BY JOSEPH MERCOLA, DO

Perhaps you are wondering: If EMFs are so harmful, why isn’t anyone doing something about them? Why are we continuing to adopt more and more devices that could potentially harm our health?

The answer, unfortunately, is not a pleasant one. When you begin to see how these companies have valued profit over your health—and your family’s health—you may find the story as troubling as I do.

For clarity, electromagnetic fields (EMFs) are invisible forms of energy created whenever electricity flows or wireless signals are transmitted. While some EMFs occur naturally in the environment, the modern world has added an unprecedented level of constant, man-made exposure—from cell phones and Wi-Fi routers to Bluetooth devices and the expanding network of cell towers that now surround us.

Much of the public reassurance about wireless safety has rested on standards designed to prevent short-term heating of tissue. However, the concern raised by many researchers is whether long-term, low-level exposure may have biological effects that aren’t captured by heat-based testing.

The story of how EMFs became such an integral part of our environment—despite mounting evidence that they harm human and environmental health—shares many parallels with the history of tobacco use.

Many tend to forget that the tobacco industry, like the wireless industry today, adopted a policy of denial and silence in the face of overwhelming science documenting the biological damage and health hazards caused by cigarettes. It effectively stuck to this tactic for decades.

I believe that when you see the parallels between the tobacco and wireless industries, you may reconsider how much you rely on cell phones and other wireless devices.

The Tobacco Industry Purposefully Lied to the Public for Decades

The tobacco companies’ guiding light through it all was the public relations firm they hired in the 1950s, Hill+Knowlton Strategies. Rather than play the losing game of simply denying facts, Hill+Knowlton proposed brilliant strategies that the wireless industry would later co-opt.

One revealing example comes from a leaked Brown & Williamson document outlining the company’s objectives at the time:

• Objective #1: To set aside in the minds of millions the false conviction that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and other diseases; a conviction based on fanatical assumptions, fallacious rumors, unsupported claims, and the unscientific statements and conjectures of publicity-seeking opportunists.

A 1969 memo written by an executive at Brown & Williamson, a large tobacco company at the time, concisely sums up this strategy by the phrase “Doubt is our product.” Doubt is the wireless industry’s product as well.

Funding Biased Research

In 2006, Lai examined 326 studies on the safety of cell phone radiation conducted between 1990 and 2006 and found that 44 percent of them reported no harmful effects, while 56 percent did.

Here is where it gets interesting. When he categorized the studies by funding, the numbers told an entirely different story: 67 percent of the independently funded studies found a harmful effect, while only 28 percent of the industry-funded studies did. This groundbreaking insight led others to investigate the link between funding and results.

In 2008, a team of Swiss researchers led by Dr. Anke Huss conducted a review of 59 studies evaluating the biological effects of exposure to wireless radiation. They found that 82 percent of the studies funded by governments and other independent agencies showed harmful effects, compared to only 33 percent of studies funded by industry.

Funding Studies Designed to Produce Favorable Results

It is not only conflicting findings that raise concerns about industry-funded research. Often, the problem lies in how the studies themselves are designed. Because scientific experiments involve many variables, subtle choices in study design can influence whether potential harms appear—or remain hidden.

In a 2010 review of 23 studies designed to determine a connection between the use of cell phones and the risk of developing tumors, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed not only the results of the studies, but also the initial design of the studies, and then compared that to the source of funding.

Their conclusion was that “among the 10 higher quality studies, we found a harmful association between phone use and tumor risk. The lower quality studies, which failed to meet scientific best practices, were primarily industry funded.”

Telecommunications Act of 1996

It was lobbying that played a major role in the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which included a huge concession to the wireless industry that effectively silenced the public’s say in where and how wireless infrastructure is built out. Section 322(c)(7) (B) (iv) reads, in part:

No State or local government or instrumentality thereof may regulate the placement, construction, and modification of personal wireless service facilities on the basis of the environmental effects of radio frequency emissions to the extent that such facilities comply with the Commission’s regulations concerning such emissions.

As a result, the industry was essentially given the blessing of the government to install cell towers basically wherever they liked: school roofs and playgrounds, church spires, water towers, and trees all became fair game for hosting cell towers.

More than 300,000 such sites have been built since the act passed. The public was left with little to no recourse to influence these decisions because of health concerns.

Smearing Scientists Who Find Problems with Cell Phones

Another tactic the wireless industry has used to sow seeds of doubt with the public is to handpick scientists it believes will be a source of supportive studies, and then discredit those same scientists if their findings suggest that the cell phones you rely on for so many things are found to be contributing factors to illness.

