Post by Wayne Hall on Sept 20, 2020 6:19:38 GMT -5
The Invisible Rainbow
The Hidden Dangers of Wireless and Cell Phone Radiation
Interview with Arthur Firstenberg by Tonio Epstein
T.E.: Your concerns are of a nature that are not well recognized in our nation.
A.F.: Not yet. They're not well recognized in very many places in the world yet.
T.E.: But in some countries they have been studied pretty well, haven't they?
A.F.: In Russia, and in Ukraine and in the former Soviet republics, yes, they were studied quite thoroughly. Unfortunately when the Iron Curtain fell, Western telecommunications companies invaded that part of the world and now everybody there is also addicted to their cell phones so although on the books they officially have greater protective measures and more stringent limits, in practice it's not very different from here. And the average public doesn't know it any more.
T.E.: Aha.
A.F.: Although they are still teaching the effects, the biological effects of radio frequency radiation in medical schools. In Russia at least.
T.E.: So maybe we could begin by talking about the electrical nature of life and how the brain and the heart and our nervous systems are essentially like finely tuned electrical systems.
A.F.: Ah yes, they are. And we are kind of schizophrenic about that. In science, in medicine - I went to medical school for three years and we use electricity incredibly much in diagnosis and often in treatment of various diseases: electrocardiograms, electroencephalograms, electromyelograms, X-rays, MRIs. We use it to restart the heart. There are PEMF devices, pulsed electromagnetic field devices to treat various neurological disorders, mental disorders. But we're in denial about the fact that it goes the other way, that our cells are electric, that our nervous system operates electrically. We tend to concentrate on the action potential as a signal that accompanies the movement of chemicals. The transport of sodium into our cells. The transport of potassium out of our cells. And we forget that the essential signal that begins all that is electrical. And in fact, as you know from reading Dr. Becker's book, he discovered that the cells that used to be regarded as packing material, namely the Schwann cells, the perineural cells that surround the nerve cells actually carry electric current and that our heart works electrically. That's how electrocardiograms work. If you stop the conductive pathways, your heart is going to stop. So yes, and our brain is increasingly - since the advent of cell phones particularly - our brain is increasingly being modeled as a very complex digital computer. And in fact that's probably not true. Also Becker pioneered the work to show there's a whole other aspect to our brain and our body and our organism, that is analog, and that transports real electric current, not just pulses of information, and this is consistent with what has been known for over five thousand years in China. Acupuncture is really a sophisticated electrical model of the human body, that was discovered long long ago.
T.E.: And they've thoroughly studied the way electricity flows through the body and the way our organs and our systems function in relation to the flows of energy and the blockages of energy and how to work with those things.
A.F.: Correct, and not only the flows within our body but the flows into and out of our body. They have this concept of the dan tiens in Chinese medicine and the chakras in Indian medicine and the point at the bottom of your feet, kidney 1 in acupuncture, is called "bubbling springs". Why? Because that's where the energy or electricity, as is being studied by many people in China, to be equivalent, bubbles up from the earth into your feet, and the point on the top of your head is where it bubbles down, so to speak, from the sky. It's a continuous circuit between the sky through our bodies for acupuncture meridians down into the earth.
T.E.: Right, and the Chinese, they talk about it as between heaven and earth. And the earth is electrical and our atmosphere is electrical as well and there's a dynamic relationship between the two.
A.F.: Correct, yes, so we live in what's known to atmospheric physicists as the global electrical circuit. The upper atmosphere and the ionosphere are largely charged ions, electrons, protons, charged oxygen atoms. And electricity travels with great facility through the ionosphere, and everybody knows that lightning is an electrical phenomenon. What people do not so much know is that the earth is also a good conductor and conducts electricity. Our electrical utilities use that to good advantage because a lot of the return current from your house back to the power plant actually travels through the earth. This is why houses and appliances are grounded because the earth is a good conductor and the part of the circuit that is remaining closes the circuits through the drift of atmospheric ions between earth and sky. And they go through our bodies and this is the part of the electric circuit that we actually live and breathe and stand and work in. An electrical field of about 130 volts per metre. This is what travels from sky to earth via atmospheric ions to the top of our heads through our acupuncture meridians and down into the earth.
T.E.: And all life exists in a very similar way, from animals and insects to plant life as well.
A.F.: Everything is completely dependent on it.
T.E.: And affected by everything that is in the atmosphere electrically.
A.F.: This is what's very important and this is why I wrote my book. This is what our society is in denial about. And has been in denial for a very long time. Resulting in the fact that we are broadcasting electricity now freely through the air without a thought as to what it's doing to us and what it's doing to our environment. And I'm talking specifically now about wireless technology, cell phones and the like.
