The feng shui art of Space Clearing - by Karen Kingston

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Mobile phones

How to reduce cellphone health risks

Written by Karen Kingston Wednesday, 12 May 2010 10:56

I remember once being asked for my mobile phone number by a shop assistant in Australia so she could call me when my photocopying order was finished. When I explained that I didn't have a phone, she looked at me in astonishment and asked, "What planet are you from?"

For many people, life without a cellphone is unthinkable. Increasingly it's not even possible to own a bank account or sign up for certain services without having a cellphone number to enter in the required box.

So what can be done to at least reduce the possibility of health risks when using one? I do own a cellphone now but use it only a few times a month when absolutely necessary and follow this well-researched advice which is copied, with permission, from the Powerwatch website:

Reducing your exposure with your current phone

Use your phone only when necessary, and keep the call short
Where possible, try to only use your phone in areas with the best signal, as this can reduce the emissions by up to 500 times
Indoors, use your phone near the window and make sure it is between your body and the window
Hold the phone away from your body immediately after dialing, as the phone uses maximum power until the call is connected
Where possible, do not hold the phone next to your eyes, breasts, testicles, kidneys, liver or abdomen if pregnant - ideally, keep the phone away from your body (such as in a bag) when it is not in use
If you have to keep it next to your body, a location such as rear trouser pocket will help keep it away from major organs, and try to make sure the antenna is on the outer side.
Using a mobile phone in a car or train traps the fields inside the metal frame of the vehicle, and should be avoided except in an emergency.
If you are not imminently expecting a phone call, you can greatly reduce your exposure by having the phone switched off when you carry it around instead of just on standby, as your phone contacts the nearest mast every time you move into a different masts coverage, and also checks regularly even when you are stationary - this contact is always made at the phone's full power

Buying a new phone

Buy a phone with a long 'talk time' - this normally means a more efficient phone
Phones with external antennas are more likely to focus the radiation further away from your head, and are favourable to internal antenna models
Buy a phone with a low SAR, but don't rely on that to guarantee your safety. SARs vary by a factor up to about 5. Some high SAR phones are actually very efficient and normally work at low power, some low SAR phones are inefficient and normally have to work at high power. The smaller phones often have higher SARs and therefore are likely to produce higher exposure levels.
Your exposure can be greatly reduced by using an air-tube hands-free kit.
Do not rely on unscientific 'gizmos' to give you the protection you need. If you wish to use one, use your common sense as well.

More information about cellphones: www.powerwatch.co.uk

Other articles by Karen Kingston
Mobile phones
Will you let your child use one?
Longest ever mobile phone study begins

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Longest ever mobile phone study begins

Written by Karen Kingston Wednesday, 12 May 2010 09:28

COSMOS, short for 'cohort study on mobile communications', is a new study announced in the UK on 22 April 2010 that will investigate the health effects of long-term mobile phone (cellphone) usage. It will be the longest study ever made, involving 250,000 people aged 18-69 in five European countries over 20-30 years.

The UK-based part of the study will be led by Imperial College London, who explain on their website, " Studies of short term use of mobile phones and health have been reassuring, other than well known associations with risk of motor accidents. However, there are still some uncertainties about the health effects of mobile phone use, since some diseases take many years to develop, and so far few people have been using mobile phones for that period of time."

In fact, a huge number of studies have already concluded that there can be significant health risks associated with prolonged mobile phone use (see www.powerwatch.org.uk/science/studies.asp). One of the most recent, conducted by Lennart Hardell and Michael Carlberg in Sweden in 2009, found that people who begin using a mobile phone before the age of 20 were more than 5 times as likely to develop a brain tumour. With so many children using mobile phones, and at younger and younger ages, this is serious cause for concern.

Many people have likened the denial of health effects associated with mobile phone use to the line taken by asbestos and tobacco industries in the past. Professor Leif Salford, Head of Research at Lund University, Sweden, has called the use of mobile phones "the largest human biological experiment ever", and has warned that many of the current generation of young people who use them are likely to suffer from Alzheimer's disease by middle age. I hope he's wrong. Imagine what our world will be like if he's right. I don't know any teenager who doesn't own a mobile phone and use it all the time.

