According to Daily Telegraph May 25, 2008 the number of mobile phone users worldwide soared to over 3.3 billion by the end of 2007, a total penetration rate of 49 percent. most of those are people below 21 whose brains have not yet fully matured. A statistic which has NOT been clearly broken out is what demographic age group uses the cell phone the most frequently – is the teens? the pre-teens? the salesman? the soccer mom? population
When I was first in China 15 years ago leading a group of doctors and apitherapists in collaboaration with Chinese researchers and doctors, I meet very few other caucasian tourists but amoung them were a team of engineers and marketing people from a major telephone company who were talking about something called a cell phone which would obviate the need to have telephone wires drapped all across the vast expanse of the middle kingdom. Seemed to me then to be far fetched but nonetheless, in discussing the risks and benefits, I asked them about the cancer risk of hold that high frequency energy up to the head. They responded, “Yeas, we know all about the cancer risk, but the cost benefit ratios work out in favor of going with cell phones.”
Today China has more cells phones than land-lines and cell phone use in Africa showed the greatest jump – India close behind. In fact, more than 70% of all cell phone subscribers world wide live in developing countries. In Africa, cell phones account for nearly 90 percent of all telephone use. India and China recently added 154 million and 143 million new subscribers respectively.
The global annual average growth rate for cell phone subscribers currently stands at 22 percent. However, subscriptions to mobile phone plans increased at a rate of 39 percent annually in Africa between 2005 and 2007, and the rate of increase in Asia over the same period was 28 percent. America and South America are not lagging far behind.
Yesterday I flew home to Whidbey Island from LA and had the wonderful opportunity to go back to high school: I sat beside a brilliant electrical engineer who patiently delivered a physics/electronics 101 course to me and reminded me of the relationship between current, voltate and power (watts=volts X amps) as well as the properties of induction, conduction, capacitance, resistance, transmission, semi-conduction and magnetics. I learned more about AM (amplitude modification) and FM (frequency modulation) and about radar, microwaves and cell phone radiation. if you think I am going to regurgitate all that I learned here, you overestimate my skills, suffice it to say, that when I asked him his opinion about the dangers of cell phones, he was very clear and entirely unambiguous: they cause cancer. (He was also very very cautious around any radar devices). Don’t take my word for it, if you are curious about electrical pollution, ask an electrician in your family or in your circle of friends to take you back to school and review electricity 101. me? I studies philosophy and policital philosophy as an undergraduate at Dartmouth. Poetry also. But although I never mastered the rudiments of electricty, nonetheless I suggest that morality and karma applies in that realm also: There is always a price to pay for any convenience. My question to you: what price are you paying for always having your cell phone on and using the power of dangerous cellphone radiation to always be “in touch”.
Joe Mercola, DO is one of a great number of doctors who are joining this chorous of health professionals arguing against the indiscriminate use of cell phone:
| Dr. Mercola’s Comments: | |
| I cannot think of a more dangerous situation than this. This is the reason we are facing a brain cancer epidemic, which some scientists expect to grow to 500,000 cases by 2010, and over a million cases in the U.S. alone by 2015. Every time you use a cell phone, you are exposing your brain to dangerous and potentially cancer-causing radiation.Study after study has shown the connection between cancer and cell phone use, and the information has been out there for a decade now. But cell phone companies have done their best to deny, obfuscate, or downplay the danger. I guess they would rather put half the world at risk than put even a dime of their own profits at risk.
Ten Years of Known Danger The dangers have been well known since at least 1998. In that year, Dr. George Carlo released the results of a massive research project that had been funded by the cell phone industry itself in an attempt to downplay cancer fears. To the industry’s dismay — and also to their surprise, since they selected him assuming he was an industry shill, rather than the honest scientist he proved to be — he came to the exact opposite conclusion from the one they were hoping for. His results included findings of:
These findings, which came well over a decade after cell phones were first introduced (before that there was no safety research at all), caused a shake-up in the scientific world. Soon, many more scientists confirmed Dr. Carlo’s findings. In 2000, Swedish researchers found that cell phone users were almost two and a half times more likely to develop tumors near where they held their cell phone antenna than in any other portion of their brain. Similar studies were conducted in subsequent years on ever-larger groups of people, always with the same result. An Italian study in 2002 found that radio waves caused leukemia cells to replicate ferociously after long exposure. In 2004, the massive REFLEX report on DNA damage from radio waves found that cells exposed to electromagnetic fields similar to those of cell phones showed a significant increase in single and double-strand DNA breaks. If I wanted to, I could list a mountain of research studies all pointing to the same conclusion — exposure to cell phone radiation can cause brain cancer. The Industry Strikes Back The cell phone industry, of course, has long since corrected the “mistake” it made with Dr. Carlo, and funded a number of studies purporting to prove that cell phones are safe. For example, in 2006, they made sure headlines blared reports that an epidemiological study had “proven” cell phones can’t cause cancer. However, a cursory reading of the study shows that it excluded heavy cell phone users from consideration, failed to differentiate between frequent use of cell phones and almost no use, and declared an improbably low rate of overall cancer that contradicts known statistics. After all that, it proudly concluded that it had found no increased risk for cell phone use. Well, no wonder. Don’t be fooled by their lies. Holding a cell phone next to your head is as foolish as drinking a bottle of pesticide. Dr. George Carlo and I have recently finished writing Wireless Deception, which is the most up to date book in the world on this issue. It is currently in final editing and typesetting stages and we hope to have it out by the fall. Even if you manage to avoid brain cancer, you may find yourself faced with other health problems both major and minor, such as headaches and dizziness, Alzheimer’s disease, autism and even impotence. At this point, you cannot completely avoid wireless radiation from all sources; they pervade the environment. However, getting rid of your cell phone altogether can help protect you. But even if you don’t want to take that step, you can still minimize your exposure and reduce your risks by doing the following: Children Should Never Use Cell Phones: Barring a life-threatening emergency, children should not use a cell phone, or a wireless device of any type. Children are far more vulnerable to cell phone radiation than adults, because of their thinner skull bones. Reduce Your Cell Phone Use: Turn your cell phone off more often. Reserve it for emergencies or important matters. Use Your Cell Phone Only Where Reception Is Good: The weaker the reception, the more power your phone must use to transmit, and the more power it uses, the more radiation it emits, and the deeper the dangerous radio waves penetrate into your body. Ideally, you should only use your phone with full bars and good reception. Keep Your Cell Phone Away From Your Body When It Is On: The most dangerous place to be, in terms of radiation exposure, is within about six inches of the emitting antenna. You do not want any part of your body within that area. Use Safer Headset Technology: Wired headsets will certainly allow you to keep the cell phone farther away from your body. However, if a wired headset is not well-shielded — and most of them are not — the wire itself acts as an antenna attracting ambient information carrying radio waves and transmitting radiation directly to your brain. Make sure that the wire used to transmit the signal to your ear is shielded. The best kind of headset to use is a combination shielded wire and air-tube headset. These operate like a stethoscope, transmitting the information to your head as an actual sound wave; although there are wires that still must be shielded, there is no wire that goes all the way up to your head. |
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