T.E.: And throughout this book of yours you share documented research and studies that demonstrate the actual effects of various forms of electrical technology on our physical health. And before we get into that stuff I thought we could maybe explain the difference between some of these different technologies, how they are related in the electromagnetic frequency spectrum.
A.F.: Are you talking historically or what exists today? This is all of a piece but my book starts back in the 1700s.
T.E.: Well let's explore some of the history of it.
A.F.: Electricity was originally thought of as a property of life. Back as far as Isaac Newton. And it was used originally in medicine for almost two centuries before we started using it intensively for lighting our houses and powering our machines. It was used as a panacea to treat many forms of diseases: deafness, blindness, paralysis, arthritis - you name it. People tried to cure it with electricity. That was called electrotherapy. And with success, in many cases. In the year 1800 an Italian physicist named Alessandro Volta came along and invented the electric battery. And he made a momentous pronouncement: that electricity in fact doesn't have anything to do with biology. And there was a heated debate between him and his countryman Galvani as to who was correct: was electricity simply an aspect of life that we have figured out how to make use of? Or was it irrelevant and extraneous to life? And the view that it was extraneous to life won out, and we began to use electricity for things like electric lights. Telegraph wires came first actually. In the beginning all we had was direct current, at first from friction machines producing static electricity, and then the electric battery was discovered and it was still direct current. It only flowed in one direction from the positive to the negative pole. When alternating current was eventually discovered so you have electrons oscillating in a wire back and forth many times a second, what we have in our house wires nowadays here in the U.S. and in Canada: it vibrates back and forth sixty times a second, it's called 60 Hertz or 60 cycle electricity. In Europe it's 50 cycle. Then you can oscillate that much faster and the other aspect of this is that each time the direction changes it creates a changing electromagnetic field. Every time you have electricity passing through a wire, even direct current, around the wire you have an electromagnetic field and it decreases rapidly with distance but it goes out into the universe pretty much forever. A changing electromagnetic field produces a wave of changes that also travels out into the universe and that travelling change in the electromagnetic field is called electromagnetic radiation. So when you have electricity going through a wire it creates an electromagnetic field around the wire. When the electricity changes, for example when it goes back and forth, alternating current, changes direction, the changes in the field radiate through space forever, and it's called electromagnetic radiation. It basically is a signal telling every other wire in space, every other electron in space: "move in this direction". When it hits an electron - it can be miles away - the electron that gets hit by that wave starts to move. So a changing electromagnetic field produces electromagnetic radiation. When that radiation hits a wire someplace else it induces an electric current in that wire. If it hits your body it induces an electric current in the wires in your body. What are the wires in your body? They're your nerves. They're your blood vessels. They're your acupuncture meridians. So every time you get hit by either natural or artificial electromagnetic radiation it induces electric currents to flow in your body. And the problem is that alternating current basically doesn't exist in nature. To some degree it does. When lightning strikes it produces very low frequency vibrations. The earth's magnetic field is direct current. For most of what we live in, except for very low frequency waves from lightning, is direct current. We've introduced alternating current much more powerful than any natural fields that we evolved with. And we've increased the frequency way beyond anything that we've evolved with, so when we get hit with radio waves from radio stations, and they're tiny tiny very very high frequency radio waves from cell phones and cell towers, this also induces electric currents in any wire and in all the wires in our body, which we did not evolve with and which interfere with the natural electric currents that flow through our bodies, that are not used to those kinds of frequencies, not used to those kinds of power levels, and our bodies are the equivalent of very complex electronic machinery that are getting interfered with.
T.E.: And electrical engineers understand how various more sensitive electronic equipment can be disrupted and even destroyed...
A.F.: It's called radio frequency interference and they have to harden all the equipment so that all this stuff that's flying around doesn't interfere with each other. But they forget that we are also....
T.E.: Right, that's the point.
A.F.: very delicate electronic machines and we also have to be taken care of so that all this stuff flying around doesn't interfere with us.
T.E.: Right.
A.F.: It's producing a soup out there of what you could call dirty electricity. We have this concept of dirty electricity in wiring, which you can easily detect with an A.M. radio if you have a hand-held battery-operated analog , not digital, A.M. radio and you tune it to the beginning of the dial where there's no station, and you turn it on, if there was no dirty electricity around you, you would hear a gentle hiss. But if you bring it next to your wall where there's a wire going through or next to an electric light switch or next to an outlet, in most people's houses nowadays, the radio will buzz and scream and produce all kinds of wild noises. That's called dirty electricity because all these electronic devices are plugged into our walls and they're producing high-frequency alternating current to various weird kind of stuff and it's going into our house wiring and it's radiating at us and this is making us sick. And this has been called dirty electricity. Dr. Samuel Milham wrote a book called "Dirty Electricity" in 2011. It's the basis for some of my research as well.
