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CATALYST journalist responds to criticism of WI-FI investigation
Australia Created: 19 Feb 2016
The claims that our program "should never have aired" should not sit well with the public - At best, it's an over-reaction. At worst, it's a form of censorship.

Sometimes in science asking questions provides you with answers that may be unsettling. Not because they are conclusive, but because they are inconclusive. It's the duty of scientists and science reporters to encourage critical thinking on issues that are still up for debate.

Several other counties around the world have more stringent radio frequency safety thresholds than Australia. Italy, China, Switzerland and Russia have wireless safety limits, which are a hundred times more stringent than our own. In France, they restrict advertising of mobile phones to children. They have also banned Wi-Fi in nurseries and day care centres.

So I decided to investigate. Why are some countries making these changes and not Australia? To say that this is a fringe view is not sustainable.

Wireless technology is relatively new and the science in this area is not as settled as is often claimed. Especially in relation to children. That is why a study is currently underway, involving over 14 countries, which is assessing whether the use of mobile phones at an early age increases the rates of early onset brain tumours in 1000 young people. The results will be released this year.

To be clear, we never stated that Wi-Fi definitively causes cancer, as has been incorrectly asserted. While there are associations or links between heavy mobile phone use and glioma (malignant brain tumours), we did not suggest direct causation.

People have been aware of a purported link between mobile phones and brain cancer for some time now. The easy argument is that mobile phones have been around since 1988 and there's been no tidal wave of tumours, so 'case closed'. But not enough people had mobile phones in 1988 to make any assessment on population risk. The explosion of wireless technology, smartphones and Wi-Fi has only occurred in the past 10 years. Given that brain cancers are rare, it's unlikely there would be sufficient numbers to detect an increase in their incidence in the general population (trend data).

But if you look at specific groups with brain tumours, and compare them to people who don't have brain tumours, studies show 4-8 times more glioma detected in people who began to use a cell phone before 20 years of age.

We cited the Bioinitiative Report, which outlines hundreds of peer-reviewed papers by independent scientists, detailing studies on how cell biology can be disrupted by exposure to radiation from wireless devices. Even though ARPANSA, our safety agency, says there's no established scientific evidence that the use of mobile phones or Wi-Fi devices cause any health effects, we cited the major case-controlled studies (Interphone, Hardell and CERENAT), which demonstrate a link between heavy mobile phone use and glioma (malignant brain tumours).

Are these studies perfect? No, but they are the best we currently have and they have been replicated three times, which is important from a scientific perspective.

This is not a completely polarised debate among scientists. There is consensus that parents should limit their children's use of mobile phones, a statement made by ARPANSA in the program.

As an investigative journalist, I am used to taking some heat from critics. It's part of the job. Catalyst is no stranger to controversy. As investigators, we have studied emerging scientific debates at home and abroad, and brought them into Australian living rooms. What was perceived as controversial a few years ago, like discussions on dietary sugar or the over-prescription of cholesterol-lowering medications called statins, is now widely debated overseas by mainstream media outlets.

We always knew Dr Davis was a dissenting voice in this debate. But that's never a reason not to interview someone, especially as she is extremely well credentialed.

We also invited two high profile critics of Davis onto the program to dispute her claims: Professor Simon Chapman and Professor Bernard Stewart, but they both declined. Perplexingly, they have since launched a passionate rebuttal of Davis in print media, something they could have done within the program itself.

It's surprising that Dr Davis provoked such a visceral response online. Dr Davis has previously appeared on most other networks and papers in Australia without attracting the same hysteria that occurred on Twitter. But science isn't settled in 140 characters. And Twitter is renowned for being more of a lynch mob than a considered jury. The online backlash was irrelevant to the more important scientific debate.

Catalyst was accused of scaremongering. It's an overused term. It's routinely used in politics to dismiss opposition policies. Reporting on terrorist threats, the Zika virus and crime sprees could also be argued to cause anxiety among the general population. But it's a price we're all willing to pay for free and diverse speech.

