Red lines which are on your handout. There is a staple handout & they are right on there. So you can learn more on this website
saferemr.com and please join me in welcoming Dr. Joel Moskowitz. Thank you Kim I'd like to thank the
University Health Services for inviting me to do this keynote presentation. I'd
also like to thank the School of Public Health for co-sponsoring the event and
especially like to thank Kim for coordinating the event today. So I don't
forget there's a journalist, a digital journalist who's here filming for CNBC.
And after the Q&A session you may want to talk to some of the activists who are
in the audience and maybe some non activists as well to get their opinions
so if you want to stay after the Q&A panel, Isaac is the person who's hiding
behind that pole over there to talk to. I got involved in this issue by accident
in 2009 when my Center sponsored a visiting scientist from the National Cancer
Center of South Korea who worked with a team of researchers and with us on two
meta-analyses which are quantitative reviews of the literature and one of the meta analyses
dealt with mobile phone use and tumorous and when that was published he had gone
back to to South Korea so I was left with having to feel media requests from
journalists from virtually all over the world who were very concerned about the
findings of our meta-analysis at the time and since then I've been following
the literature very closely studying the literature and writing about it and lecturing about it and trying to bring reporters up to speed on how to cover this complex topic
and set up research which has evolved considerably since 2009. So I first want
to go over some basic information to give you an overview of what the issues
are that we're dealing with. I'm going to focus on the radiation risk and I'm not
going to talk about the benefits of cellphones because I think you're all
quite aware of the benefits of cellphones and smartphones. In fact I'd be surprised if there's anyone in the audience who doesn't have
one currently. I'm not going to focus on the social problems including policy,
well this is social problems which range from privacy and security issues to
varieties of inappropriate use or problematic use, including addictive
behaviors which are increasing all the time. At the national level we're
increasingly seeing a potential cyber security problem with regard to the
infrastructure that the cell phone relies upon, and there's a lot of
controversy around the cyber security issues in which technology out of China
is safe to use them which is not. Beginning in 1984, we have fairly
inelegant cell phone which didn't actually work very well because they
often didn't get receptivity, due to very few cell towers in the country. You
see here on the left side and over time the cell phone has become more
elegant, it also has evolved from a single function which was basically
operating as a cell phone to include texting, game playing, music playing, to
becoming an internet delivery device and with each of these
increases in functions, numerous social problems began to evolve around
these different uses. On the far right you see the latest version
which is a foldable cellphone, probably very few of you have seen this. I think
they're going to sell for somewhere between two thousand and twenty six
hundred dollars, depending on where you get it from. This model over here on the left originally
sold for $3,000 but that was 1984 dollars. And in the lower right, you see
one example of a cell tower, there is a symbiotic relationship between cell
phones and cell towers at least currently, you can't have cell phone
reception without these cell antennas. Industry is trying to get away I think
from using these cell antennas devices. And because, although we have a love
affair with the cell phone, at best people are ambivalent about having these
cell towers especially in their neighborhood, so they've been
experimenting with things like drones and hot-air balloons and there's even
proposals to put up thousands of mini satellites to provide access, to provide
the medium on which your cell phone can operate, your smartphone can operate. The
industry association CTIA and I'll talk more about their rather nefarious role
in all of this. This is the lobbyist group for the wireless or cellular
industry in the US. They engage in a lot of lobbying, they coordinate the lobbying
of various cell phone companies and manufacturers. The industry as a whole
spends about 100 million dollars a year lobbying the Congress. They also do
lobbying at the state level and occasionally get involved in local level
politics and lawsuits. So you can see the rapid growth in connections. Not all
of these connections are to cell phones however because there are other devices
that rely on cellular subscriptions such as tablets. Let's get these buttons down as you can see this is a big big business. It's also
a huge business globally, not just in the U.S. There's roughly five billion
subscriber connections worldwide, so this is an industry that's probably been
unparalleled in terms of any other industry in the history of the world in
terms of its reach, and this is important too, 88 hours per year is the estimate
from the industry in terms of our average voice use. So over a 10 year
period, yet the typical person would get something like 880 hours of cumulative
call time. We'll get back to that later when we look at some of the epidemiology. Smartphones sort of became popularized
by the iPhone in 2007 and you can see the rapid uptake in terms of use in
the United States. So the current estimate or at least the estimate as of
2017 is 273 million in smartphones in use in this country. This is also a CTIA
slide. It's hard to find good prevalence data in terms of use of these
devices. This is a survey the Pew Research Center did with parents of
teens and roughly 95% of teenagers in the U.S. 13 to 17 years of age have
either have a cell phone or have access to a smartphone, according to this survey.
I was unable to find reliable data on use among children under the age of 13
but I suspect the prevalence of ownership there or access to smart
phones is also very high .The industry, particularly CTIA has been pushing
parents to give their kids cell phones younger and younger and there's a lot of
pressure I hear from parents of young children for providing
them with access to a smartphone. Concurrent with the uptake of cell
phones we've seen a decline in the access to landline phones. In fact at
this point...clicked the wrong button, sorry about that... the majority of households in the US as of 2018 are
wireless only. They do not have a landline phone and this has changed
rapidly since I've been following this issue in 2009 the uptake of cell phones
and the decline in landline phones. As a result then people have become totally
dependent for telecommunications on their cell phone or smartphone. So how
does the cell phone call work? I'll just go over this really quickly, basically when you
go to make a call you've got this two-way radio it's actually a radio and
a transmitter so it's kind of misleading. They call it a two-way radio button but they
tend to refer to it as just a radio. It transmits a signal to the nearest cell
tower each cell tower sort of has a geographic cell so to speak, in which you
can communicate with cell phones within that geographic region or cell,
and then that cell tower communicates with a switching station which then
searches for who you're trying to call, and it either connects through copper
cable or fiber optics or in some cases through a wireless connection from
microwave radiation with the wireless access point. And then that access point
then either communicates directly through copper wires through a
landline or if you're trying to call another cell phone it will then
send a signal to a cell tower within
the cell of the receiver and so forth. Interestingly here on the left in
this little graphic the radiation from your cell phone is going out usually in
all directions. In this direction though it's being absorbed by your head.
