Сэйдж С. - О Биоинициативном докладе (2007): существующие стандарты для электромагнитных полей завышены в тысячи раз

Ecological options interview

Environmental consultant Cindy Sage on the Bioinitiative Report

Cindy Sage: The word “EMF” – electromagnetic field is a broad one, certainly the things that evolve around electric appliances and powerlines (extremely low lrequency fields). And this EMF issue also encounters as radio frequency radiation and microwave radiation. And those are emissions that you get from cell phones, cell towers, Wi-Fi and WiMAX wireless communications.
 
So it’s really broadly: all of those things things are either that give us electric power or that give us the ability to communicate in a wireless fashion. And there are emissions and they have important biological effect.
 
In 2006 a group of scientists met at the Bioelectromagnetic Annual Meeting in Mexico. And we presented a minisymposium on electromagnetic fields and radiofrequency radiation to highlight a couple of things for several hundred scientists who meet at those meetings.
 
The first was to focus on the science to say: ”These are the studies that we believe show an effect at levels that are an everyday levels and we might want to be concerned about this”. And secondly to talk about what kind of precursionary actions countries are taking around the world. And my part of this was to summarize the world’s response to EMF issues in terms of precursional, you know, preventative actions.
 
The Bioinitiative working group is a group that grew out of meeting in Mexico at the Bioelectromagnetic society. There was a lot of debate at that scientific conference about why it is that there are thirty years of worked(?) of scientific studies documenting bioeffects and advert (?) cell effects from this exposures and yet we’re still living with the same old standards we’ve had for years. They get tweaked (?) over few years but not at any substantial way. And not in a way that takes into account our growing knowledge about health risks.
 
So the Bioinitiative Group originally had four members – a core organizing group and the meeting occurred in june (?) in Mexico and by October. We had decided that we would write a state of the our report on electromagnetic field and health risks. And we would use this to alert people in the world. Mission it is to translate science into the good public health policy. And to tell…and broadly to tell public what these findings are.
 
So between October 2006 and august of 2007 which is a very short time, this group of fourteen scientists and public health experts did their very best work. A science chapters and public health chapters to evaluate and come up with recommendations.
 
And so in a nine-month period we have produced the only truly independent look at electromagnetic fields, radio frequency radiation and health risks.
 
Journalist: Or in other words you synthesized the data to the chapters…
 
Cindy Sage: We did…we did. Each of these people, each of these participants on the Bioinitiative Group is in their own right a leading world expert.
We had Henry Lai doing the work he…in a year of courses in the university of Washington…and he did the work on genotoxicity or damage to the human genom. And he also did the very large chapter on neurology, the effects on the central nervous system and effects on cognition, our ability to think, effects on behavior, judgment, sleep and so on – all the neurological studies.
 
And I think in total we used a group of probably looked at more than two thousands studies. These are pure reviewed published science, they are not someone’s…you know, casual opinion on things.
 
Lennard Hardell from Sweden did the work on brain tumors and cell phone use in cooperation with Kjell Hanson Mild. Both of them are highly respected in their fields.
Michael Kundi from Austria worked on the chapter envolving a brain tumors that are non-cell phone related and there is a large literature on that.
 
We also had Eugene Sobel and Zoreh Davaniour who are experts in the area of Alzheimer’s and Lou Gehrig's disease or ALS. And they provided a large chapter on the effects of ELF and…to ALS or extend RF on Alzheimer’s and breast cancer including much of the melatonin works that was just vital.
 
Olle Johansson from Sweden provided us with a very very detail chapter on the immune system and how many people become electrically sensitive. They become hypersensitive to exposures like many people are chemically sensitive to chemicals. There’s a growing percentage of people in the world, estimated between 3 and 8% of everyone in the world, that is electrosensitive. And this is a disfunction of the immune system, that’s why all this involved. And electrosensitivity is gonna be a very large social issue with huge financial costs, so this was another linchpin of the report.
 