T.E.: Out of curiosity, is there any such thing as "clean electricity" that isn't harmful? That's man-made?
A.F.: That's a good question. To some degree all man-made electricity is harmful. And that has been the case since we started using static electricity as you saw in the beginning of my book. That there was harm. To some degree that can be cleaned up. There are engineering solutions. The electromagnetic field around a wire is an unintentional field. You can shield it. You can twist wires and you can bury them. You can configure them so that you can minimize the electromagnetic field coming out of it. As soon as you start putting alternating current through it, the shielding problem becomes more difficult, but not impossible. The difference between all of that and wireless technology is that suddenly we're broadcasting it deliberately over every square inch of the earth. And that is dangerous and that cannot be fixed.
T.E.: Right. It's not contained.
A.F.: That's right. It's no longer contained.
T.E.: So, using the analogy of a fire, contained within the fireplace, it's very useful , but if it gets out it can destroy everything.
A.F.: Well, we make the analogy to a microwave oven. As long as the microwave oven is shielded and the door is shut, it's useful. You can put food in it. It'll cook it. You don't want the door open while you're cooking your food, because then it'll cook you. What a cell phone is, is a small microwave oven with the door open. It's an uncontained source of microwave radiation that you're putting next to your head.
T.E.: Hmm. So let's get into the effects and let's start by talking about the historical connections between the rollout of each new level of electrical technology and the illnesses that erupted at the same time.
A.F.: OK. The first technology that was actually harnessed for uses outside of medicine was telegraphy. Telegraph wires. And it was harnessed very quickly and in a very big way with millions of miles of telegraph wires strung around the Earth. Starting in the 1840s, 1850s, 60s, 70s. Submarine cables were laid. It went world-wide. And a new disease started to be reported in the medical literature, that they called "neurasthenia". Now we call that nowadays "anxiety disorder". But from the time it was first described, which was in the 1860s, until about the turn of the 20th century, it was considered a physical disease not a psychological disease as we think of it today. And they searched and searched and searched and searched for a cause. And it affected enormous numbers of people, throughout the Western world, and it seems to follow the courses of the telegraph wires. Whenever telegraph wires were laid, all of a sudden in that part of the world people would come down with neurasthenia. I make the case that this was due to exposure to electromagnetic fields. In 1889 alternating current essentially was harnessed. It was invented by Nicola Tesla and his patents were adopted by Westinghouse and all of a sudden we could transmit electricity long distances with little loss of power. And this was harnessed extremely rapidly. So rapidly that we went from virtually zero use of alternating current to intense use of alternating current in one year, and the year was 1889. 1889 was the year of the first great modern influenza epidemic. And this went world-wide, and it lasted four years and it killed a couple of million people. Not as intense as the 1918 epidemic. We fast forward to 1918, when the United States entered World War I and Marconi had shown the world that you could make use of radio waves and demonstrated one of the first transmissions of it twenty years before but when the United States entered World War I we made intensive use of radio technology for the first time as part of our war effort. And after World War I is when the development of commercial radio began. I make the case in the book that the Spanish influenza epidemic was caused by the sudden change in the Earth's electromagnetic environment by the world-wide use of radio for the first time. And the next big....
T.E.: Before we get to that, how close were they related time-wise? The Spanish influenza epidemic and the implementing of radio technology?
A.F.: Extremely close. The Spanish influenza began in American bases in this country (the U.S.A.), where soldiers were trained in the use of radio waves. And the installation of the most powerful alternator , a 50,000 watt alternator in New Jersey by the United States for use in communicating overseas occurred in September of 2018, which is exactly when the Spanish influenza epidemic became so deadly.
T.E.: O.K. I just wanted to clarify that.
A.F.: Yes.
T.E.: Continue with the historical progression.
A.F.: 1957 and 58 was the erection of incredibly powerful civil defense radar stations, again by the United States, from coast to coast and throughout Canada and Alaska, and into the oceans and on airplanes. And that also coincided with the next epidemic of influenza. In 1968 was the first launch of military satellites. In fact pretty much the first launch of , satellites, period. There was Sputnik, there were a few isolated satellites. In 1968 in one fell swoop we doubled the number of satellites in the sky and that coincided with the Hong Kong flu of 1968. Now, people will be resistant to the idea that influenza is not an infectious disease. This is why I spent two whole chapters on it in my book. Even back in the deadliest epidemic practically that has ever occurred in history, which is the 1918 Spanish influenza, there were heroic efforts to try to demonstrate the infectious nature of this disease. Doctors in various universities recruited hundreds of healthy people and brought them to the bedside of the sickest influenza patients and tried to infect them, tried to infect them by collecting secretions and mucus, throat swabbings from very sick people and had healthy people swallow it. Put it in their eyes, put it up their nose, inject people with sick people's blood. They were totally unable to infect a single healthy person with influenza from sick people during the deadliest epidemic this world has ever known. The same thing was tried in horses. Influenza affects horses so they tried to infect healthy horses with the secretions from sick horses. Also failed. So it's fascinating, some of the old scientific reports make entertaining reading, shall I say. But the existence of an influenza virus is well-established, but the relationship between the virus and the disease is actually in question. And the relationship between influenza and electricity is very strong.
