An Interview with Louis Slesin

Casey Walker: Will you describe why you founded Microwave News: A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation?
Louis Slesin: I got started in the 1970s, when there were no independent sources of information that could be trusted. Finding out what was going on was like playing the game "Telephone," in which one child whispers a message into another child's ear, and that child whispers it to the next, and so on down the line. By the time it reaches the last child, the message is totally garbled. This was what was going on in the EMF community. Everything you heard had to be checked and double-checked.
At the time, I was working at an environmental law firm on EMFs and a number of other issues, including the regulation of toxic chemicals and genetic engineering. I realized that if I wanted to work on EMFs full-time, which I did, I'd either have to become a consultant—and we all know the rules for making it as a consultant: Do as you're told—or I could try the newsletter business. With the newsletter approach, I'd be able to provide a service. I'd be able to tell people what was really happening. That's the route I took.

Will you speak to the concerns you recognized—which questions were not being asked or pursued in the public realm?
What was going on in those days—and it continues today—is that every time a biomedical or scientific breakthrough raises important public health questions, there is very little follow-up. Sometimes there's none at all.
A good example is the question of whether microwaves can affect the blood-brain barrier. In 1975, Allan Frey showed that fairly low levels of microwave radiation could increase the permeability of the blood-brain barrier. Chemicals in the blood that weren't supposed to go into the brain could do so following microwave irradiation. This raises an obvious question: What might these chemicals do once they cross into the brain?
Back in those days, some of the classic effects of microwave radiation were being reported in the Russian and East European biomedical literature. Those exposed to radar and communication radiation in the military or on the job were complaining of headaches, mood swings, and insomnia. Chemicals crossing the blood-brain barrier may not in fact cause such symptoms, but it's certainly a good place to start.
Today, more than 30 years later, what do you think remains one of the "hot button" issues on the effects of microwaves? The permeability of the blood-brain barrier. It's still unresolved. I've written editorials in Microwave News over the years, pleading, let's settle this. There have been three to four iterations. A new generation of scientists comes along, asks the same question, finds the same effect and publishes the results, but then funding dries up and the issue remains unresolved.
The latest set of experiments were done at the University of Lund in Sweden by Leif Salford and Bertil Persson. Salford is a brain surgeon whose main interest is not so much in the effects of microwaves, but whether they can be used to treat brain tumors by delivering drugs through the blood-brain barrier. The idea is to be able to inject a drug into a vein and focus microwaves in the right place to allow the drug to reach the tumor. That would certainly be less invasive than carving up someone's skull. Their studies, showing leakage through the blood-brain barrier with EMF exposures, were published in good journals and continue to stick out like a sore thumb. This work needs to be confirmed or refuted. As I said, this is only the latest series of experiments. History keeps repeating itself and we never seem to make much progress.

Has anyone studied cell phone use and the permeability of the blood brain barrier?
A French researcher, Pierre Aubineau of the University of Bordeaux, who was a member of one of the first French committees investigating cell phone health effects and very well-regarded, showed the same kind of increased permeability in the smaller blood vessels in the brain. He speculated that the leakage could cause inflammation and lead to headaches, which have been reported by many cell phone users. What happened next? Having rocked the system, Aubineau was chased out of the field. He has never published those findings. I heard him present them at a scientific conference. He's a first-rate scientist. But, he dared to challenge the status quo and, basically, paid for it with his scientific career. Sadly, such a story is all too common.

Are children more at risk than adults when using cell phones because of blood-brain barriers that have yet to mature?
This too remains an open question. Here again, it's obvious the issue needs to be resolved, but it hasn't. In a way, the lack of resolution borders on criminal because cell phones are being marketed to younger and younger children and parents are generally clueless about the potential risks.
The point is that we still don't know much about cell phone risks and until we do we should limit exposures to children. The reason I'm worried is that we're starting to see data showing that those who have used cell phones for at least ten years have significantly elevated tumor rates. Two different research groups have each reported two different kinds of tumors on the same side of the head cell phones were used among these long-term users. There's no reason to panic, but these findings should be taken very seriously.