This little child is absorbing it and is largely in his brain and neck area much
of the radiation a lot of the radiation is wasted so there is an energy
conservation issue with regard to all of this that has been not very well studied,
but there's a lot of wasted energy and then some of that radiation will reach
the tower and enable you to make the communication. I'll use notes for this part of the
presentation, so what we see here is the electromagnetic spectrum. The spectrum
displays all types of electromagnetic fields arrayed by the frequency or the
length of the waves on the far right are the highest frequency waves which are
considered ionizing radiation for example x-rays. This radiation has
sufficient energy to knock electrons out of their orbits causing an atom to
become charged or ionized which can directly cause chemical changes in DNA
damage. It can also indirectly cause such damage and in fact estimates are thirty
to fifty percent of the damage is actually indirect. Ionizing radiation is
known to be cancer-causing or carcinogenic since the 1930s. On the far
left are extremely low-frequency waves that oscillate up to three thousand
cycles per second which is also known as Hertz. H E R T Z after one of the original scientists. These waves can produce strong magnetic fields, radio waves occur at the higher
frequencies and the highest frequency radio waves are called microwaves or
millimeter waves. Cell phones and cordless phones are two-way radios that
transmit microwaves. They will soon also be transmitting millimeter waves. Cell
phones can emit up to 2 watts of power, in contrast a microwave oven can emit a
thousand watts whereas the oven has sufficient power to significantly heat
tissue. Wireless phone generally do not except when held next
to the body. Cell towers, cell phones and other wireless devices emit
microwaves that are modulated or pulsed to encode voice and data. Also the
systems that power these devices emit low-frequency electromagnetic fields.
With the upcoming fifth generation of cellular technology known as 5g, you may
be seeing a lot of this in the media currently, cell phones and cell towers
will employ lower frequency and higher frequency microwaves than in current use.
Also for the first time this technology will employ millimeter waves which are
much higher in frequency than microwaves. There are some issues with millimeter
waves in terms of the technology. Millimeter waves can't travel very far
and they're blocked by structures and foliage in fact some of the frequencies
are blocked by water vapor, fog, rain so the industry estimates that it'll need
800,000 new cell antenna sites. In each of these sites may have cell antennas
from various cell phone providers and each of these antennas may have micro
rays consisting of dozens or even perhaps hundreds of little antennas,
which will be needed in the near future in the US. Roughly two and a half
times more antenna sites than in current use we will see deployed in the
next few years unless the wireless safety advocates and their representatives in Congress or where the judicial system
puts a halt to this. Millimeter wave radiation is largely absorbed in the
skin, the sweat glands, the peripheral nerves, the eyes, and the testes based
upon the body of research that's been done on millimeter waves. In addition
this radiation may cause hypersensitivity which I'll talk about
more later and biochemical alterations in the immune and circulatory systems: the
heart, the liver, kidneys, and brain. Millimeter waves can also harm
insects and promote the growth of drug-resistant pathogens so it's gonna
have some pretty widespread environmental effects for the micro
environments around these cell antenna sites. Cell phones, cell towers, and other
wireless devices are regulated by most governments. In 1996 the Federal
Communications Commission or FCC adopted exposure guidelines that limit the
intensity of exposure to radiofrequency radiation. These guidelines were designed
to prevent significant heating of tissue from short-term exposure to
radiofrequency radiation. Our government's safety guidelines were not
designed to protect us from the effects of long-term exposure to low intensity
radiofrequency radiation, yet the preponderance of the research published
since 1996 finds adverse biologic and health effects from long-term exposure
to low levels of modulated or pulsed radio frequency radiation, such as
produced by cell phones, cordless phones, other wireless devices, Wi-Fi. In 2001
based upon the biologic and human epidemiologic research, low-frequency
magnetic fields were classified as possibly carcinogenic by the
International Agency for Research on Cancer of the World Health Organization.
This agency is often called by its acronym IARC. In 2011 IARC classified radiofrequency radiation as possibly carcinogenic to
humans based upon studies of cellphone radiation and brain tumor risk in humans.
Currently we have considerably more evidence that would warrant a
stronger classification. The crux of the health and safety problem we face today
was stated by the FDA in 1999. The FCC regulations are quote "based on
protection from acute injury from thermal or heating effects of
radiofrequency radiation exposure and may not be protective against any non
thermal effects of chronic exposure." Yet since 1999, the preponderance
of thousands of peer-reviewed studies have found biological and health effects
from chronic exposure to non-thermal levels of microwave radiation and
low-frequency fields. To further complicate matters a smartphone
typically has five different types of microwave transmitters including three
different cellular technologies and soon with 5g they will be adding another
cellular technology, along with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Some transmitters operated
multiple frequencies and some transmitters can operate simultaneously
with others exposing the user to a complex mixture of radiation. In the next few
years mostly our smartphones will emit several types of 5g radiation in
addition to some of these earlier forms of cellular radiation. None of
these types of radiation has been tested to ensure that long-term exposure is
safe. To reduce the risk of harm individuals should adopt the following
behaviors. First, minimize use of cell phones and cordless phones. Use the
landline whenever possible. Second, distance is your friend. Keeping your
phone 10 inches from your body as compared to a tenth of an inch results
not in a hundredfold reduction, but a 10,000 fold reduction exposure. So keep your
phone away from your head and body. Store your phone in a purse or backpack, and text or use a wired headset or speakerphone for calls. Third, cell phones
are programed to increase radiation when reception is poor. A new study published
by the California Department of Public Health, in preparation of the guidelines
they released already, found up to a 10,000 fold
increase in exposure when reception was poor, that is one or two display bars on
your phone. Best to use your phone only when the signal is strong. For example, do
not use it in elevator or in a vehicle as metal structures interfere with the
signal. For additional tip see my electromagnetic radiation safety handout,
which you received today where the guidance published by the California
Department of Public Health. So in addition to the vast increase in use of
cell phones in our country, we've seen a substantial increase over time in cell
sites in the country running from roughly 2,300 sites in 1987 to over
320,000 in 2017, a huge growth over the last decade. Cell antennas can vary
greatly in terms of their size and as you can see here, here's a macro cell
this could be anywhere from like a hundred feet in this case and it's
disguised as a pine tree I think some kind of evergreen tree to a macro cell
of 200 to 400 feet. Fairly new on the horizon is these small cells which you
can see more examples here which can be mounted on light poles or utility poles.