T.E.: Hm.
A.F.: And that brings us up to today. Then there's the wireless revolution,
T.E.: Right, right.
A.F.: which is really the impetus for writing my book because I'm the President of the Cellular Phone Taskforce. We were formed in 1996 when digital or cell phone technology came to the United States. And the impetus for my helping to start this is my own injury via electromagnetic energy back when I was in medical school, which was what prevented me from finishing my fourth year. So I already was studying this since the year 1980 and I lived in New York City and I had a support group, namely of other people who were injured either by chemicals or electricity and when we saw what was coming, namely the wireless revolution, something had to be done about it, so I started this organization. And I learned pretty quickly - Number One: people didn't want to hear about it. Number Two: politicians didn't want to hear about it. Number Three: judges didn't want to hear about it. The FCC didn't want to hear about it. In other words political action on this particular environmental issue was not going to get us very far by itself. And I quickly realized that the public needed to be educated.
T.E.: Well, you wrote that Congress passed a law in 1996 that made it illegal to regulate wireless technology on the basis of health.
A.F.: That is amazing and that is correct. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 actually says that states and cities may not regulate wireless technology on the basis of health, that this is completely up to the FCC, and if the FCC permits it, it has to be permitted by your city and your state.
T.E.: So why would Congress do that? Why would politicians get onboard with such a ludicrous notion?
A.F.: Well actually it almost wasn't that way. This was due to the machinations of the telecommunications industry. In 1995 the Environmental Protection Agency drafted its own regulations which would have been mandatory throughout the United States and would not have pre-empted anybody from regulating this. And they were set to release them. The Telecommunications Industry Association - I think it was actually the PCIA, the Personal Communications Industry Association - lobbied Congress to prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating wireless technology, took away all of their funding for their regulatory activity and awarded exclusive authority over health to the Federal Communications Commission, which has no expertise whatsoever in health and safety. And the Telecommunications Act of 1996 originally did not have that provision in it but it went into committee - I think it was the House Commerce Committee - back in June or July of 1995 and when it came out of committee it had this little sentence in there: no state or local government or instrumentality thereof may regulate the environmental effects of radio frequency radiation to the effect that it complies with the Federal Communications Commission's regulation. And it doesn't even say "health". It says "environmental effects", so I seriously doubt that any of the Congressmen who voted on this bill knew that they were prohibiting states and cities from protecting the health of their citizens. But it passed, and President Clinton signed it and this has been a stumbling block for people all over the country since 1996, not only from stopping cell towers from appearing everywhere but even from going to their city councils and talking about health. Because if you talk about health, the next sentence of the Telecommunications Act says that the telecommunication company can sue the city. So everybody has been silenced. Scientists have been silenced. There have been thousands of studies saying this stuff is harmful. But even if you're a scientist you can't go to your city council and say "Hey, this is harmful, don't put it up." You can't even talk about it.
T.E.: So is there much hope for changing that legislation?
A.F.: Well, I think not until the public is educated. I think judges will not stick their necks out at this point. Everybody is on their cell phone. Everybody is addicted to the technology. This is a multi-trillion dollar industry. It's probably the wealthiest industry in the world. No judge is going to stand up against this industry until the public is on their side. No legislator is going to stand up to the industry until the public is on their side. It all has to happen together.
T.E.: So the public has to demand it.
A.F.: Correct. The public not only has to demand it but the public has to realize what they're doing to themselves. The public has to realize, and I have a chapter on cancer. I have a chapter on diabetes. I have a chapter on heart disease. The public has to wake up to the fact that most of the cancer, diabetes and heart disease that we have in our world is being caused by wireless technology and specifically by your cell phone.
T.E.: OK. That was where I wanted to go next. And the mechanism, or how this electrical technology causes these diseases.
