Subject: Letter to my Congress person (Curry)
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 1999 034617 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Roy L. Beavers"
To: emfguru
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.......Quite a good letter. This needs to get more "congressional"
distribution......
Dr. Curry has been conducting "Blue World" measurements of EMF in our
environment in a number of our major cities.....
Roy Beavers (EMFguru)......
rbeavers@llion.org.......
.....It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.....
EMF-L web-site can be found at:
EMF-L archives can be found at:
..................PEOPLE ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN PROFITS..................
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 05 Sep 1999 15:23:49 -0500
From: "Bill P. Curry"
To: "Roy L. Beavers"
Subject: Letter to my Congress person
Roy,
I thought your readers might be interested in this excerpt from an Email
letter I just sent my Congress woman. (Below)
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My second item of concern is far more important. The cellular telephone
industry has pushed the development of "wireless devices" and the deployment
of these systems so fast that inadequate studies have been made of the
implications of these systems on human health. These devices are all
generators of microwave radiation.
I am a semi-retired physicist who used to be at Argonne National Laboratory
and who has consulted in various aspects of electromagnetics for a number of
years. For about a year and a half, I have been studying what has been done
in the field of bioelectromagnetics that is relevant to the question of how
safe cellular phones and related devices are. First, I have found that
government funded research in this area has all but "dried up." Second, the
cellular phone industry's own research organization (the Wireless Technology
Research organization) has been told that it will no longer be funded. This
announcement came just prior to the release of information by the WTR that
some of its studies have demonstrated an increased probability of a rare form
of brain cancer among some cell phone users. This is a cancer that grows from
the ouside of the brain inward, just as one would expect if cellular phone
radiation is the culprit. The WTR also found that some tests show biological
cell damage associated with microwave radiation of the type and at the level
of radiation from cellular phones.
Because of the construction and placement of the microwave generation and
antenna driving circuits in cellular phones, there is a concentration of
radiation near the earpiece of the phone. I have measured this myself in
several cell phones. On the one my wife and I have (and use only for
emergencies), the radiation coming out the earpiece is almost 4 times as
intense as that coming out the antenna. Further, the radiation at 3.5 inches
away from the phone is 5 times higher than the FCC's guidelines allow -
except that the FCC mandates that the measurements be done 1 meter away
from the phone.
The FCC requires the measurements to be made so far away, because they
are concerned only about interference with other electronic devices, not about
potential adverse health effects. Yet the brain is only 1.5 centimeters away
from the brain - so the amount of radiation that impinges on the brain (after
accounting for half the radiation going away from the head and half of the
remaining radiation being absorbed by the skull) is about 48 times the FCC
guidelines.
Because the FCC adapts its guidelines from standards setting commissions in
organizations such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
(IEEE) and the American National Standards Institutes (ANSI), the FCC
guidelines only protect against direct heating of tissues.
Yet both laboratory experiments on biological cells and on living animals
- as well as epidemiological studies on humans - show that adverse
biological effects can occur at much smaller radiation doses than those
required to cause tissue heating. Even though it is high time to revise
the allowed radiation levels downward, the IEEE's tentative
recommendations for the next year 2002 do not even include any of the
research done in the decade of the 1990's and this excluded research has
some of the most important observations of detrimental biological effects
of microwave radiation.
(Note that not only does this include radiation associated with cellular
telephone systems, but also wireless local area networks - LAN's - for
computer networks in offices and especially in schools, and also the
addditional radiation associated with the buildout of the congressionally
mandated High Definition Television (HDTV) system. The latter will result
in doubling the microwave background around cities such as Chicago and in
some cases quadrupling it.)
I am quite concerned about these dangers, because the overall microwave
radiation background has increased about tenfold in as many years - according
to what I observe now and what I see was measured in the late 1980's.
Unfortunately, the proliferation of microwave sources in the environment, as
well as in personal appliances, continues unabated. Thus, I strongly urge the
Congress to restore funding to the government health agencies that have the
capability of sponsoring and carrying out the necessary research. I am quite
concerned that, within 10 years or so, we will see the unintended health
consequences of our precipitous rush to deploy microwave sources without
adequate guarantees relating to health and safety. Already, the brain cancer
rate increases at about 1% per year - even though the overall cancer rate is
going down. Could this be because of the proliferation of sources of radio
frequency and microwave radiation? We may never know, if adequate research is
not done.
--
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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 |
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Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org
Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.emfguru.com