Raise awareness of environmental health issues in order to better protect our children and future generations.

01 March 2017

The Wireless Elephant in the Room

"True prevention means first removing from our lives those things that create biological dis-regulation and dis-ease, while identifying and proactively increasing the things that create balance and wellness."

The Wireless Elephant in the Room

by Camilla Rees, manhattanneighbors.org, posted on 5 February 2017

An overview of the rapidly emerging public health issue from cell phones, wireless devices and wireless infrastructure— and how the growth in these technologies is a little understood driver of poor health outcomes and costs.

“The Wireless Elephant in the Room” was written by Camilla Rees, MBA, Senior Policy Advisor, National Institute for Science, Law and Public Policy and Founder, ElectromagneticHealth.org and ManhattanNeighbors.org.

Hard copies in booklet form are available through Amazon.

THE WIRELESS ELEPHANT

We would certainly all agree that health and environmental consciousness has been increasing over the past two decades. Organic foods, yoga centers, mind body programs, health clubs and the healing arts have proliferated. Even healthy ‘fast food’ restaurants have arrived, and large food brands are beginning to go GMO-free. As consumers, we are increasingly making ‘green’ choices that support mother Earth, and which respect our intrinsic relationship with it.

PREVENTION

Why then, despite all this interest in health and in living ‘green’, do we have over 133 million people with a chronic illness in the U.S.— approximately 45% of the population1, and growing? Promotion of ‘prevention,’ and, more recently, ‘rationing’ care, has been the response to high costs driven by chronic illnesses. But in looking for solutions to costs, we may be ‘missing the forest for the trees’, and also not understanding the true meaning of prevention.

The word ‘prevention’ rings hollow unless one is seeking to eliminate the factors that can lead to disease in the first place. These include unhealthy lifestyle choices, how we respond to stress, heavy metal and chemical toxicity, exposures to electromagnetic fields (EMFs), petroleum-based fertilizers, the weed killer glyphosate, GMO foods, poor nutrition, difficult relationships, etc. Today, ‘prevention’ instead typically means early detection of disease with tests like mammography, pap smear and PSA; manipulation of one’s physiology with pharmaceuticals and vaccines (which can have their own negative side effects); and, perhaps, depending on the doctor, advice to eat more vegetables and exercise. But prevention in the full sense of the word means something else entirely, and we ignore this at our peril.

True prevention means first removing from our lives those things that create biological dis-regulation and dis-ease, while identifying and proactively increasing the things that create balance and wellness.

THE UNSEEN ELEPHANT

A health care system that does not advocate for dramatic reduction in cell phone and wireless radiation exposures ignores over six decades of scientific research showing biological and health effects from electromagnetic fields, including recent research from the NIH.2 3 It ignores repeated resolutions from scientists and physicians worldwide calling for caution, and the classification of cell phone and wireless radiation (radiofrequency radiation or RFR) by the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) as a ‘Possible Carcinogen’ (Group 2B).4 It ignores the experience of people in every corner of the globe with life-altering, sometimes debilitating, symptoms from acute and chronic exposures to wireless technologies. And, it turns a blind eye to the DNA-damage consequences of these wireless conveniences for ourselves today, as well as for future generations.

In parallel with the growth of chronic illnesses since the 1990s, it is hard not to notice that the amount of wireless communication infrastructure in our midst has been exploding. Four and a half billion people use a cell phone today, whereas in the early 1990s most people didn’t own a cell phone. There are now millions of cell towers radiating the planet, many hundreds of millions WiFi networks5 and billions of wireless devices connected to them.6

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