Subject: (Goldsmith) Re Cell Phones and Human Health (fwd)
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 063100 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Roy L. Beavers" <rbeavers@llion.org>
To: emfguru@hotmail.com
--------------------------------------------------
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 14:04:12 +0300 (IDT)
From: John Goldsmith
To: "Roy L. Beavers"
Cc: emfguru@hotmail.com
Subject: Re: Cell Phones and Human Health (fwd)
Dear Bill:
I'm John Goldsmith, M.D., M.P.H., with a University degree in physics,
and a specialist in environmental epidemiology, having spent twenty plus
years in charge of research on the health effects of air pollution for the
California Department of Health. For the past twenty years I have been
here in Beer Sheva as Professor of Epidemiology. I will briefly and most
empathetically respond as well as I can to your comments.
>
> .......[[G]]....added by guru to help separate the discourse.
[[G]] is Goldsmith....
>
---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1998 16:45:23 -0600
> To: "Roy L. Beavers"
> Subject: Cell Phones and Human Health
>
> Greetings:
>
> An individual with whom I regularly correspond on the net has told me about
> EMF Guru, but I don't know what your list is about - in general. I am a
> physicist with an electromagnetics PhD (in EE) and some interest in (but very
> little knowledge about) the interaction of electromagnetic fields with
> biological tissue. I am especially concerned about the unwitting experiment
> which is being carried out on several 10's of millions of people who use
> cellular phones all over the world.
[[G]] I share your concern and feel compelled to do what I can to
provide
information useful for health protection against what risks we believe to
be present. I have written a book addressed to the public and am looking
for a publisher...on" Health Risks from Cellular Phones and what can be
done to reduce the risks"
> I recently attended (at my own expense) a meeting of the Radiation
Research
> Society. This is an organization of radiation biologists, radiologists,
> biophysicists, etc. What bothered me most about this meeting was finding out
> (in a special session on cell phones and human health) that 1) there is no
> program objective to identify a dAmage mechanism that might link to the
> reported cases of brain cancer in some cell phone users - instead, program
> objectives are simply to prove cell phonmes are safe - and 2) the
> multinational effort to study effect of cell phones on human health is being
> jointly funded by individual governments and by the worldwide
> telecommunications industry. The research program, however, is coordinated -
> if not directed - by the telecommunications industry. This seems to me to be
> a built-in conflict of interests!
[[G]] The World Health Organization is supposed to be the agency
identifying needed research. Dr. Michael Repacholi is the person in
charge of this effort, at WHO, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland. Dr. Repacholi is
also the author of the industry funded research which showed that
genetically predisposed mioce get increased lymphoma from cellphone like
radiation. He has repeatedly shown his reluctance to grapple with the
problems posed by and meaning for human health of the epidemiological
data.
> As far as I can tell now, the only incontrovertable evidence for an adverse
> effect of cell phone use on human health falls into two classes: 1)
> Experiments (on rats or mice) that show that individuals who are genetically
> predisposed to cancer are statistically significantly more likely to get
> cancer when subjected to a microwave field approximating exposure to cell
> phone radiation by humans for several hours a day for an extended period and
> 2) Observations of blood DNA taken from rats exposed to both chemical
> carcinogens and microwave radiation show significantly more DNA breaking when
> microwave exposure is present than when it is absent - though some individuals
> have criticized the conduct of this experiment on the grounds of timeing and
> order in which certain parts of the experiment were carried out.
[[G]] The issue is not what can be inferred from incontrovertible
evidence, but what courses of protective action are justified by the
evidence that we have. We have some epidemiological evidence of
associations of RF exposure increases with leukemia, with increased
spontaneous abortion, with shifts in red and white blood counts, and with
White blood cell mutations. In a recent survey of Swedish and Norwegian
analog and digital users, an association of headache, fatigue and and
sensations of warmth and skin burning increased in frequency with the
increased numbers of minutes of use of the equiipment.
> Rats and mice are generally considered good models of human beings for
> toxicological experiments, but I fear that they may not give the best
> interpretation of interactions of microwaves with biological material. In
> particular, I note that the human head, treated as a multiple layered
> structure with overal approximately spherical shape of the cranium, will
> probably resonate weakly with microwaves at frequencies near 1 Ghz, and I
> would expect some internal focusing of the incident radiation to occur in some
> brain structures. This means that I would expect a spatially nonuniform
> microwave field to occur inside the head of a cell phone user. Some FTDT
> calculations have been carried out in head models containing 37 different
> tissue types to try to estimate the specific absorption rate (SAR) of the
> heads of humans of various ages. It may be interesting to ask if anyone in
> this audience knows what the implications of this model are concerning the
> spatial distribution of the internal radiation field (actually, the quantity
> of interest should be the power density - i.e., the field which represents the
> Poynting vector).
[[G]] Several competent investigators have examined these
issues, particularl Prof. Ohm Ghandi at Universikty of Utah, Dr. Leif
Salford at Lund University. and Prof. Niels Kunster of ETH in Zurich.
>
> The other item about which I would like to inquire is the method of internal
> energy transfer within complicated biological molecules - such as DNA.
> Specifically, I would like to know whether microwave energy absorption into
> internal modes can be concentrated by internal energy transfer into a single
> mode and thus cause bond breaking. To understand this process, consider a
> simple polyatomic molecule that has, say, five vibrational modes, each of
> which stores insufficient energy to beak a bond, but the total of which store
> more energy than a typical bond energy. I dimly remember (from 35-40 years
> ago) having seen a formula that expresses the probability (per unit time) that
> sufficient energy transfer will occur (by internal, collisionless energy
> transfer) to concentrate the total energy of these modes in a single bond,
> leading to dissociation of the molecule. The competing process is usually
> de-excitation of some of the internal modes by collisions. Taking into
> consideration the rate of collisional deexcitation and the rate of internal
> energy transfer, one can calculate - on the average - the fraction of
> originally excited molecules that will suffer bond breaking in a given
> interval of time.
[[G]] I think that energy sufficient for breaking of bonds is no longer
the only criteria of biophysical harm. Most analysts concern themselves
with effects on cell membranes and intracellular membranes.
> The argument is usually made by radiation physicists that the energy of a
> microwave photon is far too small to cause either thermal effects (heating of
> biological tissue) or bond breaking. I suspect that multiphoton absorption of
> microwave radiation into various normal modes of the DNA molecule can, by
> internal energy transfer, eventually lead to bond breaking, and that this
> might be a plausible damage mechanism for an adverse effect of cell phone
> radiation fields on human health. Would anyone care to comment on this?> --
[[G]] I think that the thermal-non-thermal discussion is a bit of a red
herring. Granted that its maybe a bit easier to theorize about
thermal transfer than about more complex matters, but the complaints
of Swedish and Norweigian cellphone users of warmtnh around th ear and
burning sensation of the skin has to make one wonder. ---- > ........just
"Bill" >
Stay tuned, Bill, but don't broadcast from within 10 cm from
your brain.
John Goldsmith, M.D., M.P.H. Professor of Epidemiology
gjohn @BGUMAIL.bgu.ac.il
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