HUMANS, BEES AND WILDLIFE IN 2023

Cell phone impacts on our health & environment

Babies are being killed by hospitals

A correspondent in North Carolina sent me this account a few days ago of a healthy newborn who was irradiated nearly to death by the hospital environment: 

“I want to relate what happened to my Goddaughter’s baby brother at the Duke Medical Center earlier this spring. Baby Emiliano was born in excellent health, but when I returned 12 hours later, he had been moved to a different room and I became concerned because I myself developed dizziness, tremor, and headache within about 5 minutes of visiting his room.

“I knew to check my RF meter because these are microwave sickness symptoms which I get when the RF levels are high. The Cornet measurements hovered between 11 and 15 milliwatts per square meter! Personally I need the RF levels below about 0.006 milliwatts per square meter, so I can’t imagine what it was doing to an infant who was only 12 hours old. When I opened the curtains I noticed there was a round 5G pole outside on the street; also straight out of his hospital window you could see a rooftop cell array that looked like several large white panels on top of another hospital building across a small green quad. You could see them clearly because the other building was shorter, which meant that the roof panels lined up horizontally nearer to the level of the baby’s window.

“By day 3, Emiliano had developed jaundice and soon was put in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, which also had very high radiation levels. While on that unit, his jaundice numbers continued to climb, and he developed a rash. I found it interesting because I developed a rash too. I developed a butterfly rash across my face and the baby had a full-body rash on one side of his body. I told the nurse that I had a 5G rash, just like the baby. She had no clue what I was talking about. She explained that lots of babies get this rash, but they don’t know what causes it.

“After several more days in the Duke Main NICU his condition continued to worsen. I was forcing myself to visit him in the hospital, despite my being horribly sick there, because I am very close with the family. My own rash would return along with the dizziness, tremor and headache every time I visited. These would go away within 12-24 hours of leaving the hospital and returning home. The baby had to stay in the radiation, though.

“After many more days in the NICU, being irradiated 24/7, the baby developed a staph infection near his tiny fingernail. The infection began spreading down his finger and they were talking about amputating his finger. By then, I had been working for days to persuade his mother to have him transferred to Duke Regional, a smaller hospital in the northern part of the city, and finally she asked to transfer him. My reason is that I knew that Regional had much lower RF levels based on her prior visit there during early contractions when she had stayed overnight and background radiation levels in the room were between 0.003 and 0.01. (Durham Regional is in a less affluent part of town, with lower-tech overall.) They transferred the baby by helicopter and the baby’s health improved immediately. Within 48 hours of being transferred away from the high radiation at Duke Medical, the rash improved dramatically, the jaundice scores declined, and the staph infection began to improve.

“The radiation levels at Regional were about a thousand times lower than at Duke Main. Also at Duke Regional there were no visible 5G poles or roof arrays outside the baby’s windows. The baby recovered fully there and is home now.”

Cancer in young people is skyrocketing

A review of cancer statistics in young people in 44 countries has been published by an international team of scientists. The rate of cancer in people under 50, they found, has increased dramatically in every one of those countries. The study, published in Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology, is titled “Is early-onset cancer an emerging global epidemic?” The authors speculate on various possible causes for this epidemic, including diet, lifestyle, obesity, the microbiome, and genetic susceptibilities, but are forced to conclude there is no evidence that any of these factors have caused the global increase. There is one mention of ionizing radiation in a single sentence, and no mention whatsoever of RF radiation.

Investigative journalist Felice Freyer interviewed two of the study’s authors as well as six other cancer specialists from Harvard, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Tufts University about the results of that study. I mailed her a copy of my book along with the following letter:

“I read with interest your article of July 22, 2023 in the Boston Globe titled “Rise in cancer among younger people worries and puzzles doctors.” I also read the Nature Reviews paper referred to in your article (‘Is early-onset cancer an emerging global epidemic?’).

“I too have been following the increase in certain cancers in young people, but in relation to a very specific environmental factor: radio frequency (RF) radiation from the cell phones younger people have been carrying much of their lives. There is extensive literature on this connection, including a plausible causative mechanism. I believe exposure to wireless technology, especially cell phones, is the cause of much if not most of the recent rise in cancer in young people.

