Excerpts from “Wireless Hazards” by Barbara Koeppel

“If you think your cellphone is safe, have you considered why you believe that? Is it a fact or is it based on carefully crafted messages that you’ve read or heard?

For the past few decades, the telecom wireless industry and its enthusiasts have heralded cellphones as the greatest achievement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. But as their use soars, scientists worldwide worry about their hazards and have produced over 2,000 studies that tell a darker tale. They warn that the devices and antennas that power them expose humans and wildlife to nonionizing low-frequency electromagnetic fields—also called cellphone, microwave, or radio-frequency radiation. These studies indicate that when people and animals are exposed, they can develop brain, thyroid gland, prostate gland, acoustic nerve, and breast tumors, and other diseases.”

“However, the industry’s message is so widely accepted that contradictory information is routinely discarded. One scientist (who asked for anonymity) told me he recently was asked to advise a state committee about 5G guidelines. “When I tried to tell them about the hazards from the hundreds of thousands or millions of new antennas that will be installed, they weren’t interested. Instead, they only looked at materials from a telecom company, which said the ‘greatest risks from cellphones are traffic deaths due to drivers being distracted.’”

“In a May 2019 Times story, “your 5g phone wont hurt hurt you. but russia wants you to think so,” the journalist William Broad quoted Marvin Ziskin, a Temple University professor of radiology, who claimed, “5G emissions, if anything, should be safer [emphasis added] than previous generations’ exposure of the body’s internal organs.” But Ziskin’s papers, many co-authored by Kenneth Foster, a professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, are funded by the Wi-Fi Alliance and the Mobile & Wireless Forum, or MWF, a trade group whose members include Apple, Motorola, Samsung, and Sony. As industry favorites, Foster and Ziskin were invited to chair MWF’s 2016 workshop sessions in Belgium, and Foster gave the keynote address.”

“Scarato notes that her nonprofit submitted hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests to the CDC to determine why; in doing so, it learned that the CDC had hired Kenneth Foster, an industry consultant, in 2015, to write that agency’s new web pages on the health effects of wireless technology.”

“Om Gandhi, a University of Utah professor emeritus, studied how humans absorbed cellphone radiation and, by the 1990s, was focusing on children because, as he explains, “their skulls are thinner than adult skulls and they absorb much more.” He also found that for every millimeter closer to their heads people hold their phones, the absorption rate is 15 to 30 percent higher. When he published these results, his funders stopped funding. “Without the grants, I had to close my lab,” he said. Some years later, Devra Davis, an epidemiologist who co-founded the Environmental Health Trust, co-wrote a paper with Gandhi. She says that a five-year-old child’s skull absorbs about 10 times as much radiation as an adult’s skull. But when companies test phones, they use a one-size-fits-all model based on the head size of an adult male.”

Read the full expose at Wireless Hazards by Barbara Koeppel for the Washington Spectator