As one viewer wrote, "Shutting down discussion and the flow of information on the basis it might frighten people is 'nanny state-ism' and censorship gone mad and could potentially perpetuate more of the cigarette and drug disasters of the past".

So were we 'scaremongering'? Well, Davis herself stated that no-one should stop using their wireless devices but be more measured in how they're used. She stressed that "distance is your friend" a concept that is echoed in the RF warnings within the phones themselves. She also suggested people reconsider whether they should have their router in the bedroom. This is hardly sensationalist stuff.

The great thing about science is that new discoveries are constantly made and orthodoxies change. Sometimes so-called "fringe" views move into the mainstream, forcing governments to change policies to prevent public harm. This has happened many times. Think back to thalidomide, asbestos, tobacco. We are not suggesting this will necessarily happen in the case of wireless technology, but it's also not scientific to claim the door has been slammed shut on this discussion.

Both side of the debate received airtime and the conclusion of the program showed that in the face of uncertainty, people might want to be more cautious about how they use the technology.

After all that has happened, my concern is that the ability to have this conversation might be curtailed.

Related news:
Feb 2016, Australia: Wi-Fried? Prime-time TV show examines Wi-Fi health risks
Feb 2016, Australia: ICNIRP's downunder-delegate goes bonkers over CATALYST TV investigation into WI-FI
Click here to view the source article.
Source: Huffington Post Australia, Dr. Maryanne Demasi, 19 Feb 2016

ICNIRP's downunder-delegate goes bonkers over CATALYST TV investigation into WI-FI
Australia Created: 18 Feb 2016
Australian health researchers have condemned ABC science show Catalyst for “scaremongering” on alleged links between wi-fi and mobile signals and cancer.

Catalyst aired its report entitled Wi-Fried on February 16, quoting extensively Dr Devra Davis, a US epidemiologist and author of a book on “the truth about mobile phone radiation”.

Related news:
Feb 2016, Australia: Wi-Fried? Prime-time TV show examines Wi-Fi health risks

Dr Davis said that exposing the human body “to mobile phone radiation for thousands of minutes a month, for hundreds of hours over a lifetime, [is] going to have a biological effect on you.”

She also said that “every single well-designed study ever conducted finds an increased risk of brain cancer with the heaviest users” of mobile phones, but that this did not show up in cancer incidence numbers because it typically took decades for cancer to develop after exposure to radiation.

“There is no cause of cancer in the environment that shows up in the general population in ten years,” Dr Davis said.

“Of course we don't see any increase in brain cancer now. There's none expected.”

But those arguments were rubbished by prominent health researchers and academics.

Professor Rodney Croft, who directs the National Health & Medical Research Council of Australia’s Centre for Research Excellence in Electromagnetic Energy [and who's also on ICNIRP's main commission, ed.], said that views about wi-fi being harmful “are not supported by science and should be taken merely as the personal views of some fringe scientists”.

“In fact, the scientific consensus is strong, and is that there is no substantiated evidence that the low levels of radiofrequency emissions encountered by mobile telecommunications can cause any harm,” Croft told The Conversation.

Croft was particularly critical of the attempt to elicit a safety guarantee from the science community, which was used to cast doubt on the prevailing science.

“Of course it is impossible for science to demonstrate that anything is absolutely safe, and so regardless of whether we’re talking about wi-fi or orange juice, science cannot demonstrate absolute safety,” he told the Australian Science Media Centre.

UNSW cancer biologist Dr Darren Saunders argued it was reports such as that aired by Catalyst that had “very real public health effects”, rather than wireless signals.

He said there was a “lack of any demonstrable increase in brain cancer incidence over time” as well as an “absence of a plausible biological mechanism for how [mobile] radiation can cause cancer.”

Dr Geza Benke, a senior research fellow in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University, disputed the assertion that cancers would take many more decades to materialise.

Dr Benke said solid tumours had “a much shorter minimum latency”, meaning that “we should be seeing increased rates [of cancer] now if there was an association [between cancer and wi-fi radiation].”

