Forwarding to the group - as it has a saligao mention in it.
kind regards
Ashley
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Cell phone radiation: Wrong number
Date: Sun, 4 May 2014 11:25:16 -0400
From: Kevin Saldanha <veg...@gmail.com>
To: Santosh Helekar <chimbel...@gmail.com>, "muriel&mario"
<another...@gmail.com>, Ashley Delaney <ashley...@gmail.com>
Thanks for this Santosh. Good to know that my fellow Saligaokars are
safe celebrating their feast today! BOAS FESTAS!
Kevin
On 2014-05-04 9:31 AM, "Santosh Helekar" <chimbel...@gmail.com
<mailto:chimbel...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Here is my article published in Herald:
http://www.epaperoheraldo.in/Details.aspx?id=15574&boxid=17028312&uid=&dat=5/4/2014
A fuller version of the article is the following:
The health-food craze, the environmental movement and other left-wing
and right-wing political activist movements have generated many bogus
conspiracy theories among regular educated folk in recent years. Fifty
years ago this type of paranoia was found only in a few isolated
people confined mostly in western countries – such things as the
government is using fluoridation of the public water supply to make
people sick and create business for pharmaceutical and other
commercial enterprises. But easy access to the internet and spam email
has turned large number of people in any corner of the world into
conspiracy theorists. For some reason, today most of these irrational
beliefs have to do with medical issues and technology. The Journal of
American Medical Association, for example, published a research
article recently quantifying the percentage of Americans who believe
in various conspiracies. The two most popular conspiracy theories
turned out to be: 1) “The Food and Drug Administration is deliberately
preventing the public from getting natural cures for cancer and other
diseases because of pressure from drug companies,” and 2) “Health
officials know that cell phones cause cancer but are doing nothing to
stop it because large corporations won’t let them.” More than 50% of
the people surveyed believed in at least one conspiracy theory. These
people were found to be those who avoided regular health checkups,
standard medical treatment and preventive measures such as
vaccinations. Instead, they dosed themselves with vitamins, herbal
supplements, the so-called “organic” foods and various alternative
medical remedies. It appears therefore that the paranoid belief in
medical conspiracies can drive people to take chances with their
health in general.
Coincidentally, about the same time that this article appeared I was
alerted on Goan online forums to the fact that the unwarranted scare
regarding radiation from cell phones and cell phone towers had found a
foothold among Goans, particularly the residents of Saligao. I
understand that many of these residents are objecting to the
construction of a cell phone tower because they believe that the
radiation arising from it would harm their health. It is very likely
that they have been influenced by local environmental activists who
are suspicious of the government or large corporations, and
consequently buy into the latest anti-establishment scare that appears
on the internet or through a mass email campaign conducted by
activists in other parts of the world. The internet has literally
thousands of websites devoted to propagate all kinds of wild
anti-establishment plots and doomsday scenarios. It is very hard for
any lay person to discern whether the claims made on these websites
are legitimate or just pure hoaxes, unless one is specialized in the
particular medical, scientific or technological field in question. In
many cases it requires one to have an educational background in more
than one field. In the case of the cell phone scare, for example, one
has to be familiar with physics, biology and medicine. Furthermore,
the activists promoting these conspiratorial causes have access to the
technical scientific literature in these areas because of the
internet. They are therefore able to pick and choose only the studies
that appear to support their cause, like a lawyer in a court of law or
a politician in a political campaign. Invariably, they have a poor
understanding of this literature, and no clue as to how science works
and how scientific consensus is arrived at. That is why, in order to
see through the deception, in addition to the knowledge of physics,
biology and medicine, one has to be conversant with the scientific
approach and method.
As it turns out, I happen to have the right background to be able to
debunk the misinformation on cell phone and cell phone tower
radiation. I am a medical scientist and professor whose current
scientific research involves using electromagnetic medical devices and
studying the effects of electromagnetic stimulation of the brain.
