The Global Cell Phone Sickness Epidemic:
Diagnosis and Prevention
An Interview with George Carlo, Chairman,
Science and Public Policy Institute
London, UK - February 23, 2007
'There's no question that this is the largest health experiment that we've ever had. You know, we have never had penetration of 2.4 billion things into society that are potentially dangerous, ever. This is unprecedented in history and it's global. And what we're doing with our children the wifi in schools in experiment, this is nuts!
This makes no sense at all, and when you hear the rationale that is offered by the wifi companies and by the providers of the instruments and by the Government, it's an absolute breech of public trust. This experiment with the children in schools is just inexplicable; it's criminal.
So this is not just a cell phone problem. This is an ambient concentration problem.
Information-carrying radio waves are being triggered everywhere and that's why the solution has got to be changing the infrastructure - moving away from wireless back toward fiber optics.
Over a period of two to three years tremendous progress could be made as part of a gradual transition from wireless to fiber optic - and minimizing the amount of wireless transmission is something that is in everybody's best interest.
So this is not just a cell phone problem; this is a societal problem, and a shift also from a scientific debate to a medical problem - both of those items make this probably as serious an issue as we're ever going to have to face.'
Interviewed by Mary Beth Brangan & James Heddle
Co-Directors of EON - The Ecological Options Network
After six years, Dr. Carlo's research yielded alarming findings that linked cell phone radiation to serious health threats, including nerve and DNA damage and cancer. He submitted his results to the industry executives, naively expecting they would react responsibly. Instead, they tried to find ways to discredit his research and reputation with reporters and other scientists.
Carlo went public, co-authoring with reporter Martin Schram the book 'CELL PHONES: Invisible Hazards in the Wireless Age' in 2001. Subsequently he founded the Safe Wireless Initiative Registry where people suffering from the growing epidemic of cell phone-induced illnesses can network and get medical advise. In February 2007, at an event organized by British electro-sensitive activists at the prestigious Atley Room - a venue just across the street from the Parliament - Carlo made a presentation on his findings and recent work to a boisterous audience of reporters, researchers, officials, critics, electro-sensitives and even a couple of MPs.
EON videotaped the event and later caught up with him at his London hotel to hear his story in his own words. We began by recalling how suspicious EMR activists and researchers were of him back in 1999, when we released our documentary PUBLIC EXPOSURE: DNA, Democracy and the 'Wireless Revolution.'
GC: When we came out with our findings, when I came out with my book, there were a lot of people who just couldn't fathom the idea that, okay, this is legit. So there were stories that were made up about, you know, I had been fired - which never happened - and we were looking for other funding, you know, so that we would go to whoever had the funding available. Not true. So that it was a difficult time for a couple of years when you made that film; that was in that turmoil time. And, of course, you know there were a number of people I got to know later, Neil Cherry and Henry Lai [who are in the film] worked with us. We had a very difficult time at the end of the program. Henry Lai decided that he couldn't trust the system that had been set up. So I'm not surprised that, given all of the turmoil at the time, that you ended up not coming my way but that's okay.
EON: Well, we're here now.
GC: So you were able to get pretty good footage then on Thursday?
EON: Yeah. We had two cameras going. How did you feel about it?
GC: I thought it was good. The fact that it was in the Atley Room, across from the Parliament, people had told me that this is a big deal.
EON: OK, tell us the headlines of your story, how you moved from an industry outsider to a whistle blower.
GC: Well I think that in '93 when this problem surfaced in the public in the United States, the Congressional hearings made clear that cell phones had not gone through pre-market testing. They're radiation emitting consumer devices that should have gone through pre-market testing, and that absence of data created a big problem not only for the industry, but also for the Government regulatory authorities.
And when they decided on the deal [between Congress and the telecom industry so that the industry would remain unregulated], what became the $28.5M program was put together to fill the data gaps. As the program went forward and it was clear that we did not have experimental systems that would allow us to really simulate what human exposures were, we had to invent new things.
That would have been absolutely necessary in a pre-market testing regimen and that's why pre-market testing's a $20-$30M ordeal, because you have to be very precise - because the idea is to do these test tube Petri-dish-type studies, studies with animals, and then predict risks in humans.
That's what the program was that we had put in place. And we established the epidemiological work as baseline for post-market surveillance. The idea is that if you do pre-market testing and the devices pass the scrutiny in pre-market testing, you still need a safety net so that the epidemiology studies really are done in that framework as part of the safety net.
What's happened now, which is very interesting, is that the pre-market testing type studies which are what we've been focusing on - which is where we've been able to elucidate this disease mechanism - indicate some of the other more important aspects in terms of predicting risk, yet are totally ignored by the Government and totally ignored by the industry.
The reason is because it is much easier for them to focus on the epidemiological studies because they know that the epidemiology will not be able to show anything definitive for another 20 years - which is really a shame because our view at this point is that this is a medical problem now. This is no longer a scientific debate issue; this is medical problem. We have people who are ill. We have people who are debilitated.
You know, it's unfair, for when you hear about the symptoms - headaches and being unable to sleep - it sounds like those are trivial symptoms, but they're not; they're very serious, very debilitating. People who have these symptoms are not able to work. They're not able to earn a living. Their relationships and their family are hurt. Their marriages are hurt.
So this is a very serious medical problem that is creeping in all over the world. You know, in our registry, our Safe Wireless Initiative registry [ http://www.safewireless.org/ ], we have all sorts of literally thousands of people who have reported symptoms; and the desperation that comes through in the records that are submitted and the desperation that comes through when we do consults with their doctors is very palpable. I mean, the scenario that I run into a lot is a treating doctor will get our information and call in and want to do a consult.
EON: Is this mostly in the United States?