A.F.: OK. First is the fact that it does. And this was discovered by - as I mentioned him before - Dr. Samuel Milham, retired from the Washington state Department of Health. He wrote his little booklet called "Dirty Electricity" back in 2011 and these amazing charts were in his book from the 1930s and 1940s when President Roosevelt's rural electrification program was going. So, there were charts from 1930, there were charts from 1940 that as soon as a state was electrified the rate of rural cancer, diabetes and heart disease quintupled. All of a sudden the areas that had been electrified had five times as much of these diseases as areas that were not electrified. This was shocking and also people didn't want to hear it. I took his work back to about the year 1800 and I found not only that what he said was true but it has been true for a long long time, that before we encircled the Earth with millions of miles of telegraph wires there was basically no such thing as diabetes. There was an extremely rare disease. If you were a doctor you were lucky if you saw two cases in your whole lifetime. Even doctors who wrote books about it didn't see more than two cases in their lifetime. One or two cases. Cancer was a very uncommon disease. Heart disease did not exist except in old people and in infants, because of congenital disorders. This was true up till about the 1850s. In the 1850s and 1860s all of a sudden wherever electricity came you started to see a rise in these three diseases specifically. And this has continued up till today and I have correlated it with each advance in electrical technology. And the explanation has to do with what goes on in our cells, and in fact in the powerhouses of our cells, where we metabolize our food. That's called mitochondria. The last step in metabolism is the electron transport system in the mitochondria, where the electrons from our food get combined with the oxygen that we breathe and we essentially burn our food and produce energy. Electron transport is subject to interference by electromagnetic fields.
T.E.: Which sounds very obvious.
A.F.: Yes. And what happens when you interfere with electron transport? You can no longer efficiently metabolize sugars, so they back up into your bloodstream and you get diabetes. What happens when you can no longer efficiently metabolize fats? That backs up into your bloodstream and fats get the positive into arteries and you get heart disease. The flipside of it is you're not making good use of the oxygen that you breathe, so all your cells are to some degree oxygen-starved. And cancer thrives in an anaerobic environment, an anaerobic metabolism. In fact, how cancer is usually diagnosed nowadays is because cancer cells use enormous amounts of glucose in anaerobic glycolysis. That's how cancer is diagnosed. You take a picture of the body and the areas that show up as having high radio-labeled glucose are the areas where you look for cancer. So those three diseases are going to be increased if you interfere with electron transport and that's exactly what is happening.
T.E.: And reading your book everything you present makes a very very convincing argument for this.
A.F.: And I didn't make this up. I'm very good at piecing together pieces of a puzzle. I'm very good at seeing the overall picture. All my sources for historical are original sources. All my sources for the science - I didn't invent this either. Dr. Martin Blank and Reba Goodman at Columbia University until they retired were talking about the interference of electron transport by electromagnetic fields. And there are others. Everything in my book is documented in detail in the bibliography. The bibliography is almost 140 pages long. Because I knew that everything that I'm saying was going to be controversial and it needed to be thoroughly documented, and it is.
T.E.: So maybe we could get into some of the studies of the effects on animals and insects, birds and bee-colony collapse is a huge issue these days.
A.F.: Yes. The bees is one of the most interesting parts of this. There is a lot of evidence nowadays that colony collapse syndrome in honeybees is due to electromagnetic pollution, largely from cell towers. And there is anecdotal evidence all over the world that bees tend to disappear in the vicinity of cell towers. There has been work explaining this, but let me go back again to the history, that the first instance of reporting of something like this occurred on the Isle of Wight
T.E. : Yes.
A.F.: Off of England, where Marconi built his first radio station. And immediately, back in 1904, the bees started to disappear from that island and it was called "Isle of Wight disease," and I go into the history of that also, because colony collapse disorder did not emerge from nothing. It had a whole history going back to 1904. Except it's gotten a lot worse, and dramatically so, in modern times, again coinciding with cell phone technology. The most dramatic experiment was done, I believe, in Switzerland, by Daniel Favre. I may be getting him mixed up with somebody else but there was a dramatic experiment where they exposed honeybees to an actual cell phone, and then at short intervals took samples of the bees' hemolymph, which is the bees' version of blood. And within ten minutes after the exposure to a cell phone the bees were practically not metabolizing their food. Sugar levels rose to very high levels in their blood. The fat levels rose to very high levels in their blood. The protein levels, the amino acid levels rose to very high levels in their blood. They ceased metabolism and all it took was ten minutes. And their metabolism is very much faster than ours is so which shows up first? But it's spectacular. You asked about birds. There have been surveys of birds. I highlight Alfonso Balmori's studies in Chapter 16 because he specifically took surveys of all the different birds in Vallodolid Spain where he lives and works. He's a wildlife biologist. And he showed how all the different species were very much more common in areas where there are no cell towers. And they became less and less common the closer you got to cell towers. And he observed their behaviour and described their behaviour. He observed storks and sparrows. He did experiments with amphibians, raising them in tanks, shielded and non-shielded. Also very dramatic: the shielded tanks of tadpoles that he raised. They were both on a balcony of a building. The fourth storey of a building that was two hundred metres away from a cell tower. The shielded tadpoles all lived. The unshielded tadpoles practically all died. It was very dramatic, and so it makes you ask the question: why are so many species of amphibians disappearing from remote wilderness? It probably has very much to do with: we don't treat radio stations, and radar, and cell towers, which we put in remote wilderness, as environmental assaults . And they are.