ARPANSA also took to its website to reiterate guidance that associations between mobile phones and cancer rates were “weak” and “not substantiated by the bulk of scientific evidence”.

People that believe they suffer health conditions as a result of wireless signals generally group themselves under a condition called idiopathic environmental intolerance attributed to electromagnetic fields (IEI-EMF).

Previous investigations of the condition have highlighted the difficulty in tying ailments that people suffer directly to their exposure to radiofrequencies.
Click here to view the source article.
Source: Information Age, 18 Feb 2016

Wi-Fried? Prime-time TV show examines Wi-Fi health risks
Australia Created: 16 Feb 2016
Could wifi-enabled devices be harmful to our health? You cannot see it or hear it but Wi-Fi blankets our homes, our schools and our cities. Australia's safety agency says there's no evidence of harm, but that's not the same as saying its safe. A growing number of scientists are concerned that the widespread use of Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi-enabled devices could be slowly making us sick. In this Catalyst investigation, Dr Maryanne Demasi explores whether our wireless devices could be putting our health at risk.

Watch the programme via the source link below (video MP4 file is also downloadable from there)
Click here to view the source article.
Source: ABC Catalyst, Dr Maryanne Demasi, 16 Feb 2016

Science for Sale by David Lewis: recommended reading
Australia Created: 5 Feb 2016
Science for Sale by David Lewis: recommended reading
February 4, 2016 in -Mailing List, America's revolving door between govt. Agencies and corporate America, Book reviews/new books of interest, Corporate influence on Science, government and the military by EMFacts

Following a similar vein as the last blog message,”Report from the Science and Wireless 2015 event in Australia” the 2014 book, Science For Sale by David Lewis PhD is relevant reading. The sub title is:

How the US government uses powerful corporations and leading universities to support government policies, silence top scientists, jeopardize our health, and protect corporate profits.

However the title would be just as accurate if it alternatively read: ‘How powerful US corporations use the government’, etc – considering the “revolving door” between corporate America and the government where govt. agencies are effectively given over to corporate control in exchange for large election donations. If it was in a 3rd World country it would be condemned as outright corruption. In the USA however, its just accepted as business as usual.

In 2015, former president, Jimmy Carter expressed concerns over widespread corporate influence over the American government, which he saw as an Oligarchy. To quote:

Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over. … The incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody’s who’s already in Congress has a lot more to sell to an avid contributor than somebody who’s just a challenger.

So, now to Science For Sale:

From the fly leaf:

When Speaker Newt Gingrich greeted Dr. David Lewis in his office overlooking the National Mall, he looked at Dr. Lewis and said: “You know you’re going to be fired for this, don’t you?” “I know,” Dr. Lewis replied, “I just hope to stay out of prison.” Gingrich had just read Dr. Lewis’s commentary in Nature, titled “EPA Science: Casualty of Election Politics.” Three years later, and thirty years after Dr. Lewis began working at EPA, he was back in Washington to receive a Science Achievement Award from Administrator Carol Browner for his second article in Nature. By then, EPA had transferred Dr. Lewis to the University of Georgia to await termination—the Agency’s only scientist to ever be lead author on papers published in Nature and Lancet.

The government hires scientists to support its policies; industry hires them to support its business; and universities hire them to bring in grants that are handed out to support government policies and industry practices. Organizations dealing with scientific integrity are designed only to weed out those who commit fraud behind the backs of the institutions where they work. The greatest threat of all is the purposeful corruption of the scientific enterprise by the institutions themselves. The science they create is often only an illusion, designed to deceive; and the scientists they destroy to protect that illusion are often our best. This book is about both, beginning with Dr. Lewis’s experience, and ending with the story of Dr. Andrew Wakefield.

Review by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:

“David Lewis has been a beacon of integrity against the apocalyptical forces of ignorance and greed endeavoring to divert science from the noble pursuit of truth and pervert it into a tool that supports the most destructive policies of industry and government.”
Click here to view the source article.
Source: Don Maish/Agnes Ingvarsdotir

Why Devra Davis wants the world to hang up and take notice
Australia Created: 14 Dec 2015
American scientist Devra Davis has an impressive record in public health, helping to expose the dangers of tobacco, asbestos and passive smoking - Next on her list? The always-on, every-present mobile phone.