Journalist: Is that number growing?
 
Cindy Sage: That number appears to be growing, and giving that warn we are continuing to deploy technologies that expose people on the chronic, on the daily basis. To these emissions we can expect that it will increase.
 
Importantly I think we also need to say that there were two key people involved in this, who come at more of…they come at the issue from a public health aspect.
 
One of them is a pre-eminent public health expert David Carpenter. He is now the head of an institute of health and the environment at the university of Albany in New York. And he provided very key information for us and analyzing the science and trying to tell us what it meant, and in comparison to other things like smoking and cancer or environmental tobacco smoke (second-hand smoke) and cancer. He was able to say: “Look, we regulate some of these other things, we have enough evidence now to move from arguing the science, does it or does it not cause cancer and neurological problems, to what is appropriate public health response, giving what we have and what do we need to do now”.
 
The other key person in this I want to mention is David Gee, he is within a European Agency, Denmark, and he is one of the primary authors of “Late Lessons from Early Warnings” which is a book analyzing the failures of government around the world to respond to early indications in terms of leading gasoline, diethylstilbestrol that was an age of the carcinogen, BSE and…and overfishing of the Atlantic stocks of fisheries and so on, where really important public health environmental issues have been debated because there’s industry influence, preventing action until action comes so late, that the social costs are huge.
 
Well, we ask David Gee to work with us to look at EMF issues today and the science and to say, do we have enough now as an early warning and are…is the consequence of doing nothing so great that we should be doing more. And his chapter, of course, has been pivotal and getting international attention to our report because in fact the answer is “yes”.
 
The response in Europe was massive. We were overwhelmed with response requests for interviews, media coverage, really excellent, coverage in the news press from European countries and the Northern countries. And in parenthesis was due to the fact that David Gee’s home agency, the European Environmental Agency decided that this is so important initially to them that they hadn’t quite recognized until they had the report, that they took this on as their own cause. And within two weeks I think it’s fair to say it’s unprecedented that a single report, you know, a dry science report would cause a major environmental and health agency to call for new policy and new study and new preventative actions.
 
So in Europe it’s been very large, the international Herald Tribune has carried excellent analysis and response and almost every other major European newspaper in all of European countries have carried an article, two or three.
 
In the United States we have seen absolutely no coverage. It’s very disappointing to see that the silence in our media, our print and our broadcasting media is absolute and we’ll be continuing to look for some change on this front, because these aren’t just European health issues, these are issues of the United States and the African countries and the Asian countries and Australia and they’re going to cost all of our societies very dearly if we don’t pay attention.
 
Journalist: Can you return back to Northern countries and European countries, how about the countries of the South, was there any response from their press or their governments?
 
Cindy Sage: There have been media inquiries from every continent and many countries, but the propounderers of this has been in European countries, where there is interestingly also a large public concern that is expressed. And that is very evident in their press already. And that may be, you know, in part why…
Probably the next largest response has come from Australia, where in fact…while we’re in the Bioinitiative working group recommending standards that’re thousands of times below where they are today for public safety limits. Australia’s government is proposing to relax their standards to make it possible for people to be exposed to far more electromagnetic field exposure. So we’ve had quite a response from the public and from governmental agencies.
 
There’s a big industry push to either keep the standards quo or to relax standards in general. Among industries from the electric utility industry in Australia to almost all the telecom organizations that lobby throughout the world and in fact even in the United States.
 
It’s amazing today that even in the United States the IEEE, which is the body lit that recommends new standards for radio frequency, for example, from cell phones, is proposing to loose in or to make less tough the standards we have right now for radio frequency radiation from cell phones.
 