And the new generation of cell phones or cellular technology is going to rely
very heavily on these small cells because they're going to need so many of
these to support the fifth generation or 5g. In most of these sites you'll probably
see somewhere on the pawl, a warning sign that the FCC has approved that if
you get any closer than where this sign is you will actually see the FCC
exposure guidelines. Which in my opinion and in the opinion of many scientists, are
completely inadequate. Anyway, we will talk more about that. So now let me just
give you a real brief overview of what the research looks at, looks like.
First focusing on the cancer risk and this over here you can see a glioma this
is a section of the brain, the glial tissue, glial cells which are the supporting
cells for the neurons in the brain. This is a meningioma which is the outer
covering of the brain. These are tumors we're looking at. Much of the research has
focused on animal models, particularly rats to a lesser extent mice and other
species because they're a good analog for humans and you can actually do
experimental studies on animal models, which you cannot do really with humans. So as I mentioned IARC in 2011, an expert
working group consisting of 31 experts from around the world including members
of the CDC and the National Cancer Institute Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention and National Cancer Institute, concluded the end of a
meeting and review of the literature that radiofrequency radiation is
possibly carcinogenic to humans. Many scientists today feel that it's time for
IARC to re-review the literature given all the research
that's been published since 2011, to upgrade this to at least probably
carcinogenic to humans if not actually carcinogenic to humans. There
have been some major human epidemiologic studies that have looked at the brain cancer risk that have been published in recent years. The
Interphone study was actually reviewed as part of the IARC review. Interphone
found in its main body of the paper, a 40% increase in brain tumor risk, glioma risk or in cancer risk that is, for a group 1,640 or more hours, buried in an appendix where they controlled for one of the problems with
the study of participation bias, the estimates actually grew to about an
eighty percent increased risk. This got buried in a second appendix with some
text saying why you shouldn't even pay attention to this analysis. Subsequent
analyses of the Interphone data done by researchers have found, making
different assumptions about the data, found that these conclusions are
quite robust. Furthermore they found that the risks are much greater on the side
of the head where people predominantly use their cell phone and that in some of the
analysis they found that the people who used the phone for fewer than sixteen
hundred forty hours also had a significantly increased risk of glioma.
Leonard Hardell in Sweden, this was a thirteen nation study by the way, the
Interphone study. It was partially funded by the WHL and much of the funding
came from industry in these thirteen nations. The group of researchers
tended, well the paper, the pooled paper, with the pooled data tended to downplay
the findings, shifting the focus to brain tumor registry data which was really
misguided because there were problems with the dead brain tumor registry that
they were citing. Hardell has done a number of studies he's actually the
pioneer in this field and he did some reanalysis of a couple of the studies using
similar assumptions in terms of the age groupings and the cut-offs and found very
similar findings from his data that pretty much corresponded with what the
Interphone study showed. This is a French studying with four sites in France and
they found a much higher risk estimate roughly a three-fold risk
from fewer hours, cumulative hours of self call time. Now glioma, fortunately is a fairly rare form of brain cancer in terms of annual
incidence, however if you live to age 70 you're talking about a lifetime risk
somewhere between one and two hundred to one in two fifty so if we cut that risk,
essentially if we double the risk it's cutting that estimate then down to 100/
125 people. One person would be getting a glioma. Now focusing on children a little,
some of the modeling research has shown that the child's brain absorbs twice as
much radiation as the adult brain. So this is the five-year-old child then
this is the absorption pattern compared to the adult. The radiation
guidelines for handset use in the US or internationally don't take into account
differences in anatomy. There's one size fits all regardless of whether you're a
250-pound male or a 25-pound child yet the skull of the five year old child
will absorb about ten times as much radiation as the skull of the adult. There's one completed brain tumor risk study with children, a case controlled
study like the Interphone study, it looked at seven to nineteen year old children
from four countries overall they did not find a significant risk. It was elevated
at 36 percent, the risk estimates were higher in three of the four countries
but for some reason in Norway they actually had a lower risk estimate as
compared to the control group. Interestingly buried in this paper too
was a finding where they actually had cellphone company records on a subgroup
of the children. Largely in the bulk of the paper they relied on
parental reports of the child's use. In that subgroup they found that children with
2.8 or more years of cellphone use had roughly a doubling of risk, and that was significant and that gets ignored in the discussion and the abstract of the
paper. There's just a lot of pressure on this scientists I think in large part
because of their funding source, industry, at least in part if not wholly, to
downplay any risks that they find and sort of divert attention to their own
data when they do find risks. There is another study called Moby kids which is
actually the parallel study to the Interphone study and the data were collected
in 2009 to 2014, we're still waiting for final results on that study. So that
should shed greater light, it's a larger sample than Cephalo on what the risks
are to children in terms of brain tumor risk. This study was originally called for in
1999 by the FDA, they nominated to the National Institute of Environmental
Health Sciences that the National Toxicology program or NTP studied in an
experimental study using animal models, the effects of long-term exposure
to cellphone radiation. What they ultimately concluded which largely came
from a group of independent experts, here again the government experts tended to
downplay the findings when they first came out. But the expert group upgraded
the findings and so in the final report, they reported clear evidence of tumors
