Mayor of Udine launches campaign for mobile-phone-free bars and restaurants

05/01/2012 By Leave a Comment

There is much activity in the electromagnetic world – well, at least amongst those who are concerned that the stratospheric increase in man-made electromagnetic radiation over the last 20 years could have catastrophic long term effects on our health. Whereas five years ago, which I first became electro sensitive myself, we got very excited when an article about electromagnetic hypersensitivity (to give it its full title) appeared in any kind of press, now, a major article on the safely of mobile phones and related concerns appears in a national newspaper at least once a week.

We do transfer some of this material, although not nearly as much as I would like (pressure of time), on to the ES section of the FoodsMatter site but just now and then a report comes through that I think everyone would relate to – such as the mayor of Udine and his ‘telefonini’ ban!

Udine is a delightful old town, population around 100,000, which sits half way between Venice and Trieste in Northern Italy – and its mayor, Furio Honsell, has just had it with his counsellors spending most of their meetings updating their Facebook pages and sending text messages. As it happens Mayor Honsell is also a doctor, and a doctor who believes in the precautionary principle: namely that, until we are sure that having mobile phones glued to our ears, and especially to our childrens’ ears, for a large proportion of each day is not going to have some disastrous health outcome, we should not do it.

He has therefore banned mobiles in council meetings and launched a campaign to have them banned in bars, restaurants and hotels in the town; so far sixteen establishments have signed up.

Wherever you stand on the safety issue (if you did not manage to make it through the whole of Andrew Goldsworthy’s very weighty paper featured in last weekend’s FoodsMatter e-newsletter there was a good overview article on msnbc.com which will lead you in more gently), many people who value the convenience of their mobile phone are nonetheless profoundly irritated by their overuse by others, thereby banishing any semblance of peace in public places and making normal conversation almost impossible! They will be right up there with Mayor Honsell. And with  the Italian rail company, Trenitalia, who are now introducing ‘silent’ carriages – a luxury which, to their credit, most British train companies have offered for some time.

Filed Under: Electrosensitivity, Food/Health Policy Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Mobile phones a vital lifeline – but can they be safer?

12/29/2011 By Leave a Comment

Despite the reams of research and comment that I have read, written and posted on our website about the possible health hazards of mobile telephony, along with most of those who worry about what man-made magnetic radiation is doing to human health, I recognise that mobile phones have brought huge benefits to every sector of society.

From a farmer in rural Africa or India who can now access weather and crop information that enables him to farm hugely more efficiently, to a child walking safely home from school, to an Arab spring revolutionary accessing the internet and thereby both fellow rebels and the outside world, to homeless teenagers who value their phones (according to a fascinating article on forbes.com) more than eating or a drug habit – every aspect of everyone’s life has been significantly impacted by mobile phones. There is no way back – nor should there be. But…

If you accept the ever-growing body of research (see the FM site and many others) linking mobile telephony not only to brain tumours but to autoimmune conditions, autism, other cancers and hundreds of less devastating but still debilitating conditions, then – if we are to continue to use mobile phones – we must make them safer.

I do not doubt that there are ways (see Dr Andrew Goldsworthy’s suggestions below) – they just need to be found. But until the financial imperative is strong enough (eg mobile telephony is seen to pose a great enough threat to human health for mobile phone companies to face class actions that would make tobacco and asbestos payouts look like small change) the scientific effort and investment will not be applied. In fact, I am moderately optimistic that some of this work is already being undertaken (mobile phone companies may not be concerned about human health but they are not stupid) but that it will continue to be cloaked in the greatest secrecy until it is ready to be launched – and when that may be is another matter.

Meanwhile, for those of you who are technically minded, here are Dr Goldsworthy’s suggestions:

There are two ways that we could modify a mobile phone signal to make it less damaging. Most, but not all, of the damage is due to the way in which the signal is pulsed and modulated to carry the digital information.

One way that I thought of is to use what I have called Balanced Signal Technology. That is to transmit two mirror image signals from the handset on different carrier frequencies so that where one had a pulse, the other had a gap.

As far as the base station is concerned, they are two separate phone calls and there would be no problem in decoding them. However, a living cell would probably not be able to distinguish between the two so that the opposing signals would cancel each other out and the signal would appear to be unmodulated and relatively harmless.

Another way was discovered, and patented, by the late Theodore (Ted) Litovitz in the 1990s. This is to superimpose a low frequency random magnetic field (random noise) on the handset signal. He found that many of the biological effects of electromagnetic radiation could be reversed by this procedure; furthermore, it seems to work even with unmodulated signals, so a combination of the two procedures may be better than either alone.