In the early 1990s when cell phones were just beginning to be popular,
the U. S. government convened a panel of scientists of the stature of
Nobel Prize winners to apply their understanding of physics and
examine the literature to investigate whether cell phone radiation
could produce any adverse effects on the human body. After a thorough
investigation they concluded that there was no evidence for any
harmful effects to human health from this radiation, but that we need
to be vigilant for any evidence that may turn up in the future due to
long-term effects. One of these eminent panelists was an advisor to
our graduate studies program, and one of my role models. His name is
Dr. Charles Stevens. He, along with others, is responsible for one of
the most fundamental discoveries of brain science, namely that cells
have tiny channels that carry ionic electrical currents across their
membranes.
It has now been two decades since that panel met. There is still no
evidence and no rational mechanism for any detrimental effects of
radiation from cell phones and towers on the human brain or body. The
claim that this radiation causes brain cancer, has been belied by the
fact that after three decades of widespread and increasing use of cell
phones, there has not been any increase in the incidence of brain
cancer in the general population. The latest large-scale study
published in March 2012 in the British Medical Journal found that the
incidence of brain cancer remained constant from 1992 through 2008 in
the U.S., a period during which cell phone use went from almost 0% to
100%. If cell phones caused brain cancer, there should have been a
measurable increase in its incidence. There is one prior study done in
Sweden, which claims a slight increase of incidence in heavy users of
cell phones. But this study has not been replicated. In other words,
nobody else has repeated the study anywhere else, and confirmed its
findings. In science, unless a result is reproduced it cannot be taken
seriously. The reason for this is that such clinical studies are
statistical surveys, where there is always some probability of finding
a small spurious effect by chance alone, even if the study is
conducted properly. Dr. Charles Stevens has nicely pointed to this and
other problems with such non-replicated studies in this succinct
quote: “To date, however, none of the studies that reported an
association between EMF (electromagnetic field) exposure or cell phone
use and cancer (or a biological change related to cancer) has been
independently replicated. In most cases, the positive association can
be traced to statistical artifacts, systematic errors (such as heating
tissue), or fraud.”
On my part, I have gone through all the human clinical trials on cell
phone radiation effects that have been published in the medical
literature so far. It is only these human studies that count because
if there are no significant detrimental effects in humans then all the
non-human animal, plant tissue, cell culture dish and test tube
studies are pointless from a public health standpoint. I read all the
abstracts of research papers in a medical research literature database
maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, and made a note
of the results and final conclusions in terms of presence or absence
of any effects. The findings from this exhaustive and comprehensive
search of the world peer-reviewed medical literature on the effects of
cell phone radiation of human beings of all ages are as follows:
1. As many as 44 of the 68 trials showed no harmful effects of cell
phone radiation on human health. Indeed, a few of them showed
beneficial effects, such as improvement in cognitive skills, memory
and action response times.
2. Only 14 of 68 trials showed some effects that were either deemed to
be harmful, or effects whose health significance was not clear, such
as slight changes in brain wave activity.
3. The few papers that claimed to show slight increases in the
incidence of serious health effects have not been replicated. In cases
where a replication has been attempted, it has produced a negative
result or a failure to replicate the initial result.
In summary therefore, there is no conclusive scientific evidence for
cell phones or towers to cause any harm to human health. The few
studies that show a small effect are likely to be due to one of the
three spurious errors that Dr. Stevens mentioned in his quote. In
general, when you are looking for two alternative outcomes such as an
effect or no effect in a study, or a series of studies, there is a 50%
probability of seeing an effect by chance alone, like the tossing of a
coin yields heads or tails 50% of the time. That is why statisticians
require that an effect be seen in more than 95% of observations in
order to claim that there is a significant effect.