How does a ten-year latency period for diseases associated with cell phones compare with the latency periods for diseases associated with tobacco or asbestos?
If you look at people who have been smoking cigarettes for ten years—these data are actually very hard to find—you do not see a statistically significant increase in lung cancer. It's the same story with asbestos. You don't see more mesothelioma, the fingerprint disease for asbestos exposure, among workers exposed for ten years. In fact, you have to go out 15-20 years in each case, before you find a statistically reliable increase in cancer. Ten years may also be too soon to see the effects of cell phone use. It may turn out that long-term cell phone exposure is okay, but we will not know for sure for quite a few more years. But we should not be taking such chances with our children, especially when we already have reasons to be concerned. How many times do we have to tread over the same ground before we finally learn the lesson that we must act to protect children from unnecessary risks?

Will you speak to the precautionary principle as a basis for public policy?
The precautionary principle is a very powerful policy option that says: If you have suggestions of a risk but you're not sure, be cautious. Some say—and I agree with them—that invoking the precautionary principle entails a duty to continue research.
In Europe, the precautionary principle is encoded in the Treaty of Maastricht, and is part of the fabric of the European Union. Now, I'm not putting Europe up on a pedestal, but most European countries have an ongoing research program on mobile phone health risks. By comparison, there's practically nothing going on here in the U.S. The major player is industry and its principal objective is to shut down all health research. The National Toxicology Program is planning a major set of animal studies, but, at this point in time, in the summer of 2007, there's no research at all in the U.S. Nothing.
So what happened to the idea of social responsibility? There are now close to 250 million Americans using cell phones. We ran an editorial in Microwave News some time ago, suggesting that if each user contributed one thin dime each year —that's what it used to cost to use a pay phone—we could sponsor a major research effort. Today, it would yield $25 million. I doubt there are many cell phone users who wouldn't pay ten cents a year to get the answer to the health question.

Didn't the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association pledge $25 million to get this kind of research done with their Wireless Technology Research program in the 1990s?
And that was to be spent over five years! What is there to show for the $25 million? Practically nothing. It was all a sham. The money was spent, but no one knows how. The director of WTR, George Carlo, has consistently refused to reveal what he did with the money. And now there is the added insult that Carlo is portraying himself as a consumer activist. It's a disgrace that anyone takes him seriously when he had the means to do the research and frittered it away. Countless activists have beaten on his door and said, Show me the studies you bought with the $25 million. Of course, the CTIA—the industry group that put up the money—tried to push it all under the rug. It too is silent about how the money was spent.
The Wireless Technology Research program was a betrayal of a promise to the American people. The CTIA made a commitment to get to the bottom of cell phone health concerns and then it reneged. For those of us who remember, the issue was front-page news back in 1993. At that time, there were approximately 11 million cell phone users in the United States. Today, cell phone use has increased by a factor of 25. If CTIA had kept its word, we would know a lot more today about the health risks from long-term use of a cell phone.