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Will you let your child use one?

Written by Karen Kingston Saturday, 17 January 2009 06:43

Mother and child with mobile phone The governments of the world are finally beginning to acknowledge health risks associated with mobile phones (or cellphones, as they are called in the USA). Following an almost unanimous vote (522 to 16) by the European Parliament in September 2008 to bring in much stricter controls for radiation levels of mobile phones, the French government has now announced a proposal to:

Ban all advertising of mobile phones to children under 12 years
Make it illegal to sell mobile phones designed for children under 6 years old
Make it compulsory for all mobile phones to be sold with headsets

Other countries have issued similar recommendations but so far none have made them law as France is proposing to do. I hear there is even billboard advertising going up in major French cities sending out the message, ‘Let’s keep them healthy, away from mobile phones!'

Many studies have shown health risks associated with mobile phone use, with children particularly at risk because their skulls are softer and thinner than adults so there is considerably more microwave penetration.

At the first international conference on mobile phones and health held in 2008, top oncologist Professor Lennart Hardell of the University Hospital in Orebro, Sweden, reported on data from 18 studies done in the USA, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, UK and Japan, which concluded that people who started using a mobile phone before the age of 20 have more than five-fold increase in glioma (a type of brain cancer) and are five times more likely to get tumours of the auditory nerve, which usually leads to deafness. This does not mean that people who start using phones after they are 20 years old are risk-free – they are still twice as likely to have these types of health problems – but it is children and teenagers who are being pinpointed as being most at risk.

With over 50% of American children and 40% of British under-10s now owning a mobile phone, David Carpenter, Dean of the School of Public Health at the State University of New York commented, “We may be facing a public health crisis in an epidemic of brain cancers as a result of mobile phone use."

What other governments are recommending

The Russian Ministry of Health recommends that mobile phones should only be used by people over 18.
In Canada, the Department of Public Health in Toronto recommends that teenagers should limit phone calls to less then 10 minutes, and children under 8 should not use mobile phones at all except in the event of an emergency.
In Finland, the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority recommends that children should use mobile phones as little as possible, use texting rather than voice, use hands-free and never use mobile phones inside cars or trains.
The UK Chief Medical Officers “strongly advise” that children and young people only use mobile phones for essential purposes and keep all calls short.

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Mobile phones

Written by Karen Kingston Thursday, 02 October 2008 07:47

The world population is currently estimated to be around 6.7 billion. Of these, over 3 billion people use mobile phones. That’s around 45% of humanity involved in what some experts call the greatest human experiment ever conducted.

The link between nicotine and cancer still has not been completely proved, but so much circumstantial evidence now exists that governments around the world have simply had to accept that cigarettes are not good for us. I predict it will be the same with mobile phones, although hopefully it won’t take so many years for the hazards to be accepted as fact. While some studies find a causal link between mobile phone usage and health problems and others do not, the pervasive effects are totally obvious to anyone who has developed the ability to perceive and read energies. I can FEEL microwave radiation when using a mobile phone, or even standing near someone who has one turned on.

In some of the workshops I teach there is a little demonstration I often give to participants, which graphically illustrates the effect of mobile phones on us all. I first make sure that everyone in the room has their mobile phone turned off and then have a volunteer come out to the front of the class. Holding their mobile phone by their side in one hand, I have them extend their free arm out at shoulder level so that it is parallel to the ground and then I press down on their wrist with my hand, asking them to resist my pressure. This is a very basic form of applied kinesiology or muscle testing. Having established their muscle strength with their phone turned off, I have them turn it on and then we test again. Even big, strong men cannot keep their arm up. They become significantly weaker, which surprises the heck out of them.

But I’m not finished yet. The next thing I do is give the phone to someone in the audience to hold, two or three rows back, and then I test again. Usually there is some improvement in muscle strength but not to the original level with the phone turned off. So we continue in this way, passing the phone back a few rows each time until the volunteer tests strong again. In some instances the phone is passed all the way to the back of a class of 200 people and then one of my assistants has to take the phone and leave the room before the volunteer tests strong again. And if I were to test everyone in the room, I would come up with similar results. A single mobile phone, when turned on, can affect that many people for that wide a radius.