in the hearts of male rats. These tumors are malignant schwannoma. Swine cells are also a site for tumor risk in humans but in the humans, the increased risk is in
the head. It's called distibular schwannoma. It's a tumor on the main nerve from the ear to the brain. The scientists I don't believe
looked at these cells in the rats and I listened to virtually all of
the three day peer review, and I think that question
came up. So they don't have data on whether it affected that nerve
in the rats in the study. So this is clear evidence, this is the
highest standard that the MTP provides. This is not possibly probably, this is
evidence, the heart schwannomas. They also found some evidence of tumors
in the brains of male rats. This also corresponds to what we're seeing in
humans, malignant gliomas which we looked at just previously. Interestingly
and nobody's made too much of this, both of these types of cells: the schwann
cells and the glial cells produced myelin which is a fatty substance and
occurs on the nerves within our body. Schwann cells are in the peripheral
nervous system, glial cells in the central nervous system. So we have some
strong coincidences between what we're seeing in the male rats and what we're
seeing in humans. Also in talking to a biophysicist he had a theory that
myelinated nerves serve as antennas and so this could be concentrating the
radiation that comes from these devices in specific parts of the body. We'll come
back to myelination a little bit when we talk about hypersensitivity.
They also found some evidence of tumors in the adrenal glands of male rats and for
the mice and the female rats they found some evidence but they considered
equivocal as the patterns didn't match what they expected to see.
They sort of downplayed the findings in terms of direct application, but not as
much as the FDA did trying to totally dismiss this $30,000,000 study that
we've been waiting for, that the FDA has been waiting for since 1999. Normally
this study should have taken maybe five to ten years at very most, but they ran
a number of obstacles including funding and then finding a contractor who could
do the study and then they sat on the data I think for a number of years,
before finally releasing it. Other findings in the study which are critical include:
DNA damage in the brains of the male and female mice and rats, increased
degeneration in the hearts of the male and female rats, decreased birth weights
and the rats exposed prenatally. And this is a finding that you have to dig
through the appendix to find but I was looking for it because an early
Air Force finding found, an early Air Force study, looking at microwave radiation
exposure to much lower levels than used in this study, this was pre cell phones. The
military had a big interest in this because of the use of radar, and it found
a threefold increase in overall tumor risk in the animals exposed long term to
microwave radiation there. So digging through the appendices and I suggested
to them and in the final report they actually put this analysis in the main
body of the paper that they ignored my suggestion. You find that the highest
overall cancer incidence was in the middle exposure groups not the highest
exposure group, and you can see fairly substantial differences there that were
indeed statistically significant; 42 to 46 percent in the two middle exposure
groups compared to 27 percent in the control group. They also found to the lowest
exposure groups, greater non malignant tumor incidents versus the Shannon
control. Nobody's paying much attention to these findings and I think they're
extremely critical. Part of the criticism of the study is that they used exposures
full-body exposures that were much higher than you would typically get from
a cell phone, they're more com-probable than the partial body exposures so that
the head of the body exposure you get from the cell phone, but this was a
full-body exposure. But interestingly the Ramsini Institute in Italy basically
replicates the key NTP result in terms of the hearts schwannoma
and they use much lower exposures. In fact they found that point one watts
per kilogram compared to exposures ranging from 1.5 to six watts
per kilogram in the NTP study. This study has yet to receive a whole
lot of attention in the media, actually neither study got a whole lot of
attention in the media believe it or not and New York Times report on the
NTP study I think totally missed the boat and
was in the direction of problematization, and yet reporters from the New York
Times and other papers had interviewed me and other people and then they just
ignored what we had to say about the study. There are other health risks that have been found in humans, the evidence generally is not as strong.
I mentioned glioma acoustic neuroma or the Swan split cells on that nerve from
the ear to the brain in angioma, which is the outer covering of the brain.
Parotid gland which is the largest salivary gland, pituitary gland and most
recently the thyroid gland. A study out of Yale University School of Medicine and
the Connecticut Department of Public Health found not quite
significantly increased risk but almost. It was marginally significant increased
risk particularly in the males of thyroid gland tumors. We're seeing an
epidemic of thyroid gland tumors, which this may be partially responsible for.
And there is one case series of four women who had breast
cancers, multifocal tumors in the location of the breasts where they
stored their cell phone for significant periods of time. I've heard
they've been accumulating research, and other cases but there hasn't been much since that first report in the literature that I'm aware of. The
strongest evidence probably even more so than the brain tumor risk is for
sperm damage in the males. Male infertility and in females miscarriage
and preterm birth. There's less evidence but there's definitely a body of research that's accumulating from prenatal and early childhood
exposures increased headaches hearing problems impaired memory and a recent study replicated a finding in adolescence, in terms of figural memory
for kids who use the phone on the right ear: increased incidence of ADHD, and
there's actually animal model studies suggesting this as well for the
animal analog of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity) and there's a couple
papers by a researcher at Harvard, Mark Harvard who says that this may be at
least a cofactor for autism if not direct cause. One of the phenomenas with
very low exposure to microwave radiation is increased penetration or opening of
the blood-brain barrier, which can then allow chemical toxins into the brain
that are in the circulatory system. Electro hypersensitivity, there's a range
of symptoms that people experience and attribute to their exposures, either to
microwave radiation or powerline frequencies and includes
headaches, fatigue, insomnia, ringing in the ears or tinnitus, heart palpitations.