In the early 1990s, Dr. Henry Lai and fellow University of Washington researcher Narendra “NP” Singh sought funding from the Wireless Technology Research (WTR) project to study the effects of low-intensity microwave radiation on rat brain cells.

WTR representatives visited their laboratory twice in 1994, and George Carlo reportedly expressed interest in their data and promised funding to continue the research. The check never came. Lai and Singh eventually secured funding from the National Institutes of Health instead—and the results proved troubling.

Their results, published in the journal Bioelectromagnetics, found single-strand DNA damage in the brains of rats exposed to just two hours of both pulsed and continuous low-intensity microwave radiation at 2.5 GHz, a frequency similar to that emitted by your 4G cell phone.

Motorola, when it learned of Lai and Singh’s findings, went into defensive mode. An internal company memo, dated December 13, 1994, discussed the best strategy to cast doubt on the study’s conclusions. In it, executives emphasized “uncertainties” in the methodology and argued there was “no basis” to connect the findings to DNA damage or health risks without additional research.

Henry Lai’s experience was not unique. Other scientists who reported troubling findings about electromagnetic radiation encountered similar resistance.

It’s not only the industry that has sought to stifle research into the biological effects of EMFs—the military has done it too. One of the premier researchers in this area, Dr. Allan Frey, began researching how microwave frequencies affect the body in 1960. At the time, Frey was 25, a young neuroscientist working at General Electric’s Advanced Electronics Center at Cornell University.

From these early days, Frey was interested in how electrical fields affect brain function. So when a radar technician claimed he could “hear” radar, Frey eagerly traveled to investigate. Sure enough, he could hear it too—a low-level, persistent humming. “I could hear the radar going ‘zip, zip, zip,’” he later reported.

Intrigued, Frey began an investigation that ultimately led him to realize that the ear did not record the radar sounds; the brain did. This is now called the “Frey effect” and caused quite a stir in the scientific community.

Frey ran into trouble with his source of funding in 1975, when he published a landmark paper in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences that revealed how EMF exposure caused “leakage” of the blood-brain barrier. In this study, Frey injected a fluorescent dye into the circulatory systems of rats, then exposed them to microwave frequencies. After that exposure, the dye showed up in the rats’ brains.

The blood-brain barrier is an extremely important line of defense for your brain; it prevents viruses, toxins, and microbes in your bloodstream from entering the sanctity of your brain.

Frey later reported that the military instructed him to stop talking about his research or risk losing his funding.

In the late 1950s, ophthalmologist Milton Zaret became one of the first scientists to warn of the potential for harm from exposure to nonionizing radiation. Zaret found a link between microwave radiation and cataract development.

In 1973, Zaret was the first medical doctor to testify in Congress about the dangers of microwave radiation. During his testimony, Zaret sounded the alarm.

There is a clear, present, and ever-increasing danger to the entire population of our country from exposure to the entire non-ionizing portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The dangers cannot be overstated because more nonionizing radiation injuries occur covertly, usually do not become manifest until after latent periods of years, and when they do become manifest, the effects are seldom recognized.

Gradually, Zaret lost every one of his military contracts because of his findings. He was also the target of a campaign to discredit him.

“Capturing” the Federal Communications Commission

There is one way that the wireless industry has surpassed Big Tobacco—and that is by using its money and influence to get insiders appointed to government agencies charged with regulating its products, namely the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The FCC, in particular, is frequently referred to as a “captured agency,” a term popularized by Norm Alster of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, who in 2015 wrote a short book titled Captured Agency: How the Federal Communications Commission Is Dominated by the Industries It Presumably Regulates.

A detailed look at FCC actions—and inactions—shows that over the years the agency has granted the wireless industry virtually everything it has ever requested.

The wireless industry controls the FCC through a soup-to-nuts stranglehold on Congress, including well-placed campaign donations to members of Congress, influence over the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, which oversees the FCC, and persistent lobbying.

The wireless industry has spun a web that embraces Congress, congressional oversight committees, and Washington social life. The network ties the public sector to the private through a frictionless revolving door—really no door at all.

Recent FCC chairmen, including Tom Wheeler (who held the office from 2013 to 2017) and Ajit Pai (who assumed the role in 2017), have worked directly for the industry they were then tasked with overseeing. Pai was once a general counsel for Verizon, and Wheeler previously led major telecommunications lobbying organizations.

How the Wireless Industry Influences Government Policy

A natural consequence of all the efforts to sow confusion about the true risks of wireless radiation and to infiltrate regulatory agencies is that the government as well as nongovernment organizations charged with safekeeping public health falter.

In 2000, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a division of the World Health Organization (WHO), launched the 13-country Interphone Study, a $30 million investigation examining whether radiation from cell phones contributes to brain cancer.