They want to allow the amount of heat of phone can put into your brain to be calculated over 10 grams of tissue rather then 1 gram like it is today. And that means you can have far higher exposures. Now this proposal comes at a time where the Bioinitiative working group has pointed out in our report that we’re seeing brain tumor risk increased at 10 years and less of use. What you need to know with that is almost everything else that can cause a brain tumor, mostly chemical exposures or ionizing radiation take 20 years for this tumors to show up. Why is it we’re seeing this increase start at 10 years for cell phones? Well, it means cell phones are very-very effective way of creating brain tumors and it’s happening in half a time.
 
OK, here we have this paradox or this dilemma where the people that develop our standards are proposing to make it possible for far more radiation into the head, probably because cell phones today by enlarge don’t meet the existing standards, so they have to be less restricted.
 
It’s a really unwarranted move and we hope that our report will have the effect in this country of just waiting our decision makers of the Federal Communications Commission from even looking at this proposed into a less restricted standards.
 
Some of the other members of the Bioinitiative working group that contributed science chapters included Carl Blackman, who did our work as an individual although he is of course employed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
 
And he contributed a chapter on modulation effects. This has to do with the way in which pulsed radio frequency or electromagnetic fields can be received by the body as different kinds of signals and modulation is important because in some deliveries…you know, some deliveries of radiofrequency are more bioactive than others, so this was a key chapter.
 
Martin Blank from the Columbia University contributed the chapter on heat shock proteins or stress proteins. And a very important finding and…that is bright out in our report is that when you see stress proteins produced in the body, this is always…this is a very ancient response of all cells, literally in plants and animals and people, when you see heat shock proteins being expressed by cells or being created – it means the cell is in trouble and it’s hollering:”Help!” It’s got a problem with the environment that around it and that isn’t good for it.
 
And what Martin Blank has been able to show is that when you’re exposed to a very low levels of electromagnetic fields we see stress proteins created. And what that tells us is that, maybe in a short-term, you know, the body will get over it without riddle or doubt, but if you do this day in a day or chronically, this things have very serious consequences for the body. And they are actually a part of the possible biological mechanism that we talk about for ultimate chronic health problems and diseases and…and treats to health which can be carcinogens or they can be neurotoxins.
 
So, Martin Blank’s work of course has just been key for this and the levels at which he’s finding the effect on stress proteins are environmental levels. They are levels, to which most people in the urbanized countries are exposed cell phones, cell towers, power lines appliances and again it. Cordless phones as well as cell phones are implicated not only in heat-shot protein or stress protein responses, but they’re also just...they look to be just as deadly as cell phones when you look at brain tumors and acoustic neuromas – another form of tumor in the head. So importantly people need to know that it isn’t just mobile phones but it is also cordless phones that are showing increased risk of brain tumors.
 
The final group working with our team on the bioinitiative is from China. And we had two doctors from China, from Beijing, who did some interesting work on the effect of electromagnetic field on the human genom brand new area of science – transcriptomics and proteomics. And these are just big words for actually looking into what this fields do down at the DNA level, at the gene level. And their studies are reporting lots of positive effects – negative and positive both. So we were very happy to have their collaboration.
 
And my role in this, other then being one of the founding members of the bioinitiative working group, was to be the person who wrote about preventative action, precautionary, public health planning, public policy issues, and I am also a co-editor with David Carpenter on the report.
 
The studies that we produced in the chapter by our Chinese participants talked about stu…included studies that were both reporting effects and studies that reported no effect so we have some of each kind. But overall we shouldn’t be seeing any positive…we shouldn’t be seeing any studies reporting effects on the human gene from these levels of exposures and if we are what it means is that our standards are not good enough, they’re inadequate.
 
The general conclusions of the bioinitiative report are these. The existing standards that we have worldwide for electromagnetic fields including power lines including cell phones including cell towers, cordless phones – basically all of these things we looked at – these standards that we have today are thousands of times too high, it’s inescapable. If you look at the studies in aggregate, if you look at all of the science studies, they clearly tell us that we are living in the world today where the standards that we have do not protect public health. And the consequences of not doing something about this are going to be huge in terms of public health, in terms of sickness for people, in terms of lower quality of life because people don’t feel well, they don’t work well in these environments. And thus the cost to society over time if we do nothing are going to be enormous. So we have all the makings of an early warning here and we don’t just need trivial or do nothing kinds of cures. We are so far down the road in understanding the problem that we are calling for very substantial change. The biological effects that we see are current thousands of times lower than our standards – we need new standards.
 