“Supplementary Table 1 in the Nature Reviews study lists trends of 13 types of cancer in 44 countries. The types of cancer with a rising trend in at least 75% of those countries are cancers of precisely the organs most heavily irradiated by cell phones:

• breast

• colorectal

• thyroid

• prostate

• endometrial

• kidney

“During use, cell phones are held either right next to the thyroid gland or in front of the body near the breast. When not in use, but still on and radiating, cell phones are most often kept in a back or hip pocket, next to the kidney or near the colon and the prostate or uterus. The single most-exposed organ among the ones included in the study is the thyroid, which is the only type of cancer reviewed with an overall upward trend in every one of the 44 countries (except Thailand, where the numbers did not reach significance).

“I would also call attention to testicular cancer, which that team did not review. The testicles are also heavily irradiated by cell phones in pockets. And testicular cancer is not only on the rise in young people worldwide, but in 2020 was the most common cancer in men aged 15 to 44 in 62 countries worldwide. (Ariana Znaor et al., Global patterns in testicular cancer incidence and mortality in 2020, International Journal of Cancer 151(5): 692-698 (2022), https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ijc.33999.

“And then, of course, there is brain cancer, which that team also did not review. The brain is even more irradiated by cell phones than the thyroid. Brain and central nervous system tumors are today the second most common type of cancer and the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in children and young-adults. (J.S. Bell et al., Global incidence of brain and spinal tumors by geographic region and income level based on cancer registry data, Journal of Clinical Neuroscience 66: 121-127 (2019),  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0967586818322252).

“There is a plausible mechanism. Electromagnetic fields interfere with the movement of electrons, including the electrons in the electron transport chain in the mitochondria of every cell. This slows metabolism and causes oxygen deprivation, resulting in the spectacular increase in several diseases and disorders, about which the medical community has largely thrown up its hands in puzzlement, searching for a reason. I am referring to obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer. The decreased efficiency in digesting sugars and fats will result in obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, while cancer cells thrive in anaerobic conditions. And the Warburg hypothesis proposes that oxygen starvation not only selects for cancer but causes it.

“You may be interested in some of the following studies:

• John G. West et al., Multifocal Breast Cancer in Young Women with Prolonged Contact between Their Breasts and Their Cellular Phones, Case Reports in Medicine, Volume 2013, Article ID 354682, 
  https://www.hindawi.com/journals/crim/2013/354682

• Michael Carlberg et al., Is the Increasing Incidence of Thyroid Cancer in the Nordic Countries Caused by Use of Mobile Phones? International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17, 9129 (2020), 
  https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/23/9129

• Microwave News, Colorectal Cancer Soaring in Young Adults; Are Smartphones in the Mix? Epidemiologist De-Kun Li Wants To Know, June 3, 2019, 
  https://microwavenews.com/news-center/de-kun-li-crc

• Yakymenko et al., Long-term exposure to microwave radiation provokes cancer growth: evidences from radars and mobile communication systems, Experimental Oncology 33(2): 62-70 (2011). 
  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21716201/

• In Seok Moon et al., Association between vestibular schwannomas and mobile phone use, Tumour Biology. 35(1): 581–587 (2014), 
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3907669/

• Lennart Hardell and Michael Carlberg, Mobile phone and cordless phone use and the risk for glioma – Analysis of pooled case-control studies in Sweden, 1997-2003 and 2007-2009, Pathophysiology 22(1): 1-13 (2015),  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0928468014000649

• Brière, Jean-Jacques, Paul Bénit, and Pierre Rustin. 2009. “The Electron Transport Chain and Carcinogenesis.” In: Shireesh P. Apte and Rangaprasad Sarangarajan, eds., Cellular Respiration and Carcinogenesis (New York: Humana), pp. 19-32.

• Thomas N. Seyfried and Laura M. Shelton, Cancer as a metabolic disease: implications for novel therapeutics, Carcinogenesis 35(3): 515–527 (2014),
  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1743-7075-7-7

• Thomas N. Seyfried., Cancer as a mitochondrial metabolic disease, Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, Volume 3, Article 43 (2015),  https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcell.2015.00043/full

“The history and causation of cancer in relation to electromagnetic fields is reviewed in chapter 13 of my book, The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green 2020), a copy of which accompanies this letter. The book has 137 pages of bibliography.

“I believe the universal use of cell phones, which began suddenly within the past 25 years, is responsible for the simultaneous, extraordinary increase in certain cancers in young people during the same period of time, and should be a factor analyzed in every study of cancer incidence, prevalence and causation today.

“I look forward to any follow-up article you may write on this topic.”

I also sent a similar letter to each of the seven scientists she interviewed. Here are all their names and email addresses for those of you who want to write to them:

• Felice Freyer, Boston Globe <freyer@globe.com>

• Tomotaka Ugai, Brigham and Women’s Hospital <tugai@bwh.harvard.edu>

• Andrew T. Chan, Massachusetts General Hospital <achan@mgh.harvard.edu>

• Brian Wolpin, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute <brian_wolpin@dfci.harvard.edu>

• Heather Eliassen, Brigham and Women’s Hospital <nhahe@channing.harvard.edu>

• Timothy Rebbeck, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute <timothy_rebbeck@dfci.harvard.edu>

• Kimmie Ng, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute <Kimmie_Ng@dfci.harvard.edu>

• Joel B. Mason, Tufts University <joel.mason@tufts.edu>

Multiple sclerosis is rising in children

A team of scientists from the UK, France, Netherlands, Australia, Canada, and the United States compared rates of multiple sclerosis in 115 countries in 2013 with rates in 2020. They found that the prevalence of MS had increased dramatically in every region of the world in just seven years. It increased by 59% in Africa, 87% in the Americas, 38% in the Eastern Mediterranean, 32% in Europe, 58% in Southeast Asia, and 32% in the Western Pacific. Globally, 44 in every 100,000 people had MS in the year 2020. Multiple sclerosis is even starting to be tracked in children: in 2013, 7,000 cases of multiple sclerosis in people under 18 years of age were reported by 34 countries; in 2020, more than 30,000 cases in people under 18 were reported by 47 countries.

No one should be surprised. In 2015, a team of Turkish scientists exposed rats to cell phone-like radiation for one hour a day during their early and mid-adolescence, which for a rat is 21 to 46 days of age. The exposed rats’ spinal cords had significant losses of myelin, similar to what occurs in multiple sclerosis.

Incredible rise in obesity and heart conditions

In April 2023, the British Heart Foundation published statistics revealing a shocking prevalence of obesity and heart disease. 64% of all adults 16 years of age and older in the UK today are overweight or obese. And 30% of all children aged 2-15 are overweight or obese.

The number of prescriptions used in the prevention and treatment of heart disease in England rose from 46,252 in 1981 to 332,575 in 2020. The sharpest rise occurred between 1996 (91,037 prescriptions) and 2006 (234,793 prescriptions), the years when most of the population acquired mobile phones.

The number of people suffering from atrial fibrillation, a conduction disorder of the heart, increased in the UK from 1.30% of the population in 2006/07 to 2.12% of the population in 2021/22. That is a 63% increase in 15 years.

Nearly half of all U.S. honey bee colonies lost last year

The Bee Informed Partnership’s annual survey, published on June 22, 2023, revealed that 48.2% of all honey bee colonies in the United States were lost in the period from April 1, 2022 to April 1, 2023. “Lost” means all bees in the colony died.

Smart cities are killing all life

A correspondent in Gold Coast, the “smartest city in Australia”, reported in April that his city is devoid of almost all non-human life. “Where I live in Australia,” wrote George, “we used to have many rain forest frogs, most famous is the green tree frog. The last time it rained I heard not one bleep. Even the Queensland cane toad has disappeared. After each rain the grass used to be covered with earthworms–not an earthworm on the grass anymore. We used to hear the cicadas chirping in the evening–I haven’t heard a chirp for over six years. All my fruit trees have no fruit. There are no insects, bees, spiders or even aphids on my roses. My area is well known as the smartest city in Australia and our close by bush are dead of any environmental life (bees, butterflies, moths, birds, flying bats, frogs and native animals)”.

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Please join our network by forming a chapter of People Without Cell Phones in your city, state, or country. Let us know that you are doing this by sending us an email.

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Arthur Firstenberg President, Cellular Phone Task Force Author, The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life P.O. Box 6216 Santa Fe, NM 87502 USA phone: +1 505-471-0129 info@cellphonetaskforce.org August 22, 2023

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