there have been stories about what's been happening to people who work at the american embassy in moscow the stories concern radiation first it was said the russians were either bugging or jamming embassy intelligence equipment and that they were using microwaves to do that and that that was getting embassy people sick two american embassy employees in moscow may be suffering from cancer of the lymph glands and that ambassador walter stessel is suffering from pernicious anemia soviet union has admitted that some radiation exists but the government newspapers vestia dismissed it as ordinary non-dangerous electromagnetic activity possibly caused by the embassy there is no reason to believe that those microwaves have caused any illness but u. s personnel are concerned over published reports that the microwaves may have caused cancer in a few cases soviet technicians say radioactivity levels in the u. s embassy are at better than safe levels the state department is considering taking electronic eavesdropping equipment off the moscow embassy roof so the russians will stop using microwaves to try to jam it especially said reports that the radiation was caused by russian snooping devices are an invention with a foul smell tornadoes last night and today killed three persons in arkansas [Music] [Music] [Music] i'm holding here a measuring instrument and from the readings we can say that the microwave radiation in this room is i would say in biblical proportions or astronomical proportions it's approximately 1 million billion times above natural background which we had just 50 or 100 years ago so the radiation levels nowadays are enormously high compared to what cells have been developed in they are not part of the normal universe that is a completely new type of radiation [Music] the beginning of the 1980s very few were electrosensitive but today it's well over 10 i think and the trend is pointing at close to 50 percent will have one or the other type of sensibility within the next five ten years [Music] how how independent are the international organizations that are supposed to protect us foreign [Music] i don't like to go into town anymore because the radiation levels are so high now so you feel it you feel symptoms i think most people who become aware of what this radiation might cause feel the radiation quite quickly now i'm a swedish investigating journalist i've written two books on the issue of mobile phone health risks my work in this issue started in 2002 in connection with the massive rollout of 3g in sweden quite immediately discovered that the information from the industry and the authorities was not true in fact there were already then a lot of scientific studies showing that this radiation could be a major health risk the reason i wanted to investigate the health effects of electromagnetic fields actually go back to the 1970s and 80s and at that time in sweden there was an introduction on personal computers and very soon people started to report skin problems i still continue trying to investigate the health effects of various forms of man-made electromagnetic fields for instance heart rate variability when you expose people to the microwaves what happens then with the heart rate also we had studies on the red blood cells and the formations of clumps in the blood and also to investigate the functional impairment called electro hypersensitivity every human being is electro sensitive but the question is will there also be people that are electro hypersensitive meaning that they will pick up fields signals whatever that the rest of us doesn't feel and in that way they will act like the classical canary bird in the coal mine they will react as biological sensors to something the rest of the population so far doesn't react to [Music] [Music] foreign m [Music] [Music] everyone nowadays in all countries all over the world are 24 7 whole body irradiated wherever they are so in that sense the whole biotope everything living on the planet is at jeopardy they were not developed in an evolution based on microwaves the natural levels of microwave radiation here on this planet are extremely low and suddenly we turn a knob and start to send out and all these signals hit your body go through your body and the question is is it built for it and of course it's not these electromagnetic fields and waves and signals they carry energy and it's like pouring energy into any kind of biological system you will have alterations changes and of course cell growth for instance and cell growth is the same as cancer [Music] scientists has also shown that for instance microwaves can destroy the bonds in the dna molecule which is the basis of your genetic material and such damages could be the starting point for instance for cancer development so it's very serious data [Music] [Music] [Music] unfortunately for the radio frequency fields and for the mobile phones we are in a situation of scientific uncertainty i'm convinced we need more research at the moment because everybody is there's a mobile phone users it's children using it it's elderly using it sick people using it so we have to be certain and this this demands more investigations international agency for research on cancer is a research institution so we are doing research and trying to identify the causes of cancer the world health organization is responsible for for policy so they are setting our evidence that we find what causes cancer and what doesn't cause cancer into recommendations for prevention the international commission on non-ionizing radiation protection this is an independent panel that makes recommendations on protection guidelines for electromagnetic fields but they are independent of both ioc and also