Will you talk about how industry and military interests have influenced research in the U.S.?
There are three major players steering the issue of electromagnetic health effects. The first is the electric utility industry, which consists of all of the major utilities and the subsidiary industries involved with generation, transmission and distribution of electricity. This is a huge industry. It represents big money and wields a great deal of political influence. It has succeeded in keeping a lid on what's known and what's done about power-frequency EMFs. There is a lot of epidemiological evidence pointing to a cancer risk (childhood leukemia) at these frequencies, which are much lower than those associated with wireless technology. In fact, I know of practically no epidemiologists—except for those working for industry—who would contest that the evidence pointing to an association with leukemia is strong. However, the utilities still won't admit there is a cancer risk. It's a disgrace. But that's what happens when so much money is at stake.
Next, there's the telecommunications industry, which includes the wireless operators (AT&T, Verizon, etc.) and the hardware manufacturers (Nokia, Motorola, etc). And of course there are all the broadcast radio and TV stations. But that's just the beginning because so many different technologies have a wireless component. Think of the computer companies (IBM, Apple etc.) and wireless Internet companies (Comcast, AT&T, etc.). This is another massive set of economic interests.
The third major player, which is somewhat out of sight but which is in fact the most important player of all, is the U.S. military and its contractors. We know these players by Eisenhower's famous phrase, the "military industrial complex."
The only people doing microwave health research in the U.S. are employed by the military and their main concern is devising electromagnetic weapons. The best known of these is a system euphemistically called "active denial." It's a microwave weapon designed to control crowds.
At the same time the military is promoting electromagnetic weapons, it is also writing the exposure standards for protecting the public from microwave radiation. The Air Force controls the process and has for many years. It makes no sense. Doctors, biologists and biophysicists should be in charge of the standard-setting process.
Let me give an example. Not long ago, a well-known microwave researcher pointed out that when you put a cell phone next to your ear, the radiation exposure will often exceed the current safety standard. That is, the ear gets overexposed. Keep in mind that the standard is not particularly strict, indeed it was written by the military and the cell phone industry. What happened next? The standards committee exempted the ear. Suddenly, the ear was not very important. It was a piece of cartilage that could withstand 10-20 times more radiation. I am not aware of a single medical doctor who was consulted during the process of relaxing the standard, but I do know that the change sailed through. This is the way the system works.
In the first Iraq war, the first weapons fired were electromagnetic weapons. The objective was to knock out the enemy's radar and communications systems. The winners of modern wars are those who have the best electronic systems. Our capacity to wage war depends on the free use of radiation-emitting systems. If you took a microwave meter to a modern aircraft carrier or a destroyer and you applied the safety standards suggested by today's data, you'd have to put these ships in mothballs. Of course that's not going to happen, and the reason the military industrial complex is so strong in this area is to make sure that it never happens.

Will you describe the history of safety standards for EMFs in the U.S., and the role played by the IEEE?
There are only two enforceable EMF emission standards in the United States and they both address microwave radiation. One is for microwave ovens set by the FDA and the other is for cell phones set by the FCC. Everything else is voluntary.
The FDA set the standard for microwave ovens close to 40 years ago. The cell phone standard was written by the IEEE, which is an engineering society. As I mentioned, the IEEE's standard-setting committee is controlled by the Air Force and Raytheon, the same people who developed the microwave crowd-control weapon. Does this make any sense? I don't think so, but very few people have objected to doing business this way.
The FCC has long made it clear that it has no expertise in biology, so when it came time for the commission to set radiofrequency (RF) protection rules for radio and TV transmitters, cell phones and towers, and other radiation-emitting equipment, the FCC staff looked around and quickly found that the IEEE was the only game in town. At one time, there was another group, the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), which was chartered by the United States Congress. The NCRP was supposed to be writing its own RF standard, but the IEEE lobbied to put them out of business and succeeded. The money was taken away from the NCRP committee and that was that.
Essentially, the users of RF and microwave technology—the military, its contractors, and the communications industry—wrote the IEEE RF standard. For example, of the two co-chairs of the committee that developed the most recent safety standard, one works for Motorola and the other for the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force. What are the odds that their safety standard serves their interests? I'd bet the ranch on it!
Having got the safety limit they wanted, the wireless companies, such as Motorola, repeat the mantra: If it meets the standard, it's safe. Have you noticed that no one markets a phone that claims to be "safer" because it exposes the user to less radiation than the others? One company in Germany tried a few years ago and they were quickly forced out of business. The company, Hagenuk, simply disappeared.
I should add that a number of countries have much tougher standards than what is recommended by the IEEE or by the International Committee on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP). Italy and Switzerland have adopted stricter limits based on a precautionary-driven approach.
We should not be doing the minimum to protect people, but doing the most without hurting the development of the technology. Such a policy has long been used for ionizing radiation, and is known as ALARA, "As Low As Reasonably Achievable." Today, Switzerland has, as far as I know, very good cell phone service and one of the toughest standards in the world. Traditionally, the Russians, the Chinese, and East European countries have had tough standards, but very few of them have adopted the U.S. approach.
Clearly, there's a major disconnect between the safety standards set by the IEEE and ICNIRP, and those countries which take a precautionary, proactive approach.