This is an interesting table from a paper comparing the symptoms of electro
hypersensitivity to the symptoms of demyelination. The most common form of
that is multiple sclerosis. There's quite a bit of overlap in the symptoms. Here
too we're talking about the myelin producing cells, so there's reason to
think that there may be a connection between these diseases. We can talk more
about that in the Q&A session. The cell towers studies, there's been a roughly a
dozen epidemiological studies showing associations between proximity to a cell
tower over a long period of time and various kinds of effects, mostly
neurobehavioral. In some cases cancer incidents all of these studies because
there are ecological observational studies and not experimental studies,
have alternative explanations it's hard to control for confounding.
Largely there's an excellent review by Blake Levin and Henry Lai, you have to
rely on the on the animal model studies, the experimental study showing all kinds
of adverse effects from oxidative stress due to low intensity exposures to radio
frequency fields particularly microwaves. The international EMF scientist
appeal calls for stronger regulation of electromagnetic fields and health
warnings, it's been signed by 247 scientists who have all published
peer-reviewed research on electromagnetic fields. I did a search in
an archive EMF portal and I found two thousand unduplicated count of papers
that these scientists have published on electromagnetic fields and biology or
health. These scientists come from 42 nations and they made a very strong
statement which I won't read now. When you look at the slide regarding the
effects that the literature documents that they feel calls for warning the
public and stronger regulations. So you'd think given this large body of
researchers, we'd have no problem with getting governments to adopt
stronger regulations and health warnings. Unfortunately as with many other issues
like tobacco or asbestos or various chemicals or global warming for that
matter, there is a body of researchers who are basically defending the industry
promoted guidelines that have been adopted by the FCC and by ICNIRP,
which is the international equivalent of the FCC, which the WHO relies upon. And
very recently a team of investigative journalists identified 14 scientists
actually named them who defend these obsolete exposure guidelines and they do
so by preparing biased reviews of the literature for various health agencies
around the world. At least eight of these individuals have had industry research
funding. There may be another dozen EMF scientists around the world who
take a similar position as these researchers. But mostly in the US we're
hearing from non EMF researchers, people have never published research typically
physicists, engineers, sometimes ecologists who are defending the FCC guidelines
saying the only risks are short-term and do the heating. Let's touch a little bit
on policy, we can get into this more in the Q&A session. In 1996, the Congress
adopted Telecommunications Act. It has a section that basically says that no
state or local government entity may regulate: the placement, construction, or
modification of personal wireless service facilities aka cell towers on the
basis of environmental effects of radiofrequency emissions to the extent
that such emissions comply with FCC regulations. This causes a great deal of
problems for communities that are trying to fight cell towers because the courts
have interpreted environmental effects to be health effects. So you can't argue
it on health grounds, you have to basically argue it on aesthetic grounds
if you don't want to cell tower in front of your home or in your backyard. We can
talk about that some more later. Our government has been really disingenuous and irresponsible on this issue, like most governments in the
world. They do have a huge conflict of interest in that they sell licenses for the spectrum. So one small piece of spectrum that they
just sold they netted in the auction 700 million dollars and they
were disappointed because they thought they could get a billion dollars for it.
Also state and local governments collect on average 19 percent of your cell phone
bill and then of course there's all the jobs it creates and the money that comes
in terms of this. I assume some of these companies pay taxes but you never know
in this day and age. So the government has a huge conflict of interest here.
Both parties are complicit in protecting this industry and are heavily lobbied by
this industry. On the one hand they say we need more evidence but then they
don't fund the evidence or they delay the production of the one study they did fund and we've had some agencies cities of Boston and
Philadelphia who've submitted to the FCC complaints that basically there's no
leadership in the government. There's a complete pass the buck attitude, the FCC
doesn't have any health expertise and it's been irresponsible in this issue.
Senator Blumenthal, way down at the bottom in a recent exchange in a Senate Commerce hearing where industry officials
presented, concluded the hearing saying, "so there really is no
research ongoing, we're kind of flying blind here as far as health and safety
is concerned with regard to 5g. We can go beyond that and we can also say with
regard to 1G, 2G, 3G, and 4G we've been flying blind." A couple of years ago I
tried to find experts within our federal health agencies, I found
basically one person he's retired now. The person I interviewed at the FDA whose
supposedly the most knowledgeable and supposed to be advising the
FCC, was a complete denialist with regard to long term risks. He was the head of a
unit that was responsible for this topic. Turned out later when I searched him on
LinkedIn he was a nuclear engineer. He's since moved on and I suspect his
successor isn't any more knowledgeable, and the interview lasted like 2 hours
and essentially we got down the point where we were debating studies and showed to me
that he clearly didn't understand how medical or biological research work,
or epidemiological research work and was just looking to dismiss studies
and that's how he was able to maintain his sanity I guess by just ignoring the
whole issue. There's an interesting monograph
looking into the FCC and how it's been captured by industry. The link is down
here on my website to the monograph. This was a career journalist, this has
gone on even before the cellular problem with regard to earlier, it was the
broadcast industry who controlled the FCC. It's a perfect institute of regulatory
capture. These other agencies are supposed to be involved in a work group, the work group turned out to be a sham when I investigated. It has no official
functions. They would meet over a phone for one hour, three times a year so the prior
session was five people. There's been a variety of actions at the local
level, federal level trying to get, including the GAO here. All this
information is on my safer EMR website in greater detail.