who [Music] igner is a international commission of the experts on this kind of radiation and ignip has a huge power in this issue because igni has recommended the limits that most countries at least in europe have adopted and as pointed out by themselves they are only technical they were never meant to be used as any kind of medical safety or biological safety it's just a technical measure but governments and parliaments and so on have used them as a safety guideline and they are definitely not and those limits are based on an old paradigm from the american military in the 50s that considered that the only effects from this radiation is are thermal when the radiation is so high that it can heat tissue established actually i started training in 1960 at the royal navy's microwave training school and it was my specialism throughout the royal navy was looking at all aspects of microwave warfare by the 60s it was mostly understood some of the experiments done during the cold war that the scientists found that they could cause severe psychiatric problems by changing the pulse frequency imagine you are jumping on a trampoline at your own bounce level and imagine i weigh 56 stone and i jump on the trampoline and bounce at my rhythm you will be forced to bounce at my rhythm that is called entrainment and that is what goes on when microwaves go into your brain they change your own brain waves because they are bigger and heavier now depending on the pulse frequency and the power can affect the heart pulse rate how the eye sees how you hear bad behavior it can stop their ability to learn how your brain will operate all of these can be done and they can fall doctors with that microwaves played a very big part in getting information during the cold war it was reported today that the state department has sent a doctor to the u.
s embassy in moscow to see if russian radioactive waves have caused three people to fall well if you beat microwaves at the window my talking vibrates the glass and the microwaves rebound back and if you pick those up you can understand what is being said so the russians microwaved the american embassy to see what secrets they were talking about but at the same time as the microwaves were reflecting so the russians could hear they were also going through and within 18 months they found that the children had leukemia the women had breast cancers some of the men had cancers and virtually the whole staff had to be changed tonight we have the first report of a death among american embassy employees in moscow who were exposed to soviet microwaves a secretary who worked in the embassy between 1960 and 62 developed a mole on her face that later became cancerous she died in 1968. what i realized was that some of the pulses used by the communications industry are exactly the same as the pulses which are used for microwave warfare it's not the temperature that is a problem it's the effects of the electromagnetic waves on our system on our cells and the immune system and everything i've been working in telecom area since it started in 1966 and since 1987 i was within different companies in ericsson when i was working in quality i saw a graph showing increasing rates of melanoma skin cancer and we saw curves of increasing failure rates of products that was a big problem 100 millions of grounds for instance you woof foreign also foreign the protection guidelines we have at the moment would protect you from any risk that we have established but whether for example you should recommend unlimited use by children that's a completely other issue and i think even without strong scientific evidence you should apply common sense here and say it's a technology that we have not fully understood it's it's a technology that you hold directly to the body so we need more work on this when we talk about the reproductive system there are a number of studies clearly showing that male sperm cells are badly affected actually and that they lose their movement capacity and their morphology is destroyed and but the most important studies maybe on fertility in the long term run where people have looked on different generations of mice and seen that in the future after a certain number of generations the fertility was more or less completely gone and that is of course a very serious uh warning signal and again i'm surprised that no one is really paying any real attention to this what we are now risking by microwaving the planet we are saying we are prepared to risk all of the future generations of the world with genetic damage for today's profit margin that is what we're risking and it's i'm not just talking people the cells are identical to plants animals humans so if you're damaging a human cell you are automatically damaging the plant cells the pollinating insects over 200 of them they are all affected every single thing there are some very interesting studies from india where they took mobile phones and put them near to bee hives and that resulted in that the bees left they moved away a bee will normally navigate using the earth's magnetic field so what you have is a bee which is being disorientated and at the same time its immune system is starting to collapse [Music] if that would be correct then we just have to stop radiating these insects i mean that's crazy to do it in that sense [Music] only the future will tell hopefully it will turn out to be safe but that would mean that thousands of scientific papers all at the same time must be wrong and that has never happened before in history [Music] several long-term investigations started that have been going on for years these long-term studies seems to be just a way to push the problem in front of you get time to make as