Is part of the problem a theoretical shift from safety concerns based on thermal effects to present concerns based on non-thermal effects?
Many see it that way. If, for example, you allow that power frequency electromagnetic fields (ELF EMFs) are a contributing cause to childhood leukemia, you are saying that it would be due to a non-thermal effect since heat is not known to be a cause of leukemia. There's something else going on that's activating the cancer. We don't know what the mechanism is, nor what the non-thermal effect is, but surely that's not a reason to fail to protect children from power line EMFs.
We often take steps to protect the public health even without understanding what the root cause is. The classic example is John Snow, who stopped a cholera epidemic in London in 1854 by removing the handle of a neighborhood water pump. He did not know what agent was causing the disease but his epidemiological investigation convinced him that there must be one in the water supply. The bacterium that causes cholera, Vibrio cholerae, was not isolated for another 30 years.
Further, once you allow that childhood leukemia is associated with exposures to power frequency EMFs, it begs the question of what else EMFs may be doing. There are quite a number of occupational studies linking EMF exposures on the job to a number of other health problems. The California Department of Health Services spent eight years and over $7 million dollars looking into this, and in 2002 came out with the conclusion that it is "more likely than not"—that's its terminology—that power line EMFs are linked not only to childhood leukemia, but also to adult brain cancer, Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS), and miscarriages. There are also suggestions of links to Alzheimer's disease, as well as to both male and female breast cancer.
Now, we have lots of data pointing to these associations, but, when the electric utility industry comes to a hearing, it calls on physicists and consultants to testify that such outcomes are simply impossible. Do you go to a physicist when you have appendicitis? I don't think so. Just because a physicist or a hired gun can't explain the mechanism for developing a disease, doesn't justify throwing out the epidemiology in hand. The studies clearly show higher rates of disease among those with real-world exposures to EMFs. It may turn out not to be true. I grant that. The level of certainty is not 100%. But, a precautionary approach means that we take steps to mitigate exposures even in the face of uncertainty.
One of the most interesting findings that came out of the California Department of Health Services project was the miscarriage study. They found that a key index of exposure is not the average exposure experienced by a woman, but whether she was exposed above a certain level. Women exposed to more 16 mG had more miscarriages. For comparison, the childhood leukemia data show an increase at about 3-4 mG, on average. This is a whole new way of thinking about exposures, suggesting that we begin looking at thresholds, not averages.
Was there any follow up? Not yet. I don't know anyone who is doing a similar study, but I am happy to say that one of the groups which worked on this during the California project is in the process of repeating this work and seeing whether the association holds up. In the meantime, it may be that one is better off avoiding high fields. For instance, if you are pregnant, you might not want to ride Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) in the San Francisco Bay Area during your first trimester when the risk of miscarriage is highest.