T.E.: And they affect plants as well. There are studies of how forests were affected by radar stations.
A.F.: Especially in the Cold War. Yes, this was documented in Germany, near the border between East and West Germany, where there was lots of radar aimed at that border, and they had the term Waldsterben (forest death), and it specifically happened in areas that were highly irradiated.
T.E.: So there is an interesting paradox of the people who are most affected by this technology, whose health is affected the most. You'd think it was the young and the infirm who would be most affected, but studies show that it's actually the healthiest members of the population and the people in the age between 15 and 30 who are most susceptible to particularly the influenza outbreaks.
A.F.: Yes, this was a peculiar aspect of influenza, and still is a peculiar aspect of influenza, although nowadays we hear advertisements telling old people and infants to get vaccinated. But in fact influenza more often makes you sick if you are between the ages of twenty and about fifty. And the stronger you are and the healthier you are the more likely you are to get influenza, and this was very dramatic in the 1918 flu epidemic. So much so that doctors started to worry that their advice to their patients to stay healthy and to be fit and strong was actually killing them, because it was the strongest and healthiest people that were getting influenza, and dying of it.
T.E.: Is there any logic to why it happens that way?
A.F.: Well they never figured it out. And people who have specialized in influenza since then have not figured out why. My theory is that it is the strongest and ...... and it hit pregnant women very hard too. Those of us who are most vital. In other words people in their young years, people who get pregnant, people who are very much connected to the world, are also very much more connected to our electrical environment. We have much more chi flowing through us. Or acupuncture meridians. This is vitality that we get from the world. When the global electrical circuit becomes polluted, essentially with dirty electricity, just like when we plug our electronic devices and computers into the wall we pollute our wiring with dirty electricity. We're actually polluting our bodies with dirty electricity when we throw this stuff out into the world. And those of us who are most connected to our environment are most susceptible to being disturbed by it.
T.E.: Uh-huh. And then there are the people who are saying "We're living longer than ever before, so what's all this uproar about illness and disease?
A.F.: I also have a chapter about that. Chapter 14 in "The Invisible Rainbow" is about exactly that: that a metabolism is being disturbed. And when you slow down your metabolism it's like putting us into a mild state of suspended animation and of course if your metabolism slows down you are going to live longer. And it's very interesting: the most reliable way to extend an animal's life in the laboratory is to restrict its intake of food. This is called in longevity research calorie restriction. That if you restrict an animal's intake of food throughout its life it will live longer, and it will live much longer. You can double a mouse's life simply by cutting its food intake in half throughout its life. It slows down its metabolism. But that's a healthy way of slowing down the metabolism. When you cut down your intake of food your rate of metabolism decreases. Your rate of disease also decreases. It turns out that when you irradiate an animal this can be non-ionizing radiation. The experiments bear this out too. We have research that they expose rats to radio waves throughout their life. And we have research where they expose animals - various types of animals - to ionizing radiation, atomic radiation, x-rays, gamma rays, for their whole lives - that if the dose is small enough it won't kill them but it will make them sick but they'll live longer, that animals that are exposed to gamma rays at low doses get lots of cancers but on average they live longer than the unexposed animals. And the same thing with radio waves, that if you expose animals to radio waves throughout their lives, like laboratory rats, they get more cancers but on average they live longer T.E.: So if they're not killed.
A.F.: If they don't die of their disease they live longer.
T.E.: Uh-huh.
A.F.: So you can restrict your metabolism in one way and have you become healthier or you can restrict your metabolism in another way and live a sicker longer life and that's exactly what we're doing now. In our world in the 21st century we're living sicker longer lives and the length of our lives is not primarily - it is to some extent but it is not entirely - due to modern medicine. Some of it is due to all this electrosmog that we are living in.
T.E.: And with the proliferation of cell phone technology and also wireless internet broadband and satellites as well as cell phone towers and microwave towers in the book you say that we're on the verge of a whole new generation and wave of an increase of all of that.