GAO most recently, Montgomery County Maryland is suing the FCC over the
exposure guidelines or wants to sue. They petitioned the court to allow the suit,
we'll see if it happens. It's in the ninth circuit. A number of organizations
have also called for changes in the FCC's RF limits are testing. The FCC
opens up these requests for public input, they did one in 2003, another in 2013 and
then they never do anything with the filings. The most recent filing has over a
thousand submissions. Many thousands of documents studies submitted and they
just ignore it. Maybe I should stop since time is up. I can finish this perhaps
in the beginning of Q & A session. Thank you. I also have a lot of
supplemental slides, which I won't go through but will be part of the online
version of this. I actually spent three and a half hours on the phone just going
over the basic issues with one reporter for a major paper so it's hard to condense
this down. And then no reports resulted as a result of it because the work was
suppressed by her editor. And this wasn't the first time she tried to publish
stuff. If you go online and look at our federal health
agency websites, you will see health warning information but it's usually framed. We're not recommending
this but if you're worried, here's some things you can do.
CDC actually for a ten week period a few years ago, said we recommend you take
precautions and then once the industry-funded scientists saw it, it got
pulled down. That eventually got written up in the New York Times a few years ago.
That story and the back story is on a website called Microwave News which I
have a link to later. So regarding to the scientific
evidence, they use carefully worded language saying: there's no consistent
evidence, it does not show a danger, there's no scientific evidence that
establishes a causal link where there's no adverse health effects established as
being caused by. But as I was saying earlier I would think the vast majority
of people who've actually done research on the biological and health effects believe
there are indeed serious risks of harm, but the government's don't want to
listen to them. The industry, the CTIA has a statement where they basically hide
behind the FCC, the FDA, the WHO, the Cancer Society and say that the science, they make the claim the scientific evidence shows no
known health risks through the RF energy emitted by cellphones. This is only a
year ago and in a recent conference call with a legislative assistant to a member
of Congress, he was asked, you're the telecom person, you hear from the
industry all the time. What do you they say about health? And he said, they don't say anything and they have gotten in trouble in the past when they made these
statements. I think one guy got fired, one of their major PR guys for saying the
wrong thing. If you want to get into the politics and
policy as well as the research, an excellent website goes back 35 years is
Louis Lessons Microwave News, you can download all these early documents and trace the history and how we got into this predicament. A more recent study done by two investigative journalists that's been published in the nation and The
Guardian and a few other places is a report by Mark Kurtz Dart and Mark Dally and how
Big Wireless made us think that cell phones are safe. And then there's this
investigating Europe series, some of the papers are still to be published,
they are in other languages, but you can use Google Translate and see how
this is operating on the international level; how these scientists basically
downplayed the risk of the research that many of them are gathering themselves
that show evidence of risk. A couple case studies: San Francisco in 2010
unanimously adopted a cellphone right to know law. The first version had discussed
some health risks, immediately got sued by the CTIA, they revised the fact sheet
to take out the health risks to make it fairly innocuous but still they thought
useful. The appeals court overturned it because more on procedural grounds
that it was too burdensome that they had to post things and hand out things and
so forth. The supervisors could have made some further modifications but at that
point Gavin Newsom who was the mayor of San Francisco who moved on to become
lieutenant governor and he was the primary supporter of this ordinance at
the time, and said that supervisors when they were threatened by the industry of
having to pay the industry's legal bills which were quite substantial and short, I
decided to just stand with the law and stop fighting the industry after a
three-year period. Now governor Newsom reported in a film called Mobilize that he'd never seen such blowback from an industry
before and he probably will never see since. So he's reluctant to do
anything publicly on this issue. I've heard from activists who've talked to
his staff that he still tells them to take precaution of their cell phones
which is nice. The city of Berkeley was going to adopt back in 2010 but
decided as soon as the CTIA sued San Francisco, they'd wait and see until the dust settled. And in 2015 they decided that they would
adopt a law, that too was unanimously adopted. CTIA once again immediately filed the lawsuit and the city made a minor
revision to the ordinance notification which was a seven word
sentence that said: children may absorb more radiation than adults, which the
science supports but the FCC doesn't recognize that the courts wouldn't
recognize it, so they modified and took that out. The district judge said fine you can go forward, let them implement the law, so the law has been in
effect but it's still being appealed at various levels including the Ninth
Circuit by the industry. They bumped it up to the Supreme Court because they
didn't like what the Ninth Circuit ruling was nice. The Supreme Court
decided not to take the case, sent it back to the Ninth Circuit. It's under
review by the Ninth Circuit panel once again and we'll see what happens. The
lead lawyer in this is a fella named Lawrence Lessig was a Harvard Law
professor. He drafted the ordinance with the Dean of the Yale Law School.
It's a very modest notification as you can see here, which appears in the cell
phone stores in Berkeley, or at least should appear in cell phone stores in Berkeley.