GC: Mostly in the United States. We haven't done anything here yet, in Europe. But the scenario is like this: I'm a typical doctor. I've had this patient for ten years. He's a great person. We have a great relationship but this latest condition he has, I mean I just think he's crazy. And this is completely unfair. Now after we're able to have a discussion about what we know about the mechanism, this is how it works, this is how the disruption of intercellular communication can lead to all these different symptoms, then the doctor has a totally different view.
So, what we're focusing on now is the medical community. The idea of continuing the debate about is 'it a problem or is it not a problem' is really silly at this point. We have sick people and those people need to be taken care of, and there needs to be resources put towards taking care of those folks and identifying, you know, better diagnosis techniques, better intervention possibilities, all of those things. This is a medical problem and that's the first message.
The second message is there are technologies available to lesson the risk. With those technologies available, it means that all of this illness and suffering is really unnecessary. You know, those things are not necessary because there's a better way to go. And what we have done is study this very carefully based on our understanding of the mechanism of harm. And it's clear that with the fiber optic infrastructure, as opposed to a wireless infrastructure, they'd be able to reduce the background levels of these information-carrying radio waves up to 90%. Then you minimize the amount of wireless communication that's necessary.
And at the point of transmission you can add technology and the best technology available now is noise field technology that will offer a masking of the radio waves so that, for the people within the vicinity of these transmission devices, you are not triggering these adverse effects.
There are also technologies that are available at the point of use. There are noise field technologies available - attachments to cell phones and other wireless devices. And that will help minimize the risk in the consumers.
Then the final piece of this is to train doctors so that they understand the symptoms and understand there are therapeutic interventions that are useful. And with those things in place, we can handle this problem; and that's why the politicization of this, the politics of 'is there a problem, is there not a problem,' you know, 'who's responsible, who's not responsible' - all of that is silly because there's a better way to go forward and it's unnecessary.
EON: Let me understand the mechanism. What is an information-carrying radio wave and how does it affect us?
GC: Okay. Well, the thing that we now know is that because at 1900 MHz, for example, that's an oscillation that is so fast our biological tissue cannot recognize it. So this is an invisible wave.
The only time that wave becomes dangerous is when it's pushed by a high amount of power so that it can cause heating of tissue. And that is exactly what you have with microwave ovens; you have 2450 MHz pushed by 100 Watts of power and you're able to heat tissue. People thought that that was the only mechanism for microwave interaction. That's why we have these wireless communication systems anyway, because we're carrying voice or data.
What we now know is that even though that carrier wave is invisible to biological tissue, because it's necessary to carry information. Information needs to be packeted so it can be deciphered and that packeting is in the form of modulations. And those modulation packets themselves travel through space and form a secondary wave. There's another wave. And that secondary wave oscillates in the hertz range, in the cycles per second range.
Our hearts, for example, beat at 2 Hz. So now we're very much within biological range. And that secondary wave is what we term the information-carrying radio wave. It's the secondary wave that's the result of the modulating packets of information. And that wave is recognized by protein receptors on the cell membrane.
And because information-carrying radio waves are completely manmade, we have never had them historically, our bodies interpret them as foreign invaders; so that when there's recognition of an information-carrying radio wave by a protein receptor, the message is sent to the cell saying 'we're under siege and we need to protect ourselves!' So what happens is that the active transport channels begin to close down.
In other words, the doors in the castle begin to be closed so that now nothing can come in and nothing can go out. And, of course, what we want to come in through active transport are nutrients. So nutrients are not able to get into the cell and, consequently, the cell becomes energy deficient. And when the cell becomes energy deficient, it is not able to carry out the primary intercellular communication which is mediated through microtubings which is a high-energy photon-based, light-energy based communication between cells.
That's the first thing that goes. And when that goes, then the rest of the communication system between cells suffers. The other thing that happens is that nutrients, while not being able to come in, waste products are not able to get out of the cell; and as waste product builds up in the cell, you have free radicals appearing in higher concentration. And the free radicals preferentially will attack the mitochondria because that's where the most action is inside the cell; the most energy is in the mitochondria, generating our cellular energy primarily. So when the free radicals attack the mitochondria, you have the cell losing its ability to efficiently function. So you have this mechanism leading to cellular dysfunction.
That is the most likely mechanism explaining the leakage in the blood brain barrier, for example.
The other thing that happens is that these free radicals interfere with DNA repair inside the cell. They also interfere with the messages transferring between messenger RNA and DNA and the evidence of that is formation of micronuclei which we've seen now in several studies from around the world. And those micronuclei are pieces of DNA that function well enough to form a membrane around themselves.
Now when the cell is functioning properly, those micronuclei stay with in the cell and they don't do any damage, but when the cell loses its ability to function or when that cell goes through its normal life cycle and it goes through apoptosis which is the cell membrane disintegrating to make room for another cell to come in and do the job, these micronuclei are released into the interstitial fluid which is nutrient rich. And because the intercellular communication is not in place to summon the immune system to come and take care of the micronuclei, you have these micronuclei sitting there in nutrient-rich environment and they clone and proliferate and that is the most likely mechanism for the development of tumors.
EON: We're talking about cell phone effects mainly now, is that correct?
GC: No, no, no. We're talking about all wireless because you see five years ago we were able to distinguish the near field, the radiation plume within 6-7 inches of the antenna of a cell phone and the far field, which is everything else, the space between the phone and base station.
Well, that was fine when you had a couple hundred million people using cell phones; now we have 2.4 billion people using cell phones, in the United States upwards of 210 million people using cell phones, in the UK upwards of 65 million people using cell phones. So you're talking about a huge penetration of cell phones.
In order to deliver that technology, you have a huge concentration now, a higher concentration of base stations. Those base stations themselves have a near field and because of this congruence now of the near field from the cell phone and the near field from