A.F.: We are. And it's been in the news lately. It's called 5G. And it's being planned both on earth and in space. On earth the telecom companies are gearing up for this new thing that they're calling the internet of things that's going to be served by a kind of service that they're calling 5G wireless technology. And it's going to be totally different than the kind of cell phones and internet connections that we have now. It's actually going to be phased arrays, which is not in my book because when I wrote my book this was not on the drawing board yet. But it's going to require small cell towers. Antennas on existing utility poles is how they are going to do it. On every block in every city in the world, spaced about 200 to 300 feet apart. Throughout the world they're going to use millimetre waves, each cell site is going to have thousands of tiny antennas and it's focusing beams at your cell phone, at your wireless hub in your house. The intensity of radiation that we will be hit with will increase astronomically. The second thing that's on the drawing board is doing this with satellites in space, and only recently Elon Musk of SpaceX just last week, he got permission from the FCC to launch his first 4,425 satellites into space. That's already been granted. Eventually SpaceX's plans are for 12,000 satellites completely blanketing the Earth with phased-arrayed antennas, super-high-speed internet from only 200 miles in altitude. They're going to irradiate every square inch of the Earth. There is going to be no place remote enough where you're not being irradiated. The fact that these are still hundreds of miles above our heads is not reassuring in the light of what has happened historically, that every time we have dramatically changed the properties of the Earth's electromagnetic field, which is called the magnetosphere, it has had dramatic effects on health down here on earth. And so we're sounding the alarm. There is a new organization, relatively new - it was founded three years ago, called GUARDS. It's the Global Union against Radiation Deployment from Space. And GUARDS has a website: stopglobalwifi.org. My website is cellphonetaskforce.org. That's where my book is for sale also. My book "The Invisible Rainbow" is only for sale on our website, cellphonetaskforce.org. It's not available from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
T.E.: OK. So I'm curious. Do we adapt to these technologies being in the environment?
A.F.: To some degree we've had to adapt. If we hadn't adapted we wouldn't be here. To some degree animals adapt. And that has been shown historically, for example, with homing pigeons. During the 1930s and 40s, with the proliferation of radio stations all over the planet, people who possessed homing pigeons, and the military, that used them for communications, they didn't start to get lost all over the place and lose their orientation. And they've adapted to some degree. But we're not adapting any more. Yes, to some degree we're functioning, but we're getting more cancers, we're getting more heart disease, we're getting more diabetes. We have more refugees from this technology. You talk to the people who are affected. These are people who are consciously affected. We've been injured. I was injured back in 1980 while I was in medical school. So I feel the stuff. I couldn't use a cell phone if you paid me a million dollars. I couldn't do it. And there are people that my organization, besides education and advocacy and some litigation, we're a support group, and we're a support group for the thousands of people who are calling me all the time and we have a board of directors scattered all over the United States that do some of the same work. These are people who've been driven out of their homes, unable to work, living in many cases in their cars in remote places until they can't any more. It's a tremendous refugee problem. It's like if you have a cell tower built near your home you get so sick that you can't live in it any more. If you live in an apartment buildings and your neighbour on the other side of your wall has a wi-fi access point, you've got to move. If the utility company comes and puts a smart meter, smart electric meter, on your house, you've got to leave. And how many people is this happening to? Tremendous numbers of people. There have been surveys done, not only by individual scientists but by universities, by governments, establishing that from three to five to maybe more percent - the number is increasing - of the population of any given area in the world will tell an interviewer "I'm sensitive to electromagnetic fields. I can't be around power lines. I can't be around wireless technology." Now if you extrapolate that to the whole world and you make adjustments for the fact that maybe half the world doesn't even have access to internet yet, as a conservative number, still 100 million people out there have had their lives disrupted by electromagnetic radiation. Out of those, and I'm talking from personal experience, from the thousands of people that have called me, at least one out of five, one out of four of them, have eventually been displaced from their homes. So you have conservatively a population of twenty million refugees in the world. It's a terrible thing and this is also why I'm doing this work.
T.E.: So from this problem there's a whole new cottage industry of mitigating technologies to help people.
A.F.: There is.
T.E.: Are there any effective mitigating technologies available that can help people?