When I meet Devra Davis in the foyer of a waterfront hotel in Sydney's Woolloomooloo, there's a moment when her siege mentality shows. The tireless American campaigner on the dangers of mobile phone radiation, who believes they should be used at all times as far from the body as possible, is posing for photographs with clunky retro handsets. She always carries three types with her in her handbag, including these comically colourful old-school models. Asked by the photographer to hold one to each ear, she baulks. "Don't make me look like Mickey Mouse," she says. "I don't want to look like a quack."

Though the science in her 2010 book, Disconnect: the Truth About Mobile-Phone Radiation, has been questioned, even pilloried, by some experts in the field, Davis is not an ill-informed fraud shouting her way around the world. In fact, she has a long and distinguished career in science behind her, including 10 years as a board director at the US National Academy of Sciences. There, she oversaw the evaluation of the evidence on the likes of tobacco and asbestos. "While we waited and continued to evaluate the issues, millions of people were exposed," she says.

Davis, 69, was involved with the first efforts to discourage smoking in the indoor environment because of the dangers of passive smoking, and notes that Australia was a world leader on this issue. "At the US National Academy of Sciences I saw how long it took for us to say, 'Maybe there shouldn't be smoking in the environment of children', " she says. "At one point, 70 per cent of surgeons in the US smoked," she adds, sounding justifiably incredulous.

Mobile phones, Davis says, are like tobacco in that they are widely used. "But, unlike tobacco, mobile phones play very valuable roles in society. They have transformed our ability to respond to emergencies and for us to communicate with each other at any time, from anywhere. On the dark side, mobile phone technology has also enabled terrorist groups to communicate with one another – and in a few cases to remotely detonate bombs."

Though Davis missed the fact that the CSIRO here invented Wi-Fi ("Really? Did they?"), she is aware we led the world in making the wearing of seatbelts compulsory in cars. "So why don't you give everyone the right to know what's buried in every mobile phone?"

Good point. And one that she claims some success in achieving. Following the publication of her book, she says mobile-phone manufacturers worldwide started to include information on radiation. With the tone of a conjurer, Davis asks me to take out my iPhone and follow the path Settings/General/About/Legal/RF Exposure. While it is hard to verify her claim of being instrumental in having this mandated, the information appears on my iPhone in black and white. The lengthy screed includes the following: "To reduce exposure to RF energy, use a hands-free option, such as the built-in speaker phone, the supplied headphones or other similar accessories. Carry iPhone at least 5mm away from your body to ensure exposure levels remain at or below the as-tested levels."

Did you know you were supposed to carry your mobile away from your body? Hands up if you press your iPhone to your face while speaking? If, as Davis's many detractors say, the radiation admitted by the two-way microwave radios in mobile phones is so inert and harmless, why would these warnings exist?

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), radio-frequency waves are electromagnetic fields, and, unlike ionising radiation such as X-rays or gamma rays, can neither break chemical bonds nor cause ionisation in the human body. Game over, you might think. Except that, in 2011, as Davis is only too willing to point out, WHO added the following to its "key facts" on mobile phones: "The electromagnetic fields produced by mobile phones are classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as possibly carcinogenic to humans."

Confused? We've barely begun. Davis and those who agree with her claim that much of the research so far completed is industry-sponsored. "Sponsored research can induce publication bias," notes Davis. "So most industry-sponsored research finds no effect, while independent studies do find an effect."

In turn, Davis's detractors accuse her of misrepresenting facts and selectively reporting studies that support her argument.

