Wouldn’t you think that if the Government wanted to “make the U.K. a world-leader in 5G” that its ministers would know some basics about how the regulatory organisation they follow, the International Commission on Non-Ionising Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), arrived at its recommendations for safe exposure?
Recently I wrote to my MP, Rishi Sunak, to alert him to my situation in needing to avoid radio-frequency radiation (RFR) or electromagnetic fields (EMF), due to health damage I sustained 20 years ago when I lived 15 metres from a mobile phone mast. Before, dear reader, you tell me that my conclusion is pure speculation, let me tell you that this likely explanation only occurred to me after the death of a second neighbour from motor neurone disease and after months of my suffering with flu-like symptoms and heavily swollen neck glands, followed by health problems, with which I will not bore you.
Anyway, Mr. Sunak, very diligently, put my concerns to two ministerial colleagues, while telling me in the meantime that he proposed to blanket the U.K. with the fastest wireless coverage available. My reply to the latter remark was as follows:
1.The Government purportedly stands by the results of the Stewart Report 2000 and states here “adults should be able to make their own choices about reducing their exposure should they so wish, but be able to do this from an informed position”. How will this be possible if the country if blanketed? Smart devices, phone masts and WiFi are now everywhere where there are people. Will you inform people where coverage is lightest, if they wish to reduce exposure? Will you make sure that non-smart transactions are always possible? Will you ensure that some areas will always have landlines and are smart meter and smart camera free? And so on.
2. If the country is blanketed, what happens to the rights of those disabled by electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) in terms of section 6 of the Equality Act? A case has already been won in the U.K., where a local authority has been mandated to provide RFR/EMF free education for a child with EHS.
Be that as it may, when the ministerial replies arrived, I was genuinely shocked by the level of ignorance they betrayed.
Steve Barclay, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care wrote: “The ICNIRP guidelines apply to the whole population, including children and people of varying health status, which may include particularly susceptible groups or individuals.”
This is simply wrong. What ICNIRP actually says is:
Some exposure scenarios are defined as outside the scope of these guidelines. Medical procedures may utilise EMFs, and metallic implants may alter or perturb EMFs in the body, which in turn can affect the body both directly and indirectly… As medical procedures rely on medical expertise to weigh potential harm against intended benefits, ICNIRP considers such exposure managed by qualified medical practitioners, as beyond the scope of these guidelines. (emphasis mine)
In other words, these guidelines do not apply to anyone with a metal implant or anyone undergoing a medical procedure utilising EMFs. That is a large population group. It is left to doctors to advise on this, but, in fact, in the U.K. doctors are not trained in the health effects of non-ionising radiation. And the implication of this statement is that ICNIRP has no medical expertise. Indeed on examining the profiles of ICNIRP members, I have not found anyone with a medical qualification.
But even more alarming is this statement by Sir John Whittingdale OBE, the Minister for Data and Digital Infrastructure:
The ICNIRP… guidelines… are based upon a large amount of research carried out over many years.
This is nonsense, I am afraid. The guidelines are based on behavioural studies of eight rats and five monkeys, which were irradiated for up to an hour and also by measuring heating effects on a plastic model of a man’s head. Criticisms of the methodology used for deciding the guidelines have been made by the International Commission on the Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields (ICBE-EMF) in a recent article and by James Lin, a highly qualified ex-member of ICNIRP, who laid out his objections in the IEEE Microwave magazine.
In actual fact, far from being the basis of the guidelines, the opposite is true. Studies on the biological health effects of EMFs are largely dismissed by ICNIRP with the comment “more research needs to be done”.
Sir John went on to state:
Reviews carried out by the independent Advisory Group on Non-Ionising Radiation (AGNIR) found no convincing evidence that radiofrequency field exposures below guideline levels cause health effects.
He did not mention that this review was carried out back in 2012 and was discredited by Dr. Sarah Starkey who found that the report omitted and distorted scientific evidence leading to wrong and misleading conclusions. She also pointed out how many personnel had dual roles and conflicts of interests by being in more than one of these regulatory bodies at the same time.
And indeed, since that time, there have been two very large animal studies (the NTP study and the Ramazzini study) showing a link between RFR and cancer as well as a large epidemiological review In 2019 by an international expert team led by Canada’s most senior cancer epidemiologist Professor Tony Miller, reporting human epidemiological evidence linking human breast and brain tumours, male reproductive outcomes and child neurodevelopmental conditions to RFR exposures. It also found compelling evidence of carcinogenesis, especially in the brain and acoustic nerve, as well as the breast, from strong RFR exposures to previous generations of mobile phone transmissions.
AGNIR was disbanded in 2017 and its remit adopted by the Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE). Unfortunately COMARE has never produced a report on the health effects of non-ionising (radio-frequency) radiation, because our Government has never asked it to do so, according to an email sent to me by its secretariat.