A.F.: Well, the International Institute of Building Biology and Ecology teaches courses and certifies practitioners both to diagnose and mitigate chemical contamination and electromagnetic contamination of homes. There's nothing they can do about infrastructures, cell towers, radio towers, stuff like that. But they can go into your home and they can take measurements. I myself have a large box of equipment. I can do this. I'm not trained but..... I'm self-trained. But you can go to their website. What is it? hbelc.org Approximately like that. It's the Institute of Building Biology and Ecology. And you can find a list of practitioners in your area. And this is how they make a living and it's another indication of how large this population is that they serve. As far as: is there anything effective? There are ways that you can shield yourself. There is also an industry manufacturing shielding fabric - shielding curtains, shielding canopies to sleep under, paints that you can buy in various stores that are impregnated with silver particles so you can paint your house with the shielding material, plastic that is impregnated with metallic elements that can shield your windows. You can actually shield your whole house, you can build a house out of metal. You can do this. It's not healthy. It works to a degree. Why is it not healthy? You're cutting yourself off from the earth's electromagnetic field. It's not a healthy thing to do in the long term. But it's an emergency measure and because there's nothing else you can do in this world, lots and lots of people are doing it, until they can't any more. And then they move out into their cars. And then they call me: "Help. Where can I go? What can I do?" And some of them don't survive. Some of them commit suicide. It's an enormous problem. There's not a real good answer. A lot of companies are selling the snake oil devices: little discs you can put on your cell phone that are supposed to normalize the radiation and things you can plug into your wall, pendants you can wear and all this kind of.... none of them work and many of them are harmful. A lot of them put out what they call a Schumann Resonance Field of 8 Hertz which is supposed to duplicate the resonance frequency of the earth. It's just more radiation. It's harmful. It doesn't work.
T.E.: So then there's really not much hope for....
A.F.: The hope is we've got to stop it.
T.E.: Right.
A.F.: This is a threat.
T.E.: This is political activism.
A.F.: It's political activism. It's a planetary emergency. It's a threat to life on this earth. In my opinion it's a more immediate threat than global warming. Because global warming is going to kill us eventually if they don't do something about it. This is going to kill us in a couple of years if we permit 5G to come from space.
T.E.: And there's no way to really effectively and healthfully stop it or block it.
A.F.: Go live underground. We shouldn't have to live this way. And most people are oblivious. And that's why I'm on the radio and that's why I'm consenting to give interviews. That's why I wrote my book. That's why I helped to organize GUARDS and founded the Cellular Phone Task Force in 1996. It has to be done. It has to be stopped.
T.E.: So how can people get involved in this? How can people do something to make the most of their energy and activism?
A.F.: Contact me via my organization's website. It's www.cellphonetaskforce.org. Contact GUARDS, which is stopglobalwifi.org And get involved with us. We're very few people. When I say "very few", yes, we're spread all over the globe. Yes, there are scientists butting their heads against the wall just like us activists are butting our heads against the wall. There was an international scientists' appeal for a 5G moratorium that has been submitted to the European Union. They are also not getting heard. What, 236 scientists signed that so far. It's a drop in the bucket. We need more people. We need more awareness. We need people to realize that when they pick up their cell phone and make a call, they're hurting themselves. They're destroying brain cells. They're hurting their health. It's interfering with their sleep. This is why so many people need sleeping medications and anti-anxiety and anti-depressants. First thing is awareness. Second thing get rid of your cell phone. Third thing, call us up. Contact me. Contact GUARDS. Buy my book. It's "The Invisible Rainbow. A history of electricity and life." It's for sale on my organization's website, on a few other websites but yes go to www.cellphonetaskforce.org and you can buy my book there.
T.E.: Well, this is a very disturbing and harrowing issue.
A.F.: If we get rid of wireless technology, remember how the world used to be in 1995. And I'll leave your audience with that. It's like: we can be so much more alive. Our bodies can be so much more healthy. This is how long we've had cell phones. Most of us.
T.E.: OK, so you're talking about: we can stop using cell phones. We can at least get that level of relief.
A.F.: Not just stop using them. You have to throw it away. Because as long as you have it you are perpetuating the infrastructure.
T.E.: Right, right.
A.F.: You're paying for your cell phone. The telecommunications company is required by law to serve you. That means all these cell towers. That means 5G. That means all these satellites.
T.E.: Yep. And this is the largest industry on the planet at this point.
A.F.: It's the largest industry on the planet and it's the largest cause of disease. And people counter with: "Ah, we're not going to get rid of cell phones. That's not going to happen. And I have to tell them "Well, do you want the world to continue? Do you want to put an end to life? How much do you value life on Earth? You have to make a choice.
T.E.: Yes. That clarifies the issue very well. And that's a great note to end on. Thank you so much for all your work and for your time today
A.F.: Thank you Tonio.
T.E.: It's been a very interesting conversation and it's a fascinating book.
A.F.: I expect it to be reviewed in an environmental history journal shortly.
T.E.: And that was Arthur Firstenberg. He has been hailed as the Rachel Carson of the 21st century. After graduating from Cornell University with a degree in mathematics he attended the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine when an X-ray overdose cut short his medical career. For the past 35 years he has been a researcher, consultant and lecturer on the health and environmental effects of electromagnetic radiation.
Arthur Firstenberg: "The Hidden Dangers of Wireless & Cell Phone Radiation". Radio interview broadcast by WGDR, Goddard College Community Radio, Plainfield, United States, on April 6 2018.