Subject: (Lundquist) U.S. military bias on RF/MW health hazards (fwd) Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1999 131601 -0600 (CST) From: "Roy L. Beavers" <rbeavers@llion.org> To: emfguru <rbeavers@llion.org> -------------------------------------------------- ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 08 Jan 1999 17:16:18 From: marjlundquist@usa.net To: rbeavers@llion.org Subject: U.S. military bias on RF/MW health hazards Roy, Bill Curry wrote, in explaining the IEEE and its involvement in standard-setting activities: "One unseen factor that bothers me about all this is the military. Does the fact that the microwave spectrum is so important to the military for navigation, guidance, communication, RADAR, and even microwave weaponry prevent getting a fair hearing on microwave dangers to the civilian population? I don't know." The answer to Bill's question is YES! There is considerable evidence to support his suspicion, which is shared by others. There is a good deal of evidence that the U.S. military -- especially the Air Force -- considers it ABSOLUTELY VITAL that the public forever believe that microwaves are not hazardous to mammalian health at intensities below 10 mW/sq. cm, regardless of what the truth may be (and this is NOT true). The scientific research done by the U.S. Air Force on this topic is of poor quality, designed (insofar as possible) to produce predetermined results. The interpretation of results is biased and unscientific (if this approach is needed to produce the desired conclusion) and has been like this for many years. This is not my imagination; I have been collecting critical comments in the scientific literature written by others. Of course, I have seen such examples myself, too. I have also seen an instance where an experiment gave mixed results and only the results that supported the desired conclusions were published; the results that supported the opposite conclusion were simply ignored. This is unethical and deceitful scientific practice. But the military is not alone in this; they have support from industry and the IEEE is not guiltless, because it's in professional activities that engineers with common interests but different employers mix. Of course, standard-setting is one such activity. (Indeed, historically it was the military that approached ANSI to try to persuade it to get involved in establishing an exposure standard for the civilian population!) This raises an interesting point: why was ANSI the vehicle for this standard? The answer is probably that in this way, electrical engineers and the military could enjoy greater influence over the standard-setting process. Think for a minute about professionalism and standard-setting. We usually have doctors setting medical standards, lawyers setting legal standards, architects setting architectural standards, etc. Health protection standards are normally set by health professionals. (Health professionals include physicians, nurses, industrial hygienists and health physicists.) The RF/microwave health exposure standard was set by electrical engineers! Are electrical engineers health professionals? Not by any yardstick I am aware of! Does this provide a basis for skepticism regarding the integrity of the IEEE/ANSI standard? I think so. Let me anticipate some objections from those who participate in the IEEE committees that set/revise this standard. They would say, truthfully, that ANSI requires a balance of membership on its committees, with one-third of the members representing the public; there are also physicians on the ANSI C95 committee. The trouble is, the history of physican involvement shows clearly that the medical representatives were, if not biased, certainly NOT disinterested. In the 1930s diathermy was a lively and exciting profession; medical personnel were quite literally experimenting on their patients. The spirit among the medical professionals was almost exactly the same as that which motivated the early users of X-rays within the medical profession; an aura of excitement and enthusiasm prevailed. Because these physicians were using the thermal effects of RF radiation, they were comfortable with the idea of a thermal standard, and never saw -- or wanted to see -- any reason to look further for other hazards. The ANSI committee members from the public lacked the technical expertise to stand up to the technical and medical professionals -- and it would have been useless to do so in any case, since they only constituted one-third of the committee membership and could always be outvoted by a coalition of physician and engineer members. One reason I feel it important to create the new discipline of bioelectromagnetics is so that there will be a profession of health professionals with sufficient understanding of the electromagnetic field that engineers can't "pull the wool over their eyes"! This profession would then take charge of establishing standards based on sound science and good public health principles. That is what I am working toward. And it is badly needed because all existing standards for exposure to RF/MW radiation have limited scientific validity, and these limits are NOT being recognized at present by professionals in IEEE or the medical profession or industrial hygiene or any other profession. They certainly are not being recognized by any agency of the U.S. government, or of any other government! This is why our health is at such serious risk today from microwave radiation (and to a lesser degree from the lower RF frequencies). Back to the military: the weapons potential has given the military another powerful reason to keep concealed the health effects of RF/MW radiation. I am sure there must be many classified documents in which are discussed the exploitation of effects that many electrical engineers not privy to these classified reports deny the existence of. One reason I am sure of this is that I have discovered a fairly recent successful attempt at censorship of a publication that published a discussion of this; I don't know WHO did the censoring, but I know that the only party with the clout to accomplish it would have been an agency of the U.S. government, and the motive had to be to conceal what our federal government is doing by way of EMF nonlethal weapons development. Bill Curry and I may differ about whether the IEEE is culpable in this sorry scenario of scientific deceit, but we both share a concern that is unquestionably valid. -- Marjorie P.S. For those who may think these comments are too lengthy, let me say I have totally omitted all discussion of several pertinent points in the interests of brevity. ********************************* Marjorie Lundquist, Ph.D., C.I.H. Bioelectromagnetic Hygienist P. O. Box 11831 Milwaukee, WI 53211-0831 USA ********************************* ____________________________________________________________________ Get free e-mail and a permanent address at http://www.netaddress.com/?N=1 Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.feb.se/EMF-L/EMF-L.html