Unfortunately, the mobile phone industry does not seem to be interested in either of these. I do not know why. Possibly they do not want to pay for a licence to use Litovitz’s patents (now held by the Catholic University of America) but I have offered them Balanced Signal Technology free of charge. All they have to do is test it using volunteers with EHS.
Perhaps they do not want to recognise that EHS exists; perhaps they do not want to admit that their own technology is unsafe, which could open the floodgates to a whole raft of litigation, who knows?

Dr Goldsworthy set this out in a correspondence with our webmaster so, for those who might have similar queries, here is the rest of the exchange:

Dear Dr Goldsworthy,

I did have a couple of questions about the methods of modifying mobile phone signals. 

  • I presume balanced signal technology would apply equally to mobile phones and base stations? In your email you refer to ‘phones, but ES sufferers like Michelle don’t use a mobile ‘phone but are sensitive to the radiation from base stations.
  • If I understand it correctly, for the technology to work there would need to be two ‘mirrored’ data streams. Would this doubling of the data stream effect base station call handling capacity, and have an adverse effect on cell phone battery usage? This might – in part – explain the lack of enthusiasm of the network operators?
  • Presumably the Litovitz technology might also negatively effect handset battery usage. Apparently battery usage is a hot topic at the moment! 

 

Dear Webmaster,

In theory, Balanced Signal Technology could apply to base stations too.

I take the point that there is an issue with reduced handset battery life with both systems. Although battery capacity is improving all the time, it may  still be necessary to have a slightly larger handset to accommodate a larger battery.

However, it can be argued that handsets are already too small and thin because with a modern phone the antennas are too close to the head and you have to hold it at least a half an inch from your head to keep the SAR within the legal limit.  This fact can normally be found in the instruction manual, but buried in small print where few people are likely to read it. On balance, I think I might opt for a slightly larger phone and no EHS or cancer.

Filed Under: Alternative/Complementary Health, Electrosensitivity, Environmental Issues, Food/Health Policy, Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Smart meters – what are they and why should we be campaigning against them?

12/05/2011 By 2 Comments

So, what is all the fuss about Smart Meters? What is wrong with your utility company checking your meter via a radio controlled meter rather than sending round a man to read it, or asking you to read it yourself and tell them what you have used? Sounds rather efficient…

Well that is what the energy companies are telling us anyhow, adding that it will help them and us to be ‘greener’ in our use of energy. ‘By understanding how we use our energy, this will help us all to find ways of reducing our consumption and also help make our individual contribution to the overall carbon reduction targets….’

But…..  And there are lots of buts. For much more detail on smart meters, their possible effects and who is doing what elsewhere in the world, see articles and research on the FoodsMatter site. However, for a very brief introduction – the ‘buts’, fall in to three main sections.

Efficiency/practicality

Energy companies claim that smart meters will enable them to save costs as they will not need to employ meter readers (can this really be regarded as a virtue in these times of high unemployment?) and that the readings will be more accurate and will allow them to plan and monitor usage so as to make more efficient use of energy. In fact, the experience of several states in the US where smart meters have already been installed and where bills have suddenly soared into thousands of dollars, have suggested that this may be far from the case.

Privacy/security

There are huge concerns about the data that will be collected: how it will be stored and how it could be used. The meters will be operational 24/7 and will collect data an ongoing basis or at very frequent intervals. So that if you choose to get up in the middle of the night to go to the loo, make a cup of tea, watch TV, or work in your workshop because you can’t sleep, that information will be logged via your smart meter.

In a comment on a Which? blog on smart meters, the NPower Press Office says:
‘Customer privacy and data security is key to the work being done in the industry and we are working with Ofgem to ensure that the appropriate customer protections are in place when the mass rollout starts next year. There are already customer protection mechanisms in place, such as the Data Protection Act, European Convention and Human Rights and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, that will ensure data is used in an appropriate way and that marketing information is only sent to those customers who have agreed to receive such messages.’ 

Ouch – that does not sound reassuring. Who decides what is appropriate? And do we really want them to have the information anyhow? Seems to me that Big Brother has finally found the ideal tool for monitoring our every move and I, for one, do not have faith that those ‘customer protection mechanisms’ are sufficiently robust to prevent me being harassed by sellers of everything from roof insulation to garden mowers.