It' fine to keep the old ones, because the old standards protect us against being burned or being cooked or being electrocuted. What they don't do is protect us against cancer and diseases like Alzheimer's and Loo Gerig's disease, miscarriage and the other constellation of things that we strongly suspect or occuring. So we think we need an entirely new set of standards to address these new technologies and they need to be biologically based. What that means is that we look at these two thousands studies or more and we are to see what kind of biological effects are occuring and we are to design new standards that protect us and provide a safety factor below the levels where we are seeing the risk start.
 
So for childhood leikemia which is a done deal and there is really no more question,powerline exposures,electromagnetic field exposures cause childhood leikemia at least some part of it and maybe a very big part of it. And we're looking at levels of 1 milligauss,maybe one and a little milligauss, we're not looking at a hundred or a thousand and our current limit is 904. In terms of radiofrequency radiation we don't yet know the lower limit of health risk. Every time we get a new technology that drops the level of exposure down lower we still find people getting sick, some fraction of the population or some special group. Children are particularly vulnerable, the ill are particularly vulnerable, the aged are particularly vulnerable, so we don't know the lower limit. We're gonna recommend new biologically based standards be developed,and the better key to these studies on these effects that we're saying that we're not yet prepared to say how low.
 
Because it may be in the worst case there is no lower limit. If it is truly informational content rather then amount of energy and heating, if that's true then these..some of these technologies may not be possible and at the same time maintain our own..you know, well being and health.
 
You know, one of the things that I think we've seen clearly now and looking at all of the science is that it isn't the amount of heat that matters,it's not the amount of heat from the cell phone,it's not a thermal effect, it's not like if you cut out the heat you don't have a biological effect that can lead to a brain tumor. Somehow because this levels now that are causing these effects, these levels keep creeping lower and lower, the way better to describe it as it's the informational content of the signal coming at you. The radiofrequency signal or the ELF signal is somehow being detected by the body, being amplified by the body and the body is responding to it in a way that says:'I'm in the stress' or 'I can't metabolize properly, my heart isn't operating properly, I'm not sleeping properly'. And then you have a constellation of effects that follow on, all of which create ill health or your well being,your ability to function is impaired. So if it's the kind of signal you're getting and the way that it interacts with the body, heating is relevant, it's the information of the signal that accounts.
 
In talking to people about why we're not able yet to say with authority what a lower limit should be for radio frequency radiation I tell them this. In the year 2000 when I went to Zaltzburg to an international conference to talk about radio frequency health effects and the scientific studies, at that time we thought that about 1 microwatt per cm square..just remember the number 1..might be a good number even at the standard where is appeared a 1000, we thought, that maybe 1 was going to be OK for chronic exposure. Well, we now in 2007 and I personally think that we have to be down at a nanowatt, one thousand times lower than 1 microwatt in order to begin to say it's possible that's OK for chronic exposure. And when we see technologies perhaps in the future that are emitting something lower than a nanowatt, we'll have to wait and see, what happens.
 
One of the things that we've learned recently in looking at John Kaufman's work on ionising radiation at low dose, particular related to mammograms, that there realy is no low limit at which things are safe. There is always an effect and it's always adverse, so no lower limit to ionizing..harm. I think we may be in the same area with non-ionising radiation. And in fact, part of the literature that you can find on this subject that we worked on is the bystander effect. The bystander effect says that if you hit one cell precisely with ionising radiation, somehow cells, that aren't even connected, that are more distant in location are also damaged or die. And what that means is that the way that this works is not fully explained. We don't know everything yet. So the standards that we derive based on a very limited understanding of the body's inner working are not protective. And it's really scientific arrogance to think that because scientists can't explain an effect, it doesn't exist.
 