>From the standpoint of physics and biology the lack of an effect is
not surprising at all because there is no plausible physical mechanism
by which radiation from these devices can cause a measurable effect on
any biological tissue. The radiation waves that emanate from cell
phones and towers are electromagnetic waves, just like sunlight. But
the energy of cell phone or tower waves is a million times less than
that of sunlight. The extremely low energy means that cell phone
radiation cannot break chemical bonds, unlike ultraviolet rays, x rays
and gamma rays, which are known to produce cancer. Consequently, it
cannot cause cancer, because in order for any radiation to cause
cancer the chemical bonds within DNA need to be broken by that
radiation. To get around this hard fact the cell phone radiation
activists speculate that it causes its bad effects by heating the
tissues of the body. But if this were the case then sunlight should be
more than 7000 times as effective in producing those effects because
we are that much more exposed to heat from sunlight. In fact, since 3%
of sunlight that hits the ground is the cancer-producing ultraviolet
light, we receive three and half times greater amounts of ultraviolet
radiation compared to cell phone tower radiation. Ordinary sunlight
therefore ought to be a much bigger and more real cancer risk.
What is more, if heating of body tissues was the cause of cancer and
all the other serious problems then daily physical exercise would have
caused cancer, and would have killed people from all other serious
effects that are attributed to cell phones and towers by the
activists. This is so because even normal daily physical activities
can generate nearly 84 times more heat in the body than cell phone
tower radiation at the base of the tower. Another activist canard is
that cell phone-like microwaves are used in microwave ovens to cook
food. This is easily debunked by the fact that microwave ovens produce
500 – 1000 times more powerful microwaves than a cell phone, and they
focus and concentrate these waves inside a small box. It is the same
as focusing and concentrating sunlight with a lens to set fire to a
pile of papers. A final red herring raised by the activists is what
the World Health Organization has done for political reasons, namely
that it has designated cell phone radiation as a “possible” carcinogen
(cancer-producing substance). It has also lumped in this category
coffee, coconut oil and pickled vegetables. Dried salted fish is
classified as carcinogenic, and shift work and wood as probably
carcinogenic. WHO often does this sort of a thing to respond to the
petitions of environmental activists who point to some study that
shows a small carcinogenic effect without looking into its scientific
merit or lack of replication.
For all of these reasons, all responsible public health organizations
in the world have alerted people not to believe in wild scary
scenarios and conspiracy theories regarding cell phone and tower
radiations. They have provided balanced factual and reliable
scientific information. I will end by providing internet links to, and
pertinent quotes from, two of these organizations. Here is one from
Public Health England:
http://www.hpa.org.uk/Topics/Radiation/UnderstandingRadiation/UnderstandingRadiationTopics/ElectromagneticFields/RadioWaves/MobilePhones/info_HealthAdvice/
QUOTE
There are thousands of published scientific papers covering research
about the effects of various types of radio waves on cells, tissues,
animals and people. The scientific consensus is that, apart from the
increased risk of a road accident due to mobile phone use when
driving, there is no clear evidence of adverse health effects from the
use of mobile phones or from phone masts. However there is now
widespread use of this relatively new technology and more research is
needed in case there are long term effects.
UNQUOTE
Here is another from the U.S. National Cancer Institute:
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/cellphones
QUOTE
What has research shown about the possible cancer-causing effects of
radiofrequency energy?
Although there have been some concerns that radiofrequency energy from
cell phones held closely to the head may affect the brain and other
tissues, to date there is no evidence from studies of cells, animals,
or humans that radiofrequency energy can cause cancer.
It is generally accepted that damage to DNA is necessary for cancer to
develop. However, radiofrequency energy, unlike ionizing radiation,
does not cause DNA damage in cells, and it has not been found to cause
cancer in animals or to enhance the cancer-causing effects of known
chemical carcinogens in animals.
UNQUOTE
What I have written above is meant to honestly inform lay people in
Goa about the scientific facts pertaining to cell phone and tower
radiation. Whether they use this information to make decisions in
their own lives or not is up to them.
Cheers,
Santosh
*****************************************************************
No offense meant. But let the chips fall where they may.
*****************************************************************
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