But even if one believes in the integrity of the utility companies, what is to stop a hacker with more malign motives accessing the information – information such as when you are normally out so it would be a good time to burgle you could be deduced from your power usage. Or, on a much larger scale, a hacker could successfully bring the whole country to a standstill  by breaking into the system and just turning it off! The energy companies maintain that their systems are ‘secure’ but history suggests that no system is truly secure against a determined and skillful hacker.  (For more on this see this article in the Denver Post.)

Health risks – more electrosmog

For anyone who is already electrosensitive – and potentially for all of us – smart meters pose a greater hazard than having Big Brother breathing down your neck;  they will effectively ‘irradiate’ your house or flat 24 hours a day and you will have no way of turning them off.  Although in some countries (such as Italy) the information is sent down a cable network, the proposal for the UK (along with much of North America) is to use a wifi or wireless network. This effectively means that every dwelling in the UK that uses energy and has a meter will be connected through a wifi network to a hub in the street which will then pass the information on to a central data processing centre. It is even possible that some meters may act as relays to boost the system, in which case they will be using an even stronger signal.

A wifi smart meter system is already up and running in Canada and its emissions are currently significantly higher than the international Bioinitiative safety limit for mobile phones. Indeed one calculation suggests that, working at two thirds of its maximum capacity, one meter would give off the same amount of radiation per day as the recent Interphone study suggested would be enough to increase cancer risk over a period of 10 years.

In some countries (such as the Netherlands) you can opt out – although opting out yourself will not protect from the emission from your neighbours which, if you live in a flat, could be very high. However, as it stands, in the UK there will be no opt out on health or any other grounds, so we will all have the ambient electrosmog in which we are forced live to dramatically increased, with whatever health consequences that may have.

As far as those who are already electrosensitive are concerned, they know only too well what the consequences will be: considerable extra expenditure to try and shield themselves from the emissions and an almost inevitable decline in their health as it will not be possible to entirely exclude the meter emissions from their homes. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, the effect will largely depend on whether theories like Andrew Goldsworthy’s (outlined in my previous post) that conditions such as autism are directly related to the increase in man-made electromagnetic radiation, prove to be true – in which case it could be catastrophic. Certainly, the low level reactions (headache, fatigue, ear tingling, general malaise etc etc) that many people who are not overtly electrosensitive already experience to excess mobile phone or computer use, compact fluorescent bulbs, dirty electricity, power lines etc are likely to get worse with the resultant loss of population-wide productivity and general well being.

So, what to do?

Well, in the US, where the grid is far more advanced than ours in the UK, there are a number of groups, such as Stop Smart Meters and the Center for Electrosmog Prevention campaigning vociferously, and in some cases successfully, to stop the roll out or even to have smart meters removed. In the UK MCS-Aware, ES-UK, The Radiation Trust and Wired Child have joined together to petition the government to install a fibre-optic wired network instead of a wifi one and to allow an opt out on health grounds for those who are electrosensitive. This obviously does not address the larger concerns of the invasion of privacy, security and efficiency raised by the universal installation of smart meters, but it certainly does address the main health concerns.

If you feel you should get involved – and you should – they have set up a website, www.SmartMeterPetition.org from which you can sign the petition. They also give you templates for letters and emails  to be sent to your MP, the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and anyone else who could be relevant, lots addresses plus suggestions as to how you can protect your own home against smart meters.

For other ideas as to why the government should think again about their Smart Meter roll out, check through some of the other articles on the Foods Matter site. Even though it is unlikely that they will actually take it on board, you might also want to quote Dr Goldsworthy’s appeal to the Nuremberg Code; it might at least make them think!

‘One thing that I did not mention in my original communication, but is very relevant, is that the enforced introduction of wireless smart meters is a clear contravention of the Nuremberg Code which forbids the performance of experiments on human beings without their consent. Insofar as the long-term safety of continual irradiation from these devices has never been tested and many people (including many eminent scientists) believe that it is potentially harmful, the whole nation is being made a part of an uncontrolled experiment on their electromagnetic safety. 

In fact, it doesn’t matter whether they turn out to be harmful or not; the fact that the experiment is being performed at all without the expressed permission of the consumer is a contravention of the Nuremberg Code. If we are to adhere to the Code, no consumer should have a wireless smart meter fitted without their voluntary consent after being warned that some scientists believe them to be a health hazard. Furthermore, should the property change hands, any new consumer should have the right to ask for the meter to be removed and replaced by a conventional one.’ 

 

Filed Under: Electrosensitivity, Environmental Issues, Food/Health Policy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
« Older Posts