Will you speak to the complexity of EMFs associated with wireless technologies?
When people think about electromagnetic fields, they tend to think there's one physical agent, EMFs, and that we've got to control EMFs. But, in reality, there are as many types of electromagnetic fields as there are chemicals. We've catalogued on the order of a few million unique chemicals, and there is a similar variety of electromagnetic fields.
One of the first issues I got involved with during the 1970s was the PAVE PAWS radar on Cape Cod. It is still a controversial issue because of its possible ties to high rates of cancer. That unit's radar signals are so complex that it can recognize an object the size of a grapefruit at a distance of 3,000 miles. The radar can determine not only the presence of a target, but its shape and its speed. Now that's extraordinary.
Here's another way to think about the variety of signals. A radio station that broadcasts rock and roll music will transmit signals that are quite different from a station which sends out classical music or one that features Latin music. The differences are in the modulation of the carrier wave (the frequency on your radio dial).
A number of variables, including the frequency, modulation, polarization, intermittency and pulsing must be specified to fully characterize an electromagnetic field or electromagnetic radiation. My point is, every wireless signal, especially those found in the real world, is extremely complex. And, there's a large variety of them. Which of these variables are the important ones? We simply don't know.
One of the things that cell phone companies don't want you to think about is that it is very possible that the different frequencies and modulations used in the various wireless systems have different biological effects. If that is in fact the case, it means the wireless companies would have to test every type of signal they want to use. They don't want to do that. The cell phone industry would much prefer a blanket authorization, which is basically what they have now. This would be similar to giving a blanket authorization to the chemical companies or drug companies. It's like saying, one chemical or drug is just like another, go ahead and put it on the market. For very good reasons, that would never be allowed for chemicals or drugs, but it's business as usual for electromagnetic fields. Huge complexities are hidden from public view.
Now think about this: You go into a lab to run an experiment on exposures of animals and cells to electromagnetic fields. How do you mimic the real world EMF? It's quite possible that you would leave out an important characteristic of the field because we don't know what's important.
Because we don't know what's important, we do research by brute force. We are flying blind. We look at each part separately; but, all the while, we may be missing the key aspect of the field. This has been going on for years. One take-home lesson is this: If you don't want to find the answer to a problem, it's easy not to find it.

How do we solve this problem?
That's an interesting question. As it turns out, some of my biggest fights have not been with the military industrial complex, but with the biomedical community and the National Institutes of Health in particular. A colleague of mine, who is a reporter, called me one day and said, I want you to know I was just at a seminar for journalists held by NIH and one of the senior executives projected my name on the screen and said, "Never talk to this guy." Now what the hell was that about, I wondered?
I've been in the business for 30 years and, believe me, you don't survive in such a controversial area if you get your facts wrong. The truth is, few people want to get to the bottom of the EMF problem. The National Cancer Institute—the NCI—has its own study that shows a link to childhood leukemia from power-frequency EMFs. Yet NCI epidemiologists have never been willing to admit it. Instead, they found a loophole. It's astonishing.
The voluntary safety standard says you can expose a child in the United States to 999 mG all the time, 24/7. In contrast, a large number of epidemiological studies link childhood leukemia to an exposure of about 3 or 4 mG. That's a huge difference.
Under a lot of public pressure, the National Cancer Institute did a study. Their working hypothesis was that there is a link to childhood leukemia at 3 mG. They didn't see it at 3mG—they saw it at 4 mG. Since they saw it at 4mG, their hypothesis was rejected. And they walked away. The NCI has never conceded that there might indeed be a link between EMFs and leukemia. It would have been fair to put a qualification on the association found at 4 mG. But you've got to tell the public.
The U.S. EMF-childhood leukemia study was one of the largest in the world and it dominates the two, international meta-analyses that show links between childhood leukemia and EMFs. Still, the NCI refuses to come clean.
Why? I just don't have the answer. It is bewildering that health professionals are so unwilling to act on their own data. In this regard, David Carpenter comes to mind as an important exception. He was in charge of one of the largest projects at the state level on this issue back in the early 1980s. He told me that when he started, he did not believe that there could be a link between EMFs and leukemia. Nonetheless, as a public health official, he decided that he had to check it out. He funded the first repetition of a study done in 1979 by Nancy Werthheimer and Ed Leeper, who were the first to show the link. When Wertheimer and Leeper's findings were confirmed, he changed his outlook. He was moved by the data. But, Carpenter is the exception. Most people would rather stick with their preconceived ideas and bury the data and not deal with its implications. I might add that at the same time, the electric power industry did whatever possible to marginalize Nancy Wertheimer's work. What it did not do was to sponsor a replication effort. Luckily, Carpenter saw what needed to be done and did it.
One way to get around the denial of EMF hazards is to take a completely different approach. Rather than look at the risks posed by EMFs, we can look at the benefits. For example, a paper was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by an Israeli group on the treatment of brain tumors. In a very small clinical trial, the researchers found that by using low frequency, 100 kHz, electromagnetic fields, they were able to destroy life-threatening brain tumors. Current theory can't explain why or how, but they are pursuing it. Larger clinical trials are now underway.
My point is that if you can show the biomedical efficacy of these fields, then you've countered the argument of the physicists who claim this violates the laws of physics and is therefore impossible. I've come to believe that the success of biomedical applications may be the only way to convince a majority of health experts that they ought to take EMFs seriously. It's perhaps the only way to negate the influence of physicists who say that since they can't explain it, it can't be real.