You may be interested to know, by the way, that there are two substances I’ve so far found that everyone tests weak for in this way – mobile phones and coffee. If I substitute the mobile phone for some coffee beans, the volunteer will become just as weak. The difference is that if I pass the coffee beans back through the audience, the effect is not perpetuated. Coffee is an inert substance. It does not constantly radiate microwaves as a mobile phone does.

Now I know very well that this little demonstration I do in workshops would not in any way pass as a credible scientific experiment, but boy, does it get people's attention in a way that cold facts and figures do not. And anyone can do this test. Just grab a friend with a mobile phone, make sure all other mobile phones in the vicinity are turned off, and muscle test the person in the way I’ve described. Then have them do the same with you. It’s pretty stunning to feel your arm go so inexplicably weak when you are trying so hard to keep it strong. It certainly makes you wonder what the mobile phone is doing to the rest of your body too.

So am I suggesting that everyone stops using their mobile phones? In an ideal world, yes. Experts say it can take 10–20 years for brain tumours to develop, so they expect us to start seeing the full effects of mobile phone use in the next 5 years. But brain tumours are already the most common form of cancer in young people under 19 years old (children’s skulls are thinner than adults so much more susceptible to microwave radiation), and it doesn’t take a genius to look at the steep increase in the number of children using mobile phones in recent years to ponder if there might perhaps be a correlation. Other documented side effects are concentration problems, memory loss, DNA damage, breast cancer (in men and women), and fertility problems.

More worrying still is the suspected link between mobile phone usage and DNA damage, which Dr Henry Lai, professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington, Seattle, who has been researching the effects of this type of radiation for 24 years, warns can lead to degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cancer. I’ll leave you to discover for yourself the endless experiments that have been done on mice, rats and all kinds of other creatures except humans. We are unwittingly running our own massive experiment involving 45% of the human race, with the other 55% currently acting as a control group.

And do I own a mobile phone myself? Yes, and you’ll no doubt laugh when I tell you the make and model. It’s a Nokia 6100, which is practically antique and definitely not cool. But I find it far less invasive than the new souped-up models, and that’s more important to me than owning a fashion item.

And do I use it? Well, there are only 2 people in the world who know my mobile phone number so I only turn it on once or twice a week to check for messages, and I use it at most 5 minutes per week for making calls and sometimes not at all for months on end. It’s not that I’m fearful or trying to be saintly. I just don’t like the way it blasts my head and makes me feel dizzy and nauseous.

So if you absolutely can’t live without your mobile phone, do I have any suggestions for how to limit the effects? For this I refer you to a report published in February 2008 by Vini Gautam Khurana PhD, FRACS, entitled Mobile Phones and Brain Tumours – A Public Health Concern. Available as a download at www.brain-surgery.us, it is the result of 14 months’ objective research by the author, encompassing over 100 sources of recent scientific and medical studies on the topic. In the final pages, he gives his recommendations, which I have summarized here and added some comments of my own in brackets:

1) Always use a landline phone to make calls if you have a choice (and be considerate enough to call people on their landline rather than their mobile phone if possible).

2) If you must use a mobile phone, use it in speakerphone mode and keep it at least 20 cm (8 inches) away from you.

3) Minimise the use of Bluetooth devices and unshielded wired-earphones for mobile phones (Bluetooth devices transmit radiation much more deeply into the head than regular mobile phones, and unshielded ear-pieces and headsets can put more microwave raditation into your head than the mobile phone itself).

4) Adults need to minimise the time spent using mobile phones.

5) Children should only use mobile phones in situations of real emergency.

I would also add to this list that the worst place to use a mobile phone is inside a car, because the microwave signals bounce around inside the metal shell, making the effects much worse. You can therefore imagine how unthrilled I am to hear that many major airlines are soon planning to enable mobile phone use within aircraft. People want it, so they will give them what they want. Then again, they used to allow smoking on airplanes, didn’t they?

More information about cellphones: www.powerwatch.co.uk

Other articles by Karen Kingston
Will you let your child use one?
Longest ever mobile phone study begins
How to reduce cellphone health risks

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