Doesn't talk about health risks at all, it just talks about the
FCC's exposure guidelines and the fact that you will exceed them if you hold
the phone next to your body. And the FCC is very explicit on this and wants the
manufacturers to tell people about this but the manufacturers typically bury this
information in manuals or in the smartphone itself because they
really don't want people to pay attention to these guidelines that the
FCC requires them to give it to the consumer. So we'll see how that comes out. California Department of Health, I got a tip from an activist that they had
drafted some safety guidance in 2009. I learned about it in late 2013, submitted
three public records requests. 2014, they were all denied. The UC Berkeley
Environmental Law Clinic and the First Amendment Project offered to sue
the state on my behalf, I was the plaintiff in this suit, for the release
of these draft documents. Sacramento Superior Court after a court hearing and
review of the documents, decided that there was no reason for them to withhold
these draft documents, that they were no longer drafts since they've been sitting
on them for so long and they kept them and they kept updating them with the
latest research. So they ordered the California Department of Public Health
to release the draft documents, they also ordered them to pay for my attorneys
legal fees, they had taken the case pro- bono so that was an unexpected win for
them. The department also had to pay for the attorney general's office
legal fees to my understanding. So this could have cost them several hundred
thousand dollars and they lost the case. Interestingly at the end of 2017
they decided to publish the guidance document after all, which made me wonder
why did they bother to fight the lawsuit why didn't they just turn
over the draft documents. This got widespread media attention, the
links to the media coverage is on my website as well as the chronology of the events. It's in your handout, the document. There's a bunch of links on my website
that go into various issues about 5g in millimeter waves, they're not one in
the same because 5g is low band and mid band as well as high band. There's also
some good links on the positions for safe technology and the Environmental
Health Trust websites about 5g. There's been appeal for a moratorium on
5g. It was submitted to the European Union because they seem to pay more attention to people's health than our country does. It's been denied by the European Commission. There's also an international group of doctors group, the U.S. group is the
Physicians for Social Responsibility that's signed on to the appeal calling
for a moratorium on 5g until we fully understand the health risks and can
assure the public that it's safe. There's a lot of emerging technologies, 5g is
largely going to be useful for these emerging technologies, not existing
technologies it's not going to make your smartphone all that much more useful.
It's going to be used for so-called Internet of Things and all kinds of
smart appliances; TV's, thermostats, etc. There's a whole thing about making
cities smarter, having autonomous motor vehicles that can communicate to
each other via cell phones, that the industry argues will need 5g. The 5g
offers much faster communications and shorter latencies between
communications and then there's a whole host of wearable wireless
devices and other wireless to basic devices appearing on the market
every day. Some of those will probably try to take advantage of 5g. Here's a novel idea which seems like a no-brainer. A researcher at the University
of Colorado, Tim Sheckly who's promoting reinventing
wires and talks about all the advantages of wine earning and that
certainly solves the problem of fixed or stationary uses. We can bring fiber to
the premises and you'll have a lot better communications and much more secure, use less energy and so forth. More privacy, it'll improve our
health, that would solve the fixed uses of access to the internet and
communications. Here's a brief statement, I put in my post about the NTP study
some news media picked up on the variations of this, basically all I'm
saying is we have no assurance that 5g is safe for that matter, or if 4G is safe.
I've only found three studies on 4G they came out of China and they all
indicated changes in brain function with modest exposures, I think they were
thirty minute exposures. We're way behind the curve in terms of health
research and governments like it that way I think as well as the industry. They
don't want to fund the research, but in the interim we need a moratorium on new
technologies that involve Wireless. So let me go to some of the questions,
there's a lot of questions here. I'll try to answer at least a few of them
and I will post on my website answers to others if you want to get them. I have an
email list, a general email list for people interested in EMF, so give me your name
and email address, I can add you to that list. Conflict of interest, TV, radio, major
advertising dollars, newspaper, magazine. It's hard to establish what's gone on,
that may be a factor with regard to some of our major mainstream media, that
they're concerned about losing advertising dollars. It's probably true.
Also when they report on this they tend, because of the notions of journalistic
balance, they tend to introduce doctors to provide the opposing
point of view who know virtually nothing about the subject or physicists and
create a false equivalence then between people who've been studying this in many
cases for decades. In my case it's only a decade, with people who've just basically
based on their training in physics or Medical School, believe that only
ionizing radiation is dangerous or thermal risks or non ionizing radiation. Question regarding cellphones and cars,
what do you recommend? Try to avoid doing it I guess. Interestingly, I have
a post on electromagnetic fields and hybrid and electric cars, which also
applies to virtually all modern cars now. It's one of the most popular posts
on my website and it receives no media attention anywhere in the world. I think
this issue, the exposures in these cars can be quite substantial in terms of the
magnetic fields as well as the wireless radiation. There is an institute in
Europe, I think it's called SINTF is the agency that has set guidelines, but I don't think any of the industry pays attention to these
guidelines because there are ways to shield this stuff. Question from the audience, "How about GPS?" GPS is a receive-only system. However in a smartphone, often that information is then relayed to
various apps, so then the GPS system itself is not exposing you, but then the
apps that use the GPS information is exposing you to signals that are being
sent back to the app makers. So if you had a purely GPS device you may not be
at risk but if you have GPS in that smartphone you probably are at some risk
of increased exposure. Question: What is the rate of hyper-electro sensitivity in Taiwan? Answer: There's an interesting, there's two studies;
the original study found is based on self-reported population-based survey,
thirteen percent prevalence. More recent study found five percent prevalence.
Neither of the studies gave a great deal of detail about the methodology or the
response rates and self-reported hyper- electromagnetic sensitivity can be very problematic. It can be largely a function of how much media awareness the
attention has been paid to the issue. Prior to the survey some people may be
miss attributing their symptoms I believe they have real symptoms, they may
be mis- attributing to their electromagnetic field exposures, but on
the other hand there are probably some people experiencing symptoms that
don't realize it's related to their electromagnetic exposures. Status of 5G
rollout in the city of Berkeley. Well there's some people working on that in this
audience, so you probably should seek them out after this meeting and there
may be someone here from the mayor's office and the City Council. I think they each registered staff. Audience member, "what was the question Dr. Moskowitz?" Speaker states, "what is the status of 5G roll out in the City of Berkeley?" There's some discussion about creating an urgency
legislation. The Bay Area by the way is probably the hottest spot in the country
for activism around the rollout of these small cell antennas in preparation for
5g. In the interim they're using, they're putting out 4G radiation or LTE. In the
past year I've heard from over probably somewhere between 100-200 activists from all over the country places like Montana and Colorado as well as the East Coast,
Southern California and the traffic on my website since I posted stuff on 5g
and millimeter waves has doubled since last August. So there's tremendous
interest and concern about the deployment of this latest technology.
