#1205: GQ Magazine: Warning: Your Cell Phone May Be Hazardous to Your Health
Message #1203 mentioned the investigative cell phone article by Christopher Ketcham in GQ Mazazine and this message follows it up further. Even though the article is primarily aimed at the American audience the problem is universal: the involvement of political and corporate entities in suppressing and controlling science to protect their interests to the detriment of public health. Highly recommended reading.
Don
GQ Magazine: Warning: Your Cell Phone May Be Hazardous to Your Health
Ever worry that that gadget you spend hours holding next to your head might be damaging your brain? Well, the evidence is starting to pour in, and it’s not pretty. So why isn’t anyone in America doing anything about it?
By Christopher Ketcham
February 2010
Exerpt:
Earlier this winter, I met an investment banker who was diagnosed with a brain tumor five years ago. He’s a managing director at a top Wall Street firm, and I was put in touch with him through a colleague who knew I was writing a story about the potential dangers of cell-phone radiation. He agreed to talk with me only if his name wasn’t used, so I’ll call him Jim. He explained that the tumor was located just behind his right ear and was not immediately fatal””the five-year survival rate is about 70 percent. He was 35 years old at the time of his diagnosis and immediately suspected it was the result of his intense cell-phone usage. “Not for nothing,” he said, “but in investment banking we’ve been using cell phones since 1992, back when they were the Gordon-Gekko-on-the-beach kind of phone.” When Jim asked his neurosurgeon, who was on the staff of a major medical center in Manhattan, about the possibility of a cell-phone-induced tumor, the doctor responded that in fact he was seeing more and more of such cases””young, relatively healthy businessmen who had long used their phones obsessively. He said he believed the industry had discredited studies showing there is a risk from cell phones. “I got a sense that he was pissed off,” Jim told me. A handful of Jim’s colleagues had already died from brain cancer; the more reports he encountered of young finance guys developing tumors, the more certain he felt that it wasn’t a coincidence. “I knew four or five people just at my firm who got tumors,” Jim says. “Each time, people ask the question. I hear it in the hallways.”
SNIP
Link to the full article:
http://www.gq.com/cars-gear/gear-and-gadgets/201002/warning-cell-phone-radiation
Message from the author, Chris Ketcham:
Hey all “” I spent almost a year working on this piece about cell-phone radiation “” find it online at http://www.gq.com/cars-gear/gear-and-gadgets/201002/warning-cell-phone-radiation, or in the February hard copy of the magazine “” interviewing dozens of sources, reading scores of reports, and the bad news is in: Cell-phone radiation, now being pumped directly into the brains of 4.5 billion handset users worldwide, is likely causing havoc in the electrical systems by which our brains and bodies operate. All biology is electric, as one of my sources tells me in the article. If you add massive levels of electropollution such as cell-phone microwaves into the environment, you”™re going to disturb the functioning of living systems, with possibly huge ramifications over the long term: brain tumors, cancers, weird neurological disorders, sperm die-offs, genetic damage, behavioral changes, sleep changes, changes in learning and memory and mental acuity. Similar data is being gathered about the dangers of wifi radiation, which operates at microwave frequencies not very different and often exactly the same as those frequencies used in cell-phone technology. Anyway, read about it, weep, smash your cell-phone, or don”™t. To quote one of the scientists in the piece: “The public should know if they are taking a risk with cell phones. What we”™re doing is a grand world experiment without informed consent.”¯
Cheers,
Chris Ketcham