much money as possible not to have to take decisions today it's just a question of when we should start to react in 2009 scientists met in norway because scientists felt that the igni guidelines were not sufficient to really protect health and life and a special pretty lengthy statement was published and it was suggested that the current guidelines should be lowered at least 50 to 60 thousand times compared to the ignite guidelines the authorities experts many of them know these problems but gives free space for the technology for the industry to use their systems at least i suspect that this group they are doing a job for the industry [Music] [Applause] the [Music] [Music] an admittance that those limits from ignib has been too high and that there are health risks below those limits is a serious threat also to this industry there are lots of money [Music] that have been invested in this system thousands of billions of euros the consequences to drastically just forbid for instance mobile phones would be drastic formation yeah something [Music] bien um [Music] scientists from 14 countries have reversed those years of reassurance the classification of a possible carcinogen is the weakest scientific evidence we have so in the future with new scientific evidence it can change in either direction the general pattern i would say for such warning signals is that they start at the low level and then they move upwards so most likely in a few years time there will have been more data collected and we will probably see an um increase in the importance of these cancer classifications hopefully i'm wrong hopefully it will go in the other direction it will turn out to be without any risk but i would be a little bit surprised then the world health organization changed the cancer classification mostly due to studies showing increased risk of brain tumors from mobile telephone use those studies were made by leonard radar from the eurobrew university in sweden and also the interphone study the world health organization 13-country study that also showed increased risk for brain tumors of mobile phones i think that this radiation clearly merited a higher classification because there are a lot of evidence showing cancer risk from this radiation the problem is that the mobile phone industry has dominated the cancer research from this radiation so much we have to make sure that the industry and the research is clearly separated and of course i also think that the industry has a responsibility to support the research because they make all the profit from the technology so so they should be interested also in demonstrating that the technology is safe and what we usually do in practice that we have a firewall between the funding and the research so that there's no direct link by contracts between the researchers and the industry and that is a mechanism that has shown to to work very well and that is all very well if if they had been independent but [Music] the problem is the connections between industry and these expert groups anders album is considered to be one of the world's leading experts in this field and he a professor at the karolinska institute and he has led all swedish export investigations into this issue he has also been an expert to the world health organization and he was part of the ignir expert group that recommended the today's obsolete limits for mobile telephony i think that the conclusions uh drawn by andersha album went through a major change because earlier he was more careful about what he said he didn't clearly dismiss the risks as he does today and that is very strange so there's been a major change and i think it is those conflicts of interest that he has that can explain why he dismisses the risks that he has clearly observed himself then i started to to search further and i then discovered that his brother gunnar album had for many years been a lobbyist for the major swedish mobile phone operator talia sonora in brussels while anders album at the same time was a so-called independent expert for many authorities in sweden and also for the european commission well the article about the conflict of interest of anders album led to his non-participation in this expert evaluation of the cancer risks and after after that the mobile phone radiation was classified as possibly carcinogenic which probably would have not have been the case if anders album would have been on this expert group is [Music] and it turns out that if you read a study anyone on random that say that these techniques are safe they are approximately four times more often financed by the industry as compared to studies saying there is a health effect which i think is very sad in the sense that already when they were started they had lost a lot of their credibility a couple of months after the cancer classification at the international agency for research on cancer andesh album's colleague maria feisting at the karolinska institute presented a study was claimed to be the first study on mobile phone use and ranging risk for children it is the cephalo study and it's a study design that we call a case control study that was conducted in four countries denmark sweden norway and switzerland the interference study did not include any children or young people and this is because the study has started in the late 90s and it was very few children that used mobile phones at that time maria feisting claimed in the press release that the studies result were reassuring but when you look into the study and the published results you see continuously increased risk for brain tumor for children who had had a mobile phone subscription for the longest period when you come to table four you see here clearly that children who had used a mobile phone who had had a subscription for more than 2. 