What a contrast to the U.S. New Hampshire Commission, which gathered a large group of experts together and conducted a thorough investigation into the health effects of RFR a couple of years ago.
In June this year, at a conference at the Royal Society of Medicine in London, its findings were described with great clarity by Professor Kent Chamberlain, the Professor Emeritus of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Hampshire. His talk included a discussion of the methods used to set the ICNIRP safety exposure guidelines, a review of the peer-reviewed literature on adverse health effects of RFR and the highlighting of key findings, such as the increased risk of cancer if you live within 1,000 metres of a mast.
The Royal Society of Medicine conference was organised by the International Commission on the Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields (ICBE-EMF) and was based around an important paper, examining the 14 false assumptions of those creating the ICNIRP safety guidelines. I introduced the expert speakers in a previous DS article and they include Dr. Erica Mallery-Blythe, Professor Kent Chamberlain, Professor James Lin and Professor John Frank in an event ably introduced by David Gee, who co-authored Late Lessons, Early Warnings for the European Environmental Agency.
Short written highlights, presentation slides and videos of the event are now available to view on an ICBE-EMF webpage and I’d say that these are essential viewing and reading for anyone interested in this subject and particularly for our Government ministers and their researchers.
Just when will our Government do its due diligence? And how certain do we need to be about causation before exercising caution and catering for those who already know they are affected by RFR exposure?
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I’m not sure I have it in me to get cross about another topic, but good luck.
5G has nothing to do with the convenience of download speeds, and everything to do with the ability to locate users indoors. This is a tool of enforcement for the 15 minute city infrastructure being erected everywhere.
If 15 minute cities were a city planners utopian dream, would they not make the parks, schools, churches, shops, doctors surgeries, leisure centres and transport systems BEFORE they make the barriers, CCTV, digital ID and geo-location network to monitor movement and prevent escape?
…..Yes, I don’t know if it makes it any better that the UK is somewhere near 50th on the list with download speeds…all the countries above us have much faster speeds..does that mean their ‘pod cities’ will get on-line first?? Or we will be stuck in our pod with crap Wi-Fi??
Sorry, I know you are being serious, and I agree….
So long as the signal is strong enough to enable them to know where you are they would be happy, it won’t inconvenience them if your YouTube video buffers.
Yes, funny how they manage to find non-existent money for anything that is part of their agenda isn’t it?…..while everything else can go to wrack and ruin??
I think all they really want is some justification for spending taxpayer money on AI Smartcrap™ because AI Smartcrap Is The Future!© and who would want to miss the future?
Don’t worry, it’s “safe and effective”
now where did I hear that before?
So junk your smartphone eh? I’m so smart I’ve never had one, nor will I.
Read Shoshona Zuboff’s “Surveillance Capitalism” for the skinny on how big tech and smartphones are stripping your personal data for their own use. Indeed, I cancelled my Amazon account after reading the book.
Of course the Government should be interested in the safety of its population in relation to 5G….but the Covid debacle has shown us it isn’t..and that if it’s a choice..’the money’ always wins….I suspect whatever the subject is…
I remember stories about Electricity Pylons causing cancers from my teens..and that’s over 40 years ago…and there seemed to be plenty of evidence that it was true at the time…..
It doesn’t seem very long ago people were told not to get their children mobile phones
because there were similar worries about that..same with in-ear headphones…
We all now know, if we didn’t before, that no one gets the chance or the money to study the downside of anything that’s making masses of money for someone…..
China has already launched the 6G space satellite…. the roller coaster won’t stop…..and genuinely it might be the time for the author to make a major lifestyle change and to move to an area where there is less infrastructure…??
There’s no mobile reception in my area. A mast is being proposed which would give coverage but given the low population it doesn’t seem to make much business sense.
However, to allow monitoring devices to be peppered through the area, tracking those with a mobile phone and imposing smart meters – it has potential. There would be no off-grid.
…yes it looks increasingly like you can run but you can’t hide…!
I now look at those programmes I have watched in the past, usually the USA, where people have bought land, built a cabin, and completely cut themselves off from the Government…I now get it, in a way I didn’t before….!
I remember stories about Electricity Pylons causing cancers from my teens..and that’s over 40 years ago
Me too, although over 40 years ago is a bit of a stretch for me. But even the electrosmog (as this used to be called) people have to go with the times. Hence, they’re holding their 4G mobiles next to their ears all day in order to chat with other users of 4G mobiles about the dangers of 5G. Once that has become sufficiently common, they’ll become afraid of whatever the next thing is going to be.
Having quickly searched the report it wasn’t immediately clear but were any of the guidelines based on research using a child’s head?
I recall that there were protests about not being able to discuss potential health issues with 5G, rebutted by the committee as ‘we’re not discussing them because there aren’t any’. And, so it rumbles on.
