A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

Ken Foster: Microwave News Article Archive (2004 - )

June 12, 2023

Unremarkable science can sometimes tell a remarkable story. Two papers that were published in the last few weeks —and passed mostly unnoticed— have important, though very different, backstories.

One offers a surprising glimpse of change in the usually static field of RF research, while the other shows how much has stayed the same over the last many years.

Yet, in the end, they offer the same well-worn message, always worth repeating: Those who sign the checks, run the show.

The two papers come 30 years after Henry Lai and N.P. Singh began an experiment at the University of Washington in Seattle that would set off alarm bells across the still-young cell phone industry —and the U.S. military. Lai and Singh would show that a single, two-hour exposure to low-level microwave radiation (today, we’d say RF) could lead to breaks in the helical strands of DNA in the brains of live rats.

November 29, 2021

The Bioelectromagnetics Society (BEMS) and the European BioElectromagnetics Association (EBEA), the two leading research groups in Western countries, will soon join together and become BioEM. Like its predecessors, the new society will be a forum on the interactions of all types of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields and radiation with living organisms. BioEM will be based in Zurich, Switzerland.

The move is hardly unexpected. Just the opposite. A union has been in the planning stages since at least 2016. Many favored a BEMS-EBEA consolidation even earlier, but it ran into one roadblock or another, at least partly because directors did not want to lose control.

December 5, 2020

“An Assessment of Illness in U.S. Government Employees and Their Families at Overseas Embassies,” National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Released December 5, 2020. “Overall, directed pulsed RF energy, especially in those with the distinct early manifestations, appears to be the most plausible mechanism in explaining these case.” See also this thread of nine tweets.

September 25, 2020

Very little has been written in the popular media about the waveforms used in 5G signals. Two outstanding questions are: How fast are the pulses? How powerful are they?

In 2018, Esra Neufeld and Niels Kuster of the IT’IS Foundation in Zurich issued a warning in a...

December 6, 2019

Simply saying that more health research is needed on 5G —the latest generation of cell phone technology— can be hazardous to your reputation.

Last May, the New York Times tried to take down David Carpenter, a public health physician and the country’s most prominent 5G critic. Veteran science writer William Broad painted Carpenter as a willing tool of a disinformation campaign promoted by RT America, a Russian TV network. Two months later, Broad was back for another hit on Carpenter. Much of what Broad wrote was fiction.

Now Scientific American has ambushed Joel Moskowitz, one of the few other academics willing to state the obvious: No one knows whether 5G is safe.

January 13, 2016

The NCRP was the driving force behind the removal of cautionary advice in a CDC fact sheet on cell phone use. Senior officials at the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements pressured the Centers for Disease Control into deleting the cautionary language in August 2014.

The NCRP is an influential policy-setting group, chartered by the U.S. Congress to serve the public health.

April 23, 2014

In 2011, Health Canada found itself in a tough spot. The public was becoming more and more uneasy over exposure to RF radiation from the proliferating number of cell phones, cell towers and Wi-Fi routers. After holding hearings in the spring and fall of 2010, Parliament asked the health agency to investigate whether its exposure limits —the Canadian national RF standard known as Safety Code 6 (SC6)— were too lenient and needed strengthening. Soon afterwards, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) added urgency to the assignment by classifying RF radiation as a possible human cancer agent, or, in the vernacular, a 2B carcinogen.

Health Canada’s dilemma was that it had no interest in tightening SC6. Yet IARC’s 2B designation could not be easily ignored, especially after France and Belgium, among other European countries, had responded by adopting precautionary policies. Last year, for instance, Belgium banned the sale of cell phones to children. How would Health Canada find a way to stick with the status quo?

The answer was to commission a review of SC6 by the Royal Society of Canada (RSC)

April 14, 2011

Next Sunday, the New York Times Magazine will feature a long piece titled “Do Cell Phones Cause Brain Cancer?” by Siddhartha Mukherjee (it’s already on the Times' Web site). It’s a well-written article, as might be expected by his well-received book, Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. Yet an important part of the...

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