8 years they had more than doubled increased risk of brain tumor furthermore when you take a closer look at this study you also see that they present result on use of cordless phones when we started to study children the cordless phones have become much more common a lot of private households had a cordless phone so the exposure from the cordless phone also becomes relevant but they don't disclose clearly that they only studied the first three years of use of cordless phones this is only mentioned in a footnote below the table which is quite strange i asked maria feisty if she could send me a copy of the questionnaire that they used in the cephalo study she refused and then i turned to the ethical board because i know that the ethical board that the karolinska has to accept the study design including the questionnaire and i received the questionnaire a draft questionnaire of the cephalo from the ethical board and it appeared that they didn't include the strange restriction of the usage of cordless phones to only the first three years the child used it this study is clearly manipulated you you can't imagine any serious scientist asking for only the first three years of use [Music] both the cephalo and the interphone study that they show increased risks of brain tumors for mobile phone users both children and adults so the results in the study when you read them they show something totally different than what is communicated to the broad public yet [Music] we realized that the only sort of safe rule here is that money is behind everything it's always some political or economical or industrial argument behind the curtains that will drive a development in certain direction this is one of the most influential and power economic powerful industries in the world today and it's not only about the telecommunications industry it's also about the defense and military industry they also produce microwaves they also use this technology and they have the same interests this is a military area move away from the perimeter i say again this is a military area move away from the perimeter this industry gives the most to governments than any other industry on the planet it can help the government's secret services you have to make up your own mind because nowadays all these scientific areas are heavily infested by other arguments coming from politics economy industry and so forth so don't trust us trust yourself yes [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] risk if the precautionary principle would be implemented in this particular field most of these gadgets would immediately be forbidden and in this situation of scientific uncertainty it's now the national governments and their institutions that are responsible for the asian protection who have to decide of what to do in this time period of scientific uncertainty foreign as long as this health issue is off the agenda it's very difficult indeed to get any serious action taken by the courts the courts really are not interested because they say the international commission and non-ionizing radiation protection says there's not a problem it sounds a very good name the international commission of non-ionizing radiation protection sounds great and you think that's very important but nobody knows how it's elected how you're elected to it there are no changes upon changes to its membership i have a very good suggestion freaking and i would abolish it and uh i i think it should be people should be that are on it should be accountable they should be elected and should come from differing sources it should not just be a self-perpetuating group which it is at present and i know i've met with many of them at stages i have a lot of respect for them but it's there is no patency and there is no even itself uh the chairman of uh paolovicius said well you know we are not we shouldn't be regarded totally it's just the only guideline but they are regarded as the only guideline i consider that those experts that are lying to the public or to the decision makers about what about what the science has shown of course they should be held responsible for for for those lies that that they have produced during years i think european actions is is perhaps the best line to take on this i think for an individual government to go for it is more difficult but in the meantime i think if companies or if areas are unhappy about mass going into a place or schools are unhappy in terms of the use of wi-fi then i think there should be some attention paid to these concerns uh [Music] is uh a [Applause] [Music] [Applause] bury unable to describe someday or they toss it americans are dying my own husband has a malignant glioma tower [Applause] well my advice to everybody is to investigate for themselves to check the evidence and to check the facts about the the dangers of this radiation and to try to reduce as much their own exposure [Applause] it's up to all humans to together in concert try to solve all these issues they should go and find all the scientific results themselves they are readily available on the internet it's very very easy to find them some experts say they're seeing evidence of breast cancer that could be connected to where some women keep their mobile phones when you take something that and put it directly on the skin it's high energy microwave radiation for a prolonged period of time in young women with vulnerable developing breasts we may have a perfect storm the the actual insert that people never read frankly that comes with the with the phone it does say exactly that there's a the blackberry for example wants to keep your phone at least 0.