It should have been generated alone for these earlier
technologies, but I think what's driving people is the proliferation of
these small cell antennaes in their neighborhoods right out in front
of their house, pumping radiation into their kids bedroom or their bedroom.
While people have a love affair with the cell phone, at best they are
highly ambivalent about cell towers unless they're really technological
nerds who think this is great having cell towers everywhere because you
always have connectivity. And yet there's this symbiotic relationship
between the two. You can't have good cell phone reception without cell towers
unless we go to satellites and that might be even worse. There's one proposal to put
up like, they wanted permission from the FCC to put up 20,000 mini satellites.
I think this was SpaceX and a million ground stations to create a network that
wouldn't use cell towers or small cell antennas. It sounds like completely unfeasible but perhaps the owner of SpaceX should go back to manufacturing a more reliable electric automobile, I
won't mention his name. Question: please elaborate to microbe destruct. Speaker, "yeah I don't want to do that. I'll try to take the
easier ones." Bluetooth hearing aids? I have a post on the eye it's the one with
the wireless earbuds that iPhone makes. The AirPods, that's it. and
in that I go into, I talk about, I summarize the research on blood-brain
barrier research there's about a dozen studies that show it opens the
blood-brain barrier, but there's also another form of electromagnetic fields
called Muirfield magnetic induction that the earpods uses so much. I think some of
the hearing aids I've read also uses this and I haven't found any health effects research on ear field magnetic induction, but the Bluetooth
alone could potentially open the blood-brain barrier allowing toxins in
the circulatory system penetrate the brain tissue. So if you can get a dumb model of a hearing aid you're probably better off than smarter ones. That's an involved discussion. Electro therapies, that's an interesting question. Tens, I forget when it stands for. There's all
these electrotherapy's, so on the other hand the FDA doesn't want
to recognize that these exposures can be harmful in terms of
consumer devices, but they've been approving various kinds of medical
devices that use electromagnetic fields. And they're usually very short exposures,
pulse tenses I think something. I forget what it it stands for but it's a thing you put
on your back someplace and sends pulses and stimulates the nervous system I
haven't seen any Studies on it the FDA seems to reckon recognize that these
things can have therapeutic uses and outside the US there's a considerable
amount of research going on showing positive effects from various kinds of
short-term exposures that are very specific frequencies and so forth
EMF portal is a good website they were actually covering both sides of the
issue until about a year ago when the German government said we don't want to
hear any more about the whistle microwave radiations and defunded that
part of the website now that they're trying to raise money from foundations
and ordinary people to continue the archive the archive has like 20,000
papers in it but they don't have they claim they don't have the funding now to
continue to put into the archive studies showing risks from microwave
because of the German government's position on this they are based in
Germany in a portal as is ignor that organization that the journalist Clinton
has created a cartel is important the existing exposure guidelines a lot of
these questions there aren't really great answers and so I won't speculate the classrooms and doors to be hardwired
yeah sure that people aren't exposed to the EMR all day long of course I am I
have my office hard wired and yet they put Wi-Fi routers in so I've got a
router over on my desk now I hardly ever go in as a result hardwired mean wire
it's a lot faster and even go through Shaklee slide and see why it's a whole
lot better a lot of it why why was just industry allowed to even start hardwired
if I brought these faster safer more energy efficient has none of the health
effects excellent question it's all marketing its marketing height
and I have one post that just has links to some of the tech news stories that
expose the height so they're trying to make it look like the average person is
going to be so much better off and everyone's going to be so much better
off with this latest generation of technology but it's really all about the
Internet of Things and they're gonna have to create a market for all these
things and convince people that they need to have smart locks on the doors
and smart television sets and smart hearing whatever they Polo's devices
that people buy in home that actually than some of these
devices they don't tell you about have have microphones in those so they can
actually turn them on and monitor you there was a case of a smart garage door
opener and the person got ticked off about it so he posted on the on the
website on a website review of that door opener and the next thing he knows the
manufacturer turned off his his door opener she's disabled it and so you
couldn't open this garage door I mean that's just a silly story but the cyber
surveillance thing is cybersecurity thing is a real big risk our government
is currently considering not allowing certain manufacturers in China to
install infrastructure in this country and there's a huge debate in in the
European Union about whether to allow these companies to have their
infrastructure used for cellular systems I'm not a proponent of any harm
reduction devices I have a post on that it's really about buyer beware situation
there's lots of devices at dawn while I'm playing that some of them may
actually work it's really a caveat emptor situation buyer beware so I stay
away from endorsing any any products and I tried not to get involved in
legislative proceedings I see my role basically is translating disseminating
the research with various lighting to various audiences including reporters
policymakers the general public wireless safety advocates never basically wants
to learn about this stuff and that's what I've been doing mostly for the past
10 years since publishing that could you study I did help coordinate a study Six
Nations study looking at exposures from cell towers the site that I linked them
up to was in LA because I colleagues a former colleague from here at UCLA and
colleagues to me LA County Health Department were very interested in this
issue so we have some data finally from la across a broad range of sites the
exposures were about 70 times higher than the last study that was done in all
languages I think over 30 years ago by the EPA when they were actually funded
to do research on this but one of the results of the EPA getting involved in
the dispute over where to set the exposure guidelines because they wanted
higher guidelines FCC adopted is they lost their funding to do research on
this so even though they had one of the preeminent researchers Carl Blackmon
there who stayed on most of them left he wasn't allowed to do research on this
and his early research was showing evidence of genotoxicity which the
government did not want to hear so I will include it at that if any of you
want to stay on and and talk to him he may be interested in