If, however, research is pushed and pulled by looking at risks on one side and benefits on the other, how do we advance knowledge about what goes on between EMF and living systems so that we can understand the bigger picture?
One thing I've noticed after working for 30 years in this field is that all of the great work—all the work that has brought scientific knowledge forward—was funded out of individual's back pockets. The important studies were not funded by the military or industry or by the NIH. They were funded by people who had ideas and who wanted to test those ideas. They moved heaven and earth to get the work done. That's how we've made progress. It's the Nancy Werthheimers, the Sam Milhams, the David Carpenters, that push us forward. Yes, I am talking about a small number of people, but they are a very active contingent. They are driven to do the science that's missing. Real advancements are probably going to come when we least expect them because they will be done by those working outside the system.
But, don't get the wrong impression. It's an uphill battle all the way. I've seen many careers ruined over the years, often only because people had the courage to speak out. They've had their data taken away from them, and their funding. One of the giants in this field is Robert Becker. He came into the hazard side from the biomedical applications side. His book, The Body Electric, is a classic and I would recommend it to anyone. But the first thing you should read is the epilogue. What happened to Bob Becker is a clear lesson about what goes on in the politics of science. The science is complicated enough, but, when you overlay it with politics, it can be a recipe for disaster. He tells the story of what happened to him after he got involved in a power line battle in New York state. He spoke out because he felt he had a public duty to get involved. Interestingly, it was this power line fight that prompted the New York State Power Line Project, which was run by David Carpenter, who confirmed the Wertheimer-Leeper study linking EMFs to childhood leukemia.
What's so fascinating is that after he entered the power line fray—and paid for it dearly—Becker never could find out who was trying to shut him up. It's the stuff of paranoia and nightmares, but Becker was no paranoid. He is a first-rate scientist who published in the best journals, and enjoyed an international reputation. The powers that be just went after him until they were successful in closing down his laboratory.

What's your forecast for the future of EMF science on the world stage? Might the Internet facilitate international efforts, for example, in ways that free EMF research from business or military interests?
There's irony here. Thanks to modern communications and thanks to the Internet, those of us involved in EMF issues can cooperate—especially on the international level—on a scale that was impossible before. Indeed, if my only goal was to cover what's happening in the U.S., I could take an extended vacation because practically nothing is happening in this country. A lot of the research comes out of Scandinavia, which is light-years ahead of us on all sorts of environmental and occupational risks. We just ran a story on an epidemiological study of those exposed to AM radio radiation, which came from Korea. I don't think anyone in the U.S. has ever done a health study of radio transmitters. If you want to look at the most interesting radar research, you'd have to go to two small countries: Latvia and Croatia. Why? Because the big countries don't want to touch this stuff—it might stop them from using their military technology.
International cooperation is now crucial. There are 13 countries participating in the Interphone study, which is looking into possible cancer risks from the use of cell phones. I should add that one country is not participating: the U.S. Even though we now have close to 250 million Americans using cell phones, we are standing apart from the rest of the world.

