Nexus - 0228 - New Times Magazine-pages

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The RadioWave- Cancer Connection The RadioWave- Connection Cancer If radiowaves have been linked with cancer, should we allow our governments ‘licence to kill' by continuing to control and overload the electromagnetic spectrum? This is an article on electromagnetic fields and the potential health hazards associated with exposure to them. Author Dr Marjorie Lundquist, based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is a Ph.D. physicist and a certified industrial hygienist who has studied this issue for a number of years. Industrial hygiene is a 70-year-old profession devoted to the preven- tion of diseases resulting from exposure to hazardous environmental agents—original- ly, agents in the workplace. Although preventing disease in people exposed to electro- magnetic fields is an industrial hygiene problem, no qualified industrial hygiene profes- sional has ever been asked to solve this problem! Indeed, of the many organisations sponsoring evaluation of the data and reviews of the scientific literature, none has ever commissioned a qualified industrial hygiene professional to perform such a task! With Dr Lundquist's article, this is the first time that a specialist in prevention of environ- mental disease has addressed this issue. — ES he United States began to be subjected to artificially-generated electromagnetic radiation on a large scale in the 1920s when commercial radio broadcasting began. The very first such station licensed in this country was KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Westinghouse obtained the licence on 27 October 1920 and still operates the station today. Every government licenses broadcast transmitters. The growth of commercial radio broadcasting can be traced simply by looking at the record of licences granted in the USA (originally by the US Department of Commerce, now by the US Federal Communications Commission). Commercial radio broadcasting grew explosively in the United States dur- ing the 1920s. By the end of 1921, the Department of Commerce had issued 32 broadcast licences. A year later, the number of applicants had exceeded 600. A whole new industry had been spawned. By 1923 there were 200 manufacturers of radio receivers in the United States, and 5,000 component-makers! If one looks at the health data for the whole USA during this same period, one sees a curious jump in the nationwide incidence of childhood brain cancer that appears, for white children, to track rather closely the rise in commercial radio broadcasting. For non-white children there is a similar rise in childhood brain cancer—a rise of the same magnitude— but it is considerably delayed in time compared to the curve for white children. Census data provide a clue that could explain the delayed rise in non-white children. In 1920 the overwhelming majority of the non-white population lived in rural areas. By contrast, a majority of the white population lived in urban areas even before the beginning of the 20th century! The rise in childhood brain cancer in non-white children closely coincides with the rural-to-urban population shift of the non-white population which took place in the middle of the 20th century. The childhood brain cancer data therefore seem to indicate that a new hazardous agent had established itself in the urban—but not the rural—environment of the United States by 1930. This hazardous agent was able to affect large numbers of white children without delay because they were already present in the urban environment; but non-white children were not initially affected because they were concentrated in rural areas. However, as the shift of the non-white population from rural to urban areas took place, non-white children began to be affected, also; and when both populations were pre- dominantly urban, the children of both population groups were thereafter affected in the same manner. © 1995 by Marjorie Lundquist, Ph.D., C.1.H. Reprinted with permission from Extraordinary Science (Jan/Feb/Mar 1995) PO Box 5636 Colorado Springs, CO 80931, USA Ph: (719) 475 0918, Fax: (719) 475 0582 NEXUS ¢ 37 OCTOBER - NOVEMBER 1995