One of the things, that report suggests is that cell phones should be entirely re-designed so they do not any..so they don't work when you put them to your head, they work only in speaker mode or you have to have a wired earpiece to use them. You also shouldn't wear them if they are re-designed.
 
We can see a safe way for them to operate at the levels they emit today and in a fashion that they work today. For people who say:'I can't imagine I ever been able to give up my cell phone or Blackberry or my Trio' what we can do is to say to them:'Well, look, you can tremendously minimize your exposure, use the wired earpiece, do not use a wireless earpiece, do not use the bluetooth type mechanism because the cumulative dose from these is going to be very large and you not being informed to that.' Cordless phones again should be concidered just like cell phones and every design change should apply to cordless phones as well.
 
We're a little concerned that in some states including California we're gonna have a new law, that says that you cannot drive while holding..you know, a handheld cell phone. And that's gonna drive people to use this new wireless devices which in themselves are going to have bioeffect.
 
So we need a complete talk to bottom review and in the intro, I think we need to halt the deployment of these technologies and the deployment of and proliferation of this base stations or cell towers. Until we are able to say with some better certainty 'we know how to do it right because right now it's clear that we're doing that wrong.
 
If you look at this issue in terms of what we should have learned from..em..smoking and lung cancer and second hand radiation and cancer..I would simply do this for parents. If you wouldn't buy these for your kids and these are сandy cigarettes, you certainly wouldn't want to buy a candy toy cell phone. Because I think in ten years we're gonna be looking at these two as equally harmful, meaning the real McCoy, real cigarettes, real cell phones.
 
And there is no excuse to start children of using this cell phone devices at an early age and probably even in too young adulthood, concidering that their brains are still hard wireing and brain development and neurological development isn't complete until your early twenties.
 
We have no business providing with things that are probably going to turn out to be more dangerous than cigarettes. Certainly in the short term the brain tumor risk is going to be higher.
 
Journalist: What would you say to parents who are dubious about wireless things being set up at their children's schools?
 
Cindy Sage: Wireless internet is another area where we get a lot of inquiries, and in schools it become popular to install wireless internet connections for children's laptops. The exposure that a child would get in a school, going through the school like this and from, you know, elementary then middle-school to high-school would be very considerable over a lifetime. And we really recommend against it now because it appears that it's an experiment where we don't know the health result and it isn't worth that...the risk...can we quantify the risk yet? No,because we are not allowed to do experiments on children. But every indication is that if it has...if wireless technologies and their emissions have such a big impact on adults, from the studies we have, it will be worse on children. So if we have good alternatives? You can have great internet connections with cable modem, a wired alternative, so we don't need it by take the chance.
 
The scientific evidence today is stronger than it was for environmental tobacco smokers, second-hand smoke and cancer. So, you know, if parents would ignore health warnings for cigarettes then I can see why they might ignore the health studies that we have today for cell phones. It would be a very bad idea to ignore these warnings. But the evidence is there: the industry would like for you to think, that we have to have conclusive scientific evidence which is just ridiculously high level of approve before we do anything at all. And this just is not the case. In smart public health policy you react when you began to see the evidence mounting up in the trend that's toward showing an effect. You don't wait until the industry is finely willing to admit that it can't hide effect anymore that they're selling the carcinogen. So if you buy the argument you need proof, absolute proof and proof according to the industry that you have harmful substances..you know, with these devices, then you would wait.
 
I can't imagine any parents saying 'a cell phone and use the cell phone is so important to my child and my family, that we will risk this and wait for proof'. They're gonna act off the evidence, and we're really hoping school districts are going to do the same thing. Because when children are mandated to go to school and you can afford only a the public school, you can't afford the private school, you are stuck as a family with whatever that district decides to install in terms of wireless. So this is an area where we really hope that parents and administrators will get together and air on the side of caution and not go wireless for now.
 