Davis waves away such criticism. She says she is prepared to accept that the carcinogenic properties of mobile phone radiation are a bit of sideshow, a distraction. "I do think mobile phone radiation causes cancer and I do think there will be a tsunami of it, but I'll be dead by the time it is upon us," she says, pointing to the fact that after the dropping of nuclear bombs on Japanese cities during World War II, it took 40 years for brain cancers to appear in great numbers in exposed populations. More pressing, more urgent, and perhaps more obvious are the effects of mobile phone use on male fertility, on children and on unborn babies in the womb.

When it comes to male fertility problems, Davis has an Australian ally in Laureate Professor John Aitken of Newcastle University. She tells me that a study published by Aitken in 2009 involved taking tubes of semen from the same healthy man, and exposing one of them to mobile phone radiation. "After a few hours, if you looked at the sperm exposed to mobile phone radiation you could see changes in their shape, their number and the way they swim," she says, adding that the job of a sperm is like swimming from LA to Hawaii – and trying to hit a tiny target. "So why make their job any harder?"

Aitken's study found that radio frequency electromagnetic radiation decreases the motility and vitality of sperm. "These findings have clear implications for the safety of extensive mobile phone use by males of reproductive age, potentially affecting both their fertility and the health and wellbeing of their offspring," his study concluded.

Alarmed? Perhaps you should be, especially if you are a bloke and you carry your always-on mobile phone in your front trouser pocket, within cooee of your testicles. And even more so if you are currently trying to conceive a child. But it's not all about the blokes. In talks she gives at campuses around the world, Davis shows slides documenting prenatal DNA damage from mobile phone radiation that she claims results in reduced brain and testes growth, behavioural effects, and visible damage to the spinal cord and epithelium.

Davis is particularly horrified by the enrolment of infants in their parents' gadgets. "There is no reason whatsoever that anybody should be giving a cell phone to an infant in the crib, yet there are thousands of apps for babies in cribs," she observes. "If you must give a cell phone to a toddler, at least make sure it is in flight mode."

Though an ardent user of technology herself, Davis is concerned about the adverse physical effects of its overuse among the young. She points to recent studies indicating that prolonged exposure to the LED screens in iPhones and iPads can cause irreversible damage to the retina. As she regards me with her deep brown eyes, Davis adds that there is something dehumanising about spending nine hours a day looking at a screen rather than looking people in the eye. Davis is horrified by what she calls "e-zombies": parents who take their children to fancy restaurants where everyone gets out an iPad and they don't talk or even look at each other.

"This is the road we are travelling on," she says. "You can look up iMama, where in extreme cases babies believe the iPhone is their mother because that's where they mostly see their mother."

So what makes a woman with such a distinguished career behind her want to devote the rest of her life to these issues? "I now have five grandchildren," she says. "That two-year-old is going to be getting married in two months – that's what it feels like for me. You only get one shot, and they grow so fast. I don't want to see my grandchildren become evidence in somebody's research project."
Click here to view the source article.
Source: Sydney Morning Herald, Ian Cuthbertson, 12 Dec 2015

Free Public Lecture by Dr Devra Davis: Wireless Devices & Biological Effects
Australia Created: 12 Nov 2015
Free Public Lecture by Dr Devra Davis, Wednesday, 18 November 2015.

Wireless Devices and Biological Effects

- What we know
- What we do not know
- What can we do now

Co Sponsors: Australian Energy Research Institute, UNSW Engineering

View Dr Devra Davis' bio here:
http://ehtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Dr-Davis-Short-Academic-Bio.pdf

Venue:
UNSW Kensington, The Law Building, Ground Floor Lecture Theatre G02, NSW.

Parking:
Day Avenue Parking area next to NIDA off Anzac Parade
Click here to view the source article.
Source: UNSW Australia, 11 Nov 2015

Fertility Crisis: Researchers call for WHO review after one-seventh meet ‘normal’ sperm count
Australia Created: 9 Nov 2015
Western Australian researchers are calling for a review of what is considered to be a “normal” sperm count after a study of men in their early 20s found only one in seven met the World Health Organisation’s criteria for male fertility.

