in Nokia and Ericsson country. Finland and
Sweden are still in a euphoric state about wireless communication and it is
politically impossible to say anything that remotely threatens the mobile
phone industry, the golden goose that brings so much prosperity to industry
and government. 

The Swedish Council for Work Life Research is a central government agency
for the long-term planning and funding of research and development. In 1997
it was asked by the government to make an inventory of EMF -related health
risks. The final report was presented November 30, 2000. Two of the three
individuals who prepared this report(Lena Hillert and Ulf Bergqvist) have
industry connections. They are "scientific consultants" to Swedish Telecom
mobile phone operator, Telia and therefore hardly unbiased. 

The report presented on the website www.ralf.se gives mobile phones a clean
bill of health. The report also incorrectly claims that the general public
is not paticularly worried about health risks from mobile phones. Some
smaller groups however, the report states, are concerned about EMF health
risks. The following wording is interesting "...this concern can itself be a
health problem and should be dealt with". 

This sounds very ominous indeed
and is reminiscent of Soviet style thought management. Do they mean that
everyone in the British government report that recommends caution with the
use of mobile phones are deluded and should be "dealt with"? That kind of
wording one might find in industry lobby group memos, not in a report from a
government agency. Compared to the British report, this is a farce.

The government has been told that the report should be remade by individuals
that are not so heavily biased. The government has yet to react. If they do
not use inbiased advice, mobile phones will one day become their BSE(mad
cow) crisis. 

We regard ourselves as very sophisticated individuals, but biologically we
are as primitive as stone age man. We have no built-in protection against
environmental toxins or microwaves. One day when the party is over and we
soberly look back at this period, we might wonder how entire populations
allowed themselves to be continually exposed to low levels of microwaves. We
might regret not having worried more about the "microwave sickness" that
Soviet scientists identified decades before. We might regret not having
heeded warnings from the likes of Dr. John Holt of Australia when he pointed
out that mobile phone frequencies double the amount of histamines and thus
cause asthma and allergies. We might also regret having left research in the
hands of the mobile phone industry. How likely were they to sponsor research
that would threaten their existence?

Industry is powerful enough to influence the Finnish and Swedish governments
and also the EU to tone down the dangers from mobile phones and base
stations. This means that we will simply have to sit back and wait for very
concrete and widespread illness caused by microwaves from mobile phones.
Maybe somewhat cynical, but it is logical; most people are probably not
willing to stop using their mobile phones without substantial physical proof
regardless of government warnings. So the question is: is there any evidence
of any illness so far? Can we identify any specific symptoms?

Holt's theory that asthma is caused by microwaves is interesting. It is not
in the heavily polluted, less developed countries that asthma is more
frequent, but in the heavily developed countries of the West with most
electro-smog, where almost every other child has some kind of allergy today.

Children are more sensitive to microwaves than adults and recently there has
been an increase in children getting severe inflammation of the gut, Crohns
disease. This disease shows the same pattern as do allergies and asthma.
Both cause inflammation processes and both involve the immune
defence.(Svenska Dagbladet October 25, 1999. 

In Scandinavia we suffer from en epidemic of "burned out" individuals from
all walks of life. People who become disfunctional due to stress and have to
leave work, in the best of cases for a few month, in some cases, never to
return. A new vocabulary has been invented. Journalists love the subject.

Even children are affected. "Teenagers are stressed to pieces" says the
Danish psychiatrist Gideon Ziotnek in Expressen newspaper November 22, 1999.
Ziotnek thinks that stress will cause the brain to atrophy. "Young people
can get emotional and intellectual disturbances". 

Another paper (GoteborgsPosten) wrote the previous day: "A study among a
thousand schoolchildren in Gothenburg show that 13 percent with normal
hearing experience tinnitus. This can be a sign of social stress".

A question worth asking: Why is everyone suddenly so stressed? Have we
changed our social behavour so much? We are working harder, bur are we
working that much harder? In the past people worked hard also, but what is
new in our lives? 

What has dramatically changed to cause this stress? 
There is an important factor: the increased radiation from mobile phones,
television and radio broadcasts.

During 1994- 1996, when Swedish teenagers started using mobile phones,
prescriptions for sleeping pills to young women of the ages between 15-24
years have doubled.(Radio:Dagens Eko october 4 1999). At the same time,
prescriptions of anti-depresseants to the same group have increased by 40
percent.

But how exactly can we attribute the stress we experience to microwaves?
Professor Henry Lai from USA during a visit to Gothenburg explained that
microwaves have the same stress effect on the human body as loud sound has.
The invisible microwaves that we cannot see, but that pass thrugh our
bodies, is a chronic stressor. Our bodies, whether we want to or not,
experience the microwaves as stress, as though we were exposed to loud noise
continuously. This might explain the epedemic of "burned out" individuals.
With an ongoing backround stress from microwaves and other electrosmog, we
cannot carry out ordinary hard work. We have become stress sensitive and
brittle. A further worrying comment from Professor Lai was that this stress,
like any other stress, has an accumulative effect.

Are people finally beginning to make associations between their environment
and their symptoms? Yes, some are. When young people show an increase in
oral cancer, there is certainly cause to pause. A professor in tumour
surgery for nose and throat, Staffan Edstrsm at the Sahlgrenska hospital in
Gothenburg, explains (in the newspaper GP 13 december 1999) that we all live
in an environment with intensified radiation from mobile phones, computers,
and cars and that this gives cause to think that the environmental factor
can explain this increase in oral cancer among the young. 

Will our national health system be able to cope with the new illnesses
caused by mobile phones? Brain tumours are comparatively easy to deal with
if they occur. Either people die or they survive after surgery, but if a
large part of the working population is becoming prematurely senile,
(microwaves cause toxins to pass the blood brain barrier into the brain
where they can cause alzheimers disease) then we face a practical and
ethical situation one hardly dare contemplate. 

In Sweden, health care is locally funded and local politicians, show no
compunction whatsover in letting severely ill people wait for urgent
operations (cataracts, hip replacements)for several years. Even urgent
cancer operations are delayed. With this attitude, one might only guess what
cost-efficient, non-sentimental and highly practical Swedes might come up
with in dealing with a large senile population with no place to go and no
one to care for them.

Mobile phones might mean a tidy profit today. But tomorrow we might have to
pay. The golden goose might very well turn out to be the mad cow.

Leif Sodergren 
email:febint@hotmail.com 
International contacts 
FEB Foreningen for El-och Bildskarmsskadade  
THE SWEDISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ELECTROSENSITIVE
Po Box: 6023, 102 31 Stockholm Sweden 
email: febint@hotmail.com
Website: www.feb.se


Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org
Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.emfguru.com