I read a paper earlier this year about the development of 6G (oh yes, its already underway..) and it is very much a dystopian science fiction film.
Why is that? 6th generation networks are an entirely normal extension of previous generations as everything has been since GSM and other digital standards arrived in the early 1990s.
Another fake study
“This is nonsense, I am afraid. The guidelines are based on behavioural studies of eight rats and five monkeys, which were irradiated for up to an hour and also by measuring heating effects on a plastic model of a man’s head”
Just like the fake studies of the mRNA stabs. Radiation is expressed through gamma rays, light and electro-magnetism, traveling far and fast. Small amounts can destroy cells and tissues. Cancer is the real epidemic, along with obesity, autism, encephala, and diabetes. Why the explosion in cancer? Stabbies? Yes. Opiods? Yes. Food and the toxin sugar? Yes. Radiation? Entirely plausible.
Why is 5G such a burning necessity? What problem does it solve?
It’s part of normal modern life now I think….to be given solutions for non-existent problems. Many of which they create to produce the ‘solutions’ anyway….
You could ask the same about all the ‘agenda’ subjects at the moment…along with ‘who does it serve’….? I can’t for the life of me look at anything they are doing at the moment that serves me..or the public in general….
I hope that anyone who has young children tries to get them away from ‘screens’ as much as possible…..not just for health and well-being, and actual fun….but because I do think it’s part of the plan to isolate people from each other and make the screen world more real..we know that’s happening already….
…why would you truly understand and care about real people and the real world..the green world..if you are never in it?
With battery powered devices, the energy saving of faster data transfers, allowing the radio circuitry to have a lower duty cycle, is important in extending the operating time of the device.
Users value extended battery life, designers and manufacturers are happy to provide it where possible. It is entirely possible, so it is done.
It also means that a given installation of network equipment can support more customers and thus reduce the cost incurred for each customer, or increase the area covered by a given equipment budget which helps to meet Ofcom licence coverage requirements.
It’s certainly not for sinister reasons, it’s down to engineers improving technology because that is what we do in order to get paid for our expertise.
Thank you for raising this issue which affects all life on the planet ATL. The harm to insects populations, birdlife (avian flu anyone??) let alone humans is huge.
A symptom of exposure is anxiety & depression. Nice pharma ‘cure’ for that with SSRIs….
Double blind trials indicate that this assertion about symptoms and their cause is untrue.
Do you have links to those studies please?
I would have to spend ages searching, many of them are decades old now.
Here are some links I could find in short order:
https://www.who.int/teams/environment-climate-change-and-health/radiation-and-health/non-ionizing/emf/hypersensitivity
is one, and here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivity
You will have to decide whether their source is acceptable to you, I doubt I have direct links to incontrovertible studies, in any case I share various people’s concerns about peer review and groupthink.
This is also of interest, but may not yet have provided concrete results:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8668868/
again the source, NIH, may be thought to be tainted by the Fauci effect, but frankly what government-funded stuff are we confident in?
As an engineer I am not at all susceptible to belief in action at a distance without a cause I know to exist. I have never seen anyone claim to experience or experienced myself any such thing with RF emissions of any type in any environment.
My only observed thermal effect beyond using commercial microwave ovens is seeing someone warm up a lunchtime pie in a radar waveguide by putting it in through the inspection port for a few minutes. Quite what that did to ATC performance during this time I don’t know, but apparently it was not noticed. When I see the effective radiated power of ATC radars in the UK I am not surprised, they see a lot further than people think.
Thank you.
Fail to persuade whom: the usual bunch of science-ignorant, woo merchants?
As a professional Radio Frequency engineer with 40 years in industry I have no concerns with any non-ionising electromagnetic radiation, the energy of these photons is below that required to break chemical bonds.
5G means 5th generation, the only difference from 4G is increased bandwidth of the radio signals and hence faster data transfer.
The only part of the human body subject to any proven effects of non-ionising radiation is the crystalline lens in the eye, everything else has sufficient blood supply for thermal effects to be insignificant at the power levels permitted by ICNIRP.
There have been many studies of the effects of RF, none have demonstrated harm that can be identified and followed up. A very large sample size real world study continues daily in every country with cellular phone service, there are no indications of any problems because otherwise the clamour for action would be heard everywhere.
My opinion is that nearly all of the article is scaremongering by someone who doesn’t understand the biology.
Only the tracking issues are important in terms of the ability of the authorities to know where people are or have been. That comes down to legislation to preserve privacy.
I do so wonder why someone turns up to down vote someone with direct experience of the subject under discussion but won’t actually engage.
It tells me the value of that down vote.
Hello Tyrbiter, you are correct that the frequencies involved are below those required to cause direct ionisation of molecules. However, the hypothesis maintained by committees such as ICNIRP that only thermal effects need to be considered is inadequate and naive.
