So now I have to worry about "dirty electricity"??

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People are afraid of what that don't understand. The media makes money by sowing FUD (fear, uncertainty & doubt). I have never seen a media story about anything of which I had first hand knowledge, that was correct and not misleading in some way. Makes me wonder about the rest. Everything is harmful in excess. Some things, like the sun, are both harmful and essential. You'll never get out of this life alive. The people who want to "protect" you will get laws passed and cause all kinds of trouble, but they will never give you any guarantees that you won't die should you actually take their advice. You will never be allowed to see the raw data for studies, only the conclusions, and I usually interpret things differently than others.

Just some random thoughts. Of things I worry about, exposure to common electromagnetic fields doesn't even make the list. There's too many other things that will get you first and I suspect that many are as yet unknown and haven't even been studied.

CH
 
Few outside broadcasting know one of the worst reception areas is often directly under the tower. Transmitter rooms are notorious for the difficulty of picking up a clean off-air signal, the CN Tower a classic example. A room full of high power transmitters, megawatts radiating directly overhead, no reception. That's what broadcast antennas are designed to do, project radiation out efficiently. Near-ground bounce results in severe multi-path.

BTW Conrad, I've been in media for closing on 30 years and your take on its accuracy is dead on.
 
Examples? Without mention of frequency, length of exposure and era it's a nearly meaningless statement.

Era=Soviet Union

Application=across the board. Levels of exposure and permitted durations of exposure from DC to 10's of GHz were less by factors of 100 or more compared to western levels.

Who pulled your chain? This is to the best of my recollection from a university module on satellite communications about 20 years ago. It's not that big an issue to me, I'm just pointing out that there are a lot of vested interests impacting this data and its interpretation. If you stick a bunch of doctors together and ask for their conservative recommendations with regard to exposure in the absence of commercial pressure, they're gonna cover their ***** like any sensible human being, aren't they? If there's a mobile phone developer paying their wages the results might come out a bit differently.

I, for one, have anyway a healthy apettite for risk (which we all know is good for the economy) and would probably increase my phone usage were it conclusively demonstrated that there was an associated health risk.

w
 
Few outside broadcasting know one of the worst reception areas is often directly under the tower.
And apparently radiation levels are highest there as well. In a test with chick embryos the one under the antenna died in all three batches.
http://medind.nic.in/jae/t06/i2/jaet06i2p19.pdf

And I always thought I was safe because our bridge in the navy was under the radar tower. ;)

By the way. All radiation with gsm type frequencies and strengths on embryos. Lead to higher mortality rates of the embryos. What the significance of this scientific fact is, everyone will have to determine themselves.
 
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Personally I don't worry about radiation of my cell phone. But don't like the way dect (wireless home phone) works. Most if not all cellular phones try to operate at a minimal power level. I.e. if they are close to the antenna. They transmit at a low power level. If they are far away or there is an object between it and the antenna..it increases power levels. Dect just blasts away at 100mW. And I suppose also continually polls the "main" station to see if it is still there.

I have also flashed my wireless router with software that allows me to alter the transmission power. I've set it to 19mW instead of the default 25 or 27mW. And strangle operation between 2400 en 0900 hours. Since I don't use it between those hours and my reception is still always good these measures in no way interfere with the functionality of my router, but I've still minimized radiation. I can't change what my neighbours do with their wireless routers. But the "received" levels are still lower than the 19mW in my home. (Checked with my laptop in various positions at home, and their signals are always lower)

From this post it seems as if I'm obsessed. But I'm not. Why do I do it then? Because I can.:)
 
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I have heard from reliable sources (political news) that using a cell phone can increase brain temperature by one degree.
It is a fraction of one degree. But the thermal effect is not something to worry about. Exercise or the sun will increase the temperature much more. According to all scientific research there is actually nothing to worry about. Except maybe that frequent mobile phone users are less open minded. (Dutch research) but that effect is not causal I think.
 
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Corben,
Here's the article, and it is qualified with a question mark in the title.
Thanks for that article. It's pretty much what I suspected: The author has bought the whole thing and is entirely uncritical of the claims. He doesn't just report the stuff, he's clearly trying to sell the ideas.

The episode at the school is quite interesting. There's probably a lot more to that than meets the eye. They published an article about it: A new electromagnetic exposure metric: High frequency voltage transients associated with increased cancer incidence in teachers in a california school. I wish someone more qualified than me could take a look at that. It reads a bit funny: For example they mention that they were kicked out of the school trying to measure the dirtyness of the mains outlets. They do not discuss the relationship between what they measured and the actual fields generated by the dirty mains (they suspect that the transient voltages on the mains are capacitively coupled to the teachers thus causing cancer). The analysis they've done on their data seems suspicious too and I don't think it supports their conclusion that HF transients were strongly associated with cancer, except in the trivial sense that they might have had a bit more cancer than usual and the school might have dirty mains (the school probably also had a roof, so that too 'strongly associates' with the cancers).


Regarding research into non-ionizing radiation, I recall hearing about an experiment where cellular activity was somehow changed by low-power non-ionizing radiation in a cell culture. Might have been that some gene expression was different than in the control. Unfortunately I can't remember more about that, though I suspect that the results were bogus (it's very hard to do that kind of experiments, so bad results are to be expected), but if confirmed it's pretty interesting, since it would be a previously unknown phenomenon.

Never the less, even if there was such an (im)plausible mechanism, way too many different symptoms are attributed to NIR by "electrosensitives" for all of them to be caused by it. While probably not nearly all "electrosensitives" are hypochondriacs, I think that they do attribute their symptoms to the wrong cause, not unlike the beliefs in some cultures that illnesses are often caused by curses laid by evil witches and such.
 
The whole EMF thing made Paul Brodeur a rich man. And it is, of course, total rubbish. There's a rather clinical debunking in the fun book "Science Under Siege." One of the lovely things people ignore when throwing out scare numbers is the effect of the conductivity of the human body...

I find it more than amusing that the same people who are scared by the "threat" of EMF are happy to use magnetic therapy.
 
Era=Soviet Union

Assertion? You have a curious concept of proof and eras. The Soviet Union lasted 70 years? If their exposure guidelines remained static after 1917 then what you say makes sense but it's hardly to their credit.
Bas, EMF isn't measured with chicks and your linked paper doesn't mention towers. I also note they used a SAR figure that isn't calibrated for eggs. It sounds like they tested the effect of surgically implanting an atypically high power phone operating 24/7 into a uterus. I agree that might be hazardous.
 
Bas, EMF isn't measured with chicks and your linked paper doesn't mention towers
Indeed it does not mention towers. But it does mention antenna. Which I sorta interpreted as a mini tower ;)
From the paper: "There was one interesting observation that the embryo placed just below the antenna was dead in the exposed groups of all the three batches."
 
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