Journalist: Can you give any exposure comparisons between wireless exposure in the school and said from a cell phone?
 
Cindy Sage: There are some estimates by Alister Phillips, he is an expert in the United Kingdom, he is a man who runs an organization called “Powerwatch” which is technically very good. And he has estimated that for a students sitting in a classroom (in normal school in a classroom where you have twenty or thirty students all working on wireless computers) twenty minutes of cell phone use is equivalent to one hour in that classroom. It seems high, but those are the numbers, and certainly it’s not…this wireless exposure in classrooms is not trivial. If you got everybody working on their computer and they’re all wireless, a couple of hours is a huge exposure. Now… It’s interesting, an interesting comparison is the comparison to the brain tumor studies on cell phones, because most people think it takes a lot of exposure to a cell phone to have an increased rate of brain tumor show up. And in fact, we’re beginning to see at with only 260 lifetime hours of exposure you begin to see the risk. With only 260 hours!
 
Lennard Hardell’s work looks toward the top end of users, the heavy users, and he looks at anybody with 2000 or more lifetime hours of exposure. And he’s seen very substantial and statistically significant increased risk of brain tumors and acoustic neuromas. With 2000 or more hours. Well, you know, I work with people, I know people who average 900 minutes a month. So in 2 months, 3 months, 4 months, 5 months…a year. Oh, I ain’t do the calculation but a couple of years – and you’ve had your maximum – 2000 hours – easily. I have great concern that for the brain tumor and acoustic neuroma risk the threshold for danger is so low. You’re over it, you’re over it, you’re over it – we’re all over it if we’ve used the cell phone in work for a few years, three years, 5 years. So this is going to come back to hound us and we’re really going to…we’re really going to pay attention.
 
Students who were tested on the cell phones while they’re driving or…you know, simulated driving, were shown to have the reaction time of elderly people when they were under the influence that either the radio frequency or they have diversion or both, but they were acting like old people when they were driving as they use the cell phone. The effect of cell phones on young people in terms of brain tumors is the highest risk of any age category that we’re saying. Lennard Hardell reported that for the ages 20 to 29 year old category they had an eightfold increase of brain tumor risk or 800% increased risk of brain tumor. So it was the young kinds who had started as teenagers…you know, within a few years when they reach their mid-twenty shown the very significantly increased risk of brain tumors.
 
…or FID. And I don’t have to say it’s one more layer of radiofrequency don’t need. I personally, I so object to those bean sonde under the hem of my new clothes that I buy or…you now come onto the printer cartridges for…you know, my computer printer. And I think this is just an industry-friendly way of them saving money and shifting the health poor onto us and I really objective to it.
 
Journalist: Are there indications of chipping of dogs and children causes any health effect?
 
Cindy Sage: There are absolutely some provocative new studies that we shouldn’t been paying attention to it (and we weren’t paying attention to it), that say: “Tumors develop at the sight of the implanting chip”. If you put a chip, radiofrequency chip, in the dog, in case the dog gets lost, that chip in itself is going to present risk, a health risk, a tumor risk. Now if that’s true we really are getting sturdy on FID chips and to be inserting them into Alzheimer’s patients because they “might get lost” is just unwarranted.
 
Journalist: And children, are they safe? Like that the existing excuse for cell phones to hear my kid when im afraid of him…
 
Cindy Sage: I’m afraid…I’m so afraid, I’m so afraid! Michael Moor has “I’m so afraid!”, you know…we’re all so afraid, we need to be afraid, because it’s the only mind that we obey. I really can’t think of absolutely no rational nothing warrants puttings chipin a child to keep track of that child unless they have some incredible exceptional reason, medical reason or impairment reason. And at this technologies just because we can do them doesn’t mean we should do them. And no one is looking at the side effects – and we should be.