Is there an inherent, American chauvinism at work here?
Absolutely. If research wasn't done here in the U.S., we tend to ignore it. The implication is that it's not worth much. Frankly, when it comes to occupational or environmental issues, we should just move the whole operation to Scandinavia. Yet, even some of the policy people in Scandinavia are terrified of the implications of the cell phone issue.

One of the issues, surely, will become electrosensitivity in various populations. Will you speak to this growing controversy?
This is a major controversy. I can't prove to you that electromagnetic sensitivity actually exists. In fact, I suspect that a lot of people who claim to be electrosensitive have other issues, but there are indeed people who suffer from from being exposed to EMFs of one kind or another. It's very hard to know who's who.
But if there are electrosensitives in the population—and I suspect there are some out there—they will pay a price for our love of wireless technologies. We want instant and constant access to communications and the Internet. To do that, we're changing the very nature of the human electromagnetic environment. It's happening all over the world with Wi-Fi and WiMax. Many cable and DSL modems allow you to set up Wi-Fi hot spots in your home. The long-term risk is that we're going to 'select' out those who are electrosensitives. It's not very different from the problem of selecting out polar bears.
There are some studies—and this doesn't get any attention in the press—that suggest a non-linearity in dose-response relationships. That is, you may see a stronger effect of EMFs at lower doses of exposure than at higher doses. Right now, we're working with two models for measuring biological effects. One is the energy transfer or thermal model, which just pumps energy and looks at the effects of energy. The other is an information model, which looks at the effects of information transfers. As Robert Becker noted, if we're asking how salamanders grow back a cut-off tail, we ought to look for what types of signals are being sent, and what kind of information is transferred, that prompts a new tail to grow. And equally important, what tells the tail to stop growing.
Ross Adey, who died a few years ago, was one of the giants in the EMF field. He used an image that I can never get out of my mind. If you take a standard 9-volt battery and put one pole in Seattle and the other in Los Angeles, it will generate enough of a current in the Pacific Ocean that it can be detected by a shark. Once you think of the issue this way, it's very difficult to believe that all of today's EMFs cannot be having any biological effects.
Living bodies are obviously chemical bodies, but they're also electromagnetic. We can't afford to deny it. Much of my career in this field is based on that supposition. Maybe it was a mistake. I don't think so.

Why do you think media and other groups such as environmentalists, are as uninterested as they are in the biological effects of wireless EMFs?
If you look at the bylines of the reporters who are covering the EMF issue in the mainstream press, you'll see that the same reporter rarely touches it twice. Some of the best stories—and she should get a lot of credit for them—were written by Nancy McVicar, who recently retired from the Florida Sun-Sentinel. She tracked EMF issues since 1993, when the Reynard brain tumor case was first aired on Larry King. If a journalist knows the territory, he or she can put a new finding into context. But if you don't know much about it, isolated findings don't mean anything.
Today, it is close to criminal that the U.S. press has not reported recent findings on long latency tumor effects associated with cell phones. As I reported any number of times in Microwave News, it's front page news in Europe—in Switzerland, England, Scandinavia—and it's not even in the back pages in the United States. It is totally ignored.
I often point out that none of the institutions that we as a society rely upon to get new ideas out to the public is interested in this issue. Right now, the environmental groups, the consumer groups, the labor groups, the conservation groups —they're all silent. It's as if Consumers Union and the others have completely lost track of EMFs and they don't care about what's going on. Every year, the Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports, puts out a report on cell phones. Topics include: What are the best service plans? Which company has the fewest dropped calls? What's the cutest phone with a Mickey Mouse logo? Yet, not a word about health. And this is the premier consumer organization in the country.
Does anyone care that cell phone companies are targeting our children as their next big market? Does anyone think it may be a good idea to protect the next generation from an avoidable health risk? It doesn't seem so.
It's baffling.

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