There are many researchers out there concerned about non-thermal effects. You almost certainly are aware that such EM is not absorbed directly as thermal energy. At frequencies below visible, energy is absorbed in a quantised manner resulting in specific dynamic excitation of certain molecules or other structures. That kinetic energy is then transferred to the surroundings resulting in a temperature rise. It is relatively easy to measure thermal effects, but non-thermal effects are much more difficult to measure and characterise.
Nevertheless there is a growing body of research on such effects. For example, there is a concern that such radiation could affect cellular membranes by compromising permeability to harmful ions or radicals. There are also grounds for concern that pulsation and modulation may enhance harmful effects. See for example: Human‑made electromagnetic fields: Ion forced‑oscillation and voltage‑gated ion channel dysfunction, oxidative stress and DNA damage (Review) by Dimitris J. Panagopoulos et al, International Journal of Oncology, 2021
ICNIRP’s pronouncements imply that they have no appreciation of the complexities of the mechanisms by which RF energy is absorbed and then eventually dissipated as generalised heating.
I refuse to worry about 5G. Or chemtrails. Or covid. I reject fearmongering from either side of the aisle.
One of the decidedly unfunny aspects of our current malaise is that there are plenty of people on all sides who are just looking for someone they can fool into pulling their cart.
Perhaps Ministers are thinking (?) along the same lines as my local councillors who dismissed objections to their plan by saying “you will all be dead by the time the plans are implemented”.
five G seems likely to exacerbate the risk of death, so maybe they would be right.
You could spend a fortune and have your house pained with EMF blocking paint.
Or you could do it cheaper, and wrap yourself in tin foil…
These scientific studies conclude the following about RF-EMF’s before 5G was around which is many times more powerful and potentially much more harmful.
“ IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer) has classified RF-EMFs as a possibly carcinogenic to humans (Baan et al., 2011) and warns of the danger of EMF exposure. Moreover, it has been hypothesized that a variety of neurological effects may occur as a result of RF-EMF exposure due to the proximity of the cranial nervous system and the location where the cellular phone is predominantly used. These neurological abnormalities include headache (Frey, 1998), changes in sleep habits (Wagner et al., 1998), and changes in EEG (Braune et al., 1998; Mann et al., 1998). In addition, significant statistical results have been reported by various epidemiological studies on neurological cognitive disorders such as headache, tremor, dizziness, memory loss, loss of concentration, and sleep disturbance due to RF-EMF (Kolodynski and Kolodynska, 1996; Santini et al., 2002; Hutter et al., 2006; Abdel-Rassoul et al., 2007).”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6513191/
Medical professionals in Belgium are concerned about the roll out of 5G.
“Some 400 doctors and 900 health care workers have signed an open letter to the Belgian government, urging them to exercise caution regarding the roll-out by Proximus of a forerunner of the next generation of mobile data, known as 5G.”
https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/belgium-all-news/109231/health-workers-call-for-caution-over-5g-roll-out/
“The International EMF Scientist Appeal serves as a credible and influential voice from EMF (electromagnetic field) scientists who are urgently calling upon the United Nations and its sub-organizations, the WHO and UNEP, and all U.N. Member States, for greater health protection on EMF exposure.
As of January 14, 2021, 255 EMF scientists from 44 nations and 15 Supporting Scientists from 11 nations have signed the Appeal.”
https://emfscientist.org/
Four new studies shed light on human exposure to electromagnetic radiation from wireless technologies, but the authors of one study alleged industry tried to censor their research, and in another case, critics accused researchers of having conflicts of interest with the telecom industry.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/wireless-technology-electromagnetic-radiation-humans/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=ce82eb85-7bd8-4a9b-bfe7-b9d9736464e1
A new case report on two previously healthy men who developed “microwave syndrome” symptoms after a 5G cell tower was installed on the roof of their office, and a similar report published last month, show that non-ionizing 5G radiation can cause health problems in people with no prior history of electromagnetic sensitivity.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/5g-cell-towers-microwave-syndrome/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=c90bf6a9-0d6f-431c-b2b0-957a182ea79b
Based on the results of their landmark review of the latest science, four of the world’s top experts in environmental health called for prevention and precaution when it comes to public exposure to radiofrequency radiation.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/radiofrequency-rf-radiation-cancer/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=0f6d8b20-cd18-4c2b-bcda-19481e03949e
Research on 5G radiofrequency (RF) radiation shows it can cause brain damage and possibly lead to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, according to nine independent experts in the RF radiation field who published a new peer-reviewed article.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/radiofrequency-radiation-brain-damage-dementia-alzheimers/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=0f6d8b20-cd18-4c2b-bcda-19481e03949e
Experts Gather to Warn of Health Dangers of 5G Radiation.
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/06/12/experts-gather-to-warn-of-health-dangers-of-5g-radiation/