Radiation dangers from electronic gadgets

For years, people have become increasingly worried about the dangers of high-frequency radiation from cell phones, wireless telephones, routers, the rear side of microwave ovens, and cell sites within 400 meters of homes and places of study and work, as well as from low-frequency sources of radiation such as AC high-voltage wires, power transformers, and house wires and extension wires passing close to the headboards of beds.

There were studies on low-frequency radiation dating back to the 1990s. The studies, published in the Scientific American magazine, showed strange effects of low-frequency radiation on bacteria and plants growing beneath 150,000-volt cable towers. There were also reports in a local magazine about a batch of seminarians one by one dying of leukemia over the years from prolonged exposure as students to high-voltage cables strung close to their seminary, and of a radio station owner developing leukemia after retiring extremely wealthy. And since the 1990s, there has been anecdotal evidence of brain tumors in people keeping cell phones on their ears 12/7, and a flurry of cases of ADHD in young children (who are particularly vulnerable to this hazard). All of this evidence was played down as inconclusive in studies conducted in several countries by communication enterprises.

A group of girl-students in North Jutland, Denmark, after noticing the effect of home electronic devices on their ability to concentrate in school and to fall asleep at night, made a study of the effects of high-frequency radiation and won an award for their “very elegant piece of work, their wealth of detail and exemplary precision, and their intelligent choice of watercress plants (as the target organism)…. Not only that,  researchers in the UK, the Netherlands, and Sweden have shown great interest in the project”:  https://ph.news.yahoo.com/wifi-kill-house-plants-090903840.html

The plants exposed to the radiation did not grow, and some even died. The frightened girls now keep their cell phones very far from their beds, and always turn off the computers in their homes.

You can sleep with your cell phone in the next room, resort to your phone’s speakers or earphones when using your cell phone, (re)locate any routers inside your houses far from where family members work or congregate, turn off your computer when not needed; but what do you do about high- or low-frequency emitters in your workplace or school? What do you do about power transformers and high-voltage wires strung along the street just outside your bedroom? And what can be done about cell phone towers less than 400 meters from your home, or about nonpassive microwave radio communication antennas, though moderately distant, aimed in the general direction of where you and your children live? Is this not something that the Department of Health should look into, as rooftop cell phone towers proliferate without regard to their long-term effects on the people living within proximate range?

—BENJAMIN AGUNOD,

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