The study, titled “Testicular function in a birth cohort of young men”, was published in the Human Reproduction journal on Friday. It found obesity was linked to lower testosterone and lower sperm count in men, but it also concluded the benchmark set by the WHO was based on assumptions made from a test group of fertile men, which made it an inappropriate yardstick for the community as a whole.

Of the 423 men aged between 20 and 22 who took part in the study, only 52 met all five of the WHO’s semen reference criteria.

Lead researcher Roger Hart, who is the professor of reproductive medicine at the University of Western Australia, said that is significant not because it was a particularly infertile group – the participants were of average health – but because it showed that a random, unbiased population of men was significantly out of whack with what the WHO considered to be “normal”.

“To use a reference range of ‘fertile men’ the WHO reference range is intrinsically using a biased population,” Hart told Guardian Australia. “This study now tells us what is ‘normal’ – at least in WA.”

The difference between the WA study and other fertility studies was the participants, which were drawn from a group known as the Western Australian pregnancy cohort, or the Raine study.

The Raine study recruited 2,900 pregnant women between 1989 and 1991, and the resulting 2,868 babies made up the Raine study cohort. Those children are now in their early 20s and are the fodder for 150 different researchers from 25 different fields, because they are considered to be truly representative – the only thing they have in common is their mothers decided to take part in the same study.

That is an important but elusive quality for a fertility study, which tends to skew toward more virile men as they are more inclined to put their hand up to have their testes weighed and measured. The concern is noted in the study: “It is well known that studies requiring semen analysis have low recruitment rates which consequently question their validity.”

When the Raine study birth cohort was contacted for a 22-year follow up in 2012, 753 of the 913 men who could be reached agreed to participate in further tests. Just over half of those men then agreed to take part in the fertility study, which Hart said made it an “unbiased” population.

The men were given testicular ultrasounds at Perth’s King Edward memorial hospital, to check for epididymal cysts and varicoceles (a mass of enlarged veins in the scrotum), and also provided semen samples.

The results about what affected fertility were, much less surprising than how few of the men measured up to international criteria, Hart said. The results showed that obesity was strongly linked to lower fertility rates, more so than alcohol intake, smoking, or other illicit drug use. A participant’s Body Mass Index (BMI) also had a greater bearing on their fertility than the presence of cysts.

“As with women who are overweight, it has long been believed that a person’s health will have a negative impact on their fertility potential,” Hart said, noting obesity in fathers had also been linked to poor embryo development and higher rates of miscarriage.

“In a population of sub-fertile couples seeking fertility treatment it was known that overweight men have lower sperm counts, however what was unique about this study was that it was a young unselected population of men with untested fertility.”
Click here to view the source article.
Source: The Guardian, Calla Wahlquist, 30 Sep 2015

Parent's success in stopping WiFI installation at Australian school
Australia Created: 9 Nov 2015
Dear All on my mailing list, I have received the very important text below via Don Maisch at "EMFacts Consultancy" [don {-at-} emfacts.com]. It was written by an Australian mother who took action to inform her child’s school on EMR health issues specific to children. This action resulted in the school working cooperatively with her to enact an EMR precautionary policy.

[My personal comment is: By her actions, this mother has refused to have her child labelled with an illness diagnosis, to be viewed as a patient, and to receive various forms of flimsy treatments such as cognitive behavioural ones. She refused an exclusive and inferior environment to be excused. She did the very best for her child, calling for adult responsibility from the authorities, forcing them to act according to all the documents that all civilized governments and parliaments already have signed and accredited. In a morally and ethically sound society, a toxic environment can never be allowed to override the needs of a child, the latter can never be given a price tag. I urge everyone to follow this woman's example, and to speak up in the very and only interest of your loved ones. It is completely according to the direction of the United Nation (especially the UN “Convention on Human Rights for Persons with Functional Impairments”) and the World Health Organization, and it clearly points to the environment being the culprit, thus being the actual "patient", with a "diagnosis", and to be "treated". Finally, the school's unusual willingness and positive attitude honours them and should not be forgotten.]