When the Interphone Study results were finally released (years behind schedule), they appeared inconclusive. They found no overall increased risk of brain tumors for cell phone users—something that most of the mainstream press latched on to when reporting the findings.

However, the study group did acknowledge that “heavy users” of cell phones had an approximately 80 percent increased risk of glioma, a life-threatening and often-fatal brain tumor, after 10 years of cell phone use.

What was the definition of a heavy user? About two hours—per month! When this study was conducted (19992004), cell phone use had not yet exploded to the extent it has today.

The finding received little attention from the mainstream press. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), however, took it seriously enough to convene a working group of thirty-one scientists from fourteen countries in 2011 to review the evidence on wireless radiation exposure.

This review included the Interphone Study, as well as another study published by Lennart Hardell, a leading brain tumor researcher and professor of oncology and cancer epidemiology at Örebro University Hospital in Sweden. Dr. Hardell found that the risks of brain tumors doubled or even tripled, depending on the type of tumor, in cell phone users after 10 years of cellular phone use.

Largely because of its review, the IARC finally concluded that exposure to cell phone radiation is “possibly carcinogenic to humans” and gave it a Group 2B classification. This is the same category as the pesticide DDT, lead, gasoline engine exhaust, burning coal, and dry-cleaning chemicals, to name just a few.

While this was an important piece of progress in establishing the potential for harm, it stopped short of designating microwave radiation and EMFs as category 2A—“probably carcinogenic to humans”—which is the next step up from “possibly.”

Since then, the US government has dithered on warning the public about the hazards of cell phone use: In 2014, the CDC updated its website to state: “We recommend caution in cell phone use.”

However, the warning only lasted a few weeks before the language was removed, along with text that specifically warned against the heightened health risks for children.

The most consistent voice of reason has come from the scientific community. In 2015, 190 EMF scientists from 39 countries issued the International EMF Scientist Appeal to the United Nations calling for the WHO to adopt “more protective exposure guidelines for non-ionizing electromagnetic fields (EMF) in the face of increasing exposures from many sources.”

Thankfully, some people are listening to the science. In 2016, in the wake of the release of the first round of findings of the National Toxicology Program, Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, released an official statement.

For years, the understanding of the potential risk of radiation from cell phones has been hampered by a lack of good science. This report from the National Toxicology Program (NTP) is good science. The NTP report linking radiofrequency radiation (RFR) to two types of cancer marks a paradigm shift in our understanding of radiation and cancer risk.

This was an about-face for the American Cancer Society, which has long been a denier of risk. Of course, we need more than just talk. We need action.

History is Repeating Itself

History has shown that an admission of the potential health hazards of EMFs will not happen without considerable legal pressure, and that it can take many decades for widespread changes in behavior to occur.

The wireless industry has learned from Big Tobacco’s example that it needs not disprove the idea that its products carry health risks; it only has to provide enough evidence to the contrary that consumers are lulled into a false sense of security. This tactic not only ensures sales, but it also wards off regulatory measures and deflects blame for any illnesses or deaths from its products.

Once you review the mechanisms by which EMFs cause damage and the science that links them to several diseases, I believe you will realize that EMFs deserve the designation of a Group 1 carcinogen, the same as cigarettes.

However, there are strong arguments that EMFs are even more pernicious than cigarettes, because you can substantially control your exposure to cigarette smoke; the same cannot be said about your EMF exposure since EMFs are emitted by infrastructure such as ubiquitous cell phones, power lines, electrical wiring, Wi-Fi routers, and cell towers.

Exposure to EMFs also has a long time lag. Brain cancer, in particular, can take 40 years to develop. Survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example, are still developing malignant tumors more than 65 years after their radiation exposure. One can only imagine how high the prevalence of cell phone and Wi-Fi-related diseases will be in another 20 or 30 years.

And as long as the public is kept uncertain, behavior rarely changes—and regulation rarely follows.

While the world waits for the evidence to be deemed conclusive, you, your family, and our entire society are all guinea pigs in an experiment that has the potential to handicap future generations with potentially insurmountable health consequences.

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Joseph Mercola, DO, and New York Times best-selling author. He was voted the Ultimate Wellness Game Changer by The Huffington Post and has been featured in several national media outlets, including Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, Fox News, ABC News, TODAY, and The Dr. Oz Show. He founded his website, mercola.com, in 1997, well before Google, Amazon, and Facebook. And it has been the most visited natural health site on the web for the last 15 years.

Well Being Journal adapted the above excerpt from EMF*D by Joseph Mercola, DO. Copyright © 2020 by Joseph Mercola. Printed with permission from Hay House, Inc.