+++++++++++++

Excerpt:

An Australian mum has been successful in preventing installation of WiFi at her child’s school and has worked with the school in drafting EMR precautionary measures by requesting compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 and Article 9: Accessibility from the Conventions on the Rights of the Disabled to accommodate her child’s functional impairment.

She stated “My child has a sensitivity to EMR, specifically WiFi and Bluetooth elicit symptoms.” The school environment was very good already, to change that by installing WiFi would exclude the child’s access to the school. The first step she took was to register a compliment/complaint/ feedback form on the Dept of Education’s website she said. “I requested help to find a WiFi- free high school and stated my child’s health complaints and symptoms. Rather than sending an email which could get “lost” in the system, I chose to use the education department’s processes for registering my complaint regarding accessibility to schools.” Around the same time, the child’s school initiated the WiFi installation discussion again. This quickly led to further conversations with the school and district education officers covering both accessibility issues……

Read the whole post here: http://www.emfacts.com/2015/11/parents-success-in-stopping-wifi-installation-at-australian-school-2/


With my very best regards
Yours sincerely
Olle

(Olle Johansson, associate professor
The Experimental Dermatology Unit
Department of Neuroscience
Karolinska Institute
171 77 Stockholm
Sweden)
Click here to view the source article.
Source: EMFacts.com, Don Maisch PhD & Prof. Olle Johansson, 09 Nov 2015

Community Meeting to oppose the NBN tower
Australia Created: 21 Oct 2015
Dear Subscribers, Please find attached the poster for our 27 October Community Meeting to oppose the NBN tower at Settlement Road, Main Arm.

Local readers, why not print out a few copies to put up around town, and keep in your car for replacements in case some "go missing".

It is going to be an entertaining and informative evening. Even if you live in another area, you can benefit from the knowledge on hand. Be sure to forward this email to any interested friends.

Below is the text of a letter posted to Byron Shire Council requesting that they require a Development Application from NBN. Sometimes towers are slipped through without one, as recently happened in Tweed Shire. We encourage Shire residents to send in their own letters, perhaps using some of the reasons listed, to help ensure Council's agreement.

For those outside our region, here is a link to NBN's "three year construction plan" for additional towers. Is your town on it? http://www.nbnco.com.au/content/dam/nbnco2/documents/three-year-construction-plan.pdf

Best regards,

Peter Nielsen
www.emraware.com
Click here to view the source article.
Source: EMRAware, Peter Nielsen (via email), 21 Oct 2015

Phone Radiation is a Hotline to Brain Cancer: Researcher
Australia Created: 18 Sep 2015
A highly respected Australian doctor, currently in remission from brain cancer, is speaking out on his belief that radiation from wifi, cell phones and their towers is a major factor in increasing brain cancer rates.

Dr. John Tickell is attempting to raise awareness and is calling for more funding for brain cancer research, as it has become the number one most deadly cancer for young people in Australia. According to the Australian government, there are 35 new cases of the cancer discovered each week with four out of five cases being fatal in the first five years.

"Leukaemia was once the leading causes of cancer deaths in Australia for under 40s but it now has a five-year survival rate of over 80 per cent. Breast cancer is around 90 cent compared to brain cancer which is around 20 per cent," Tickell told the Herald Sun.

The Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association is denying any detrimental health effects from their radiation, but the World Health Organization has recently upgraded the radiation threat to category B2, meaning "possibly carcinogenic."

"You can say you can't prove it — in my mind it is proven looking at the studies that are unfunded by industry," he said.

The largest study to take place so far was conducted among 5000 cancer patients. The study found that there was no increased risk of overall cancer, but cellphone use was linked to patients having a 40% increased likeliness of developing Glioma, a common type of brain cancer.

Tickell also blasted the United States’ Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the fact that they have seemingly left all investigation to the telecommunications companies themselves.

"The telco-funded studies say they’re safe but the FCC has not done any tests on radiation from phones in 20 years," Tickell lamented.

"There's a million more times radiation in the air today than there was fifty years ago — that is frightening," he said.
Click here to view the source article.
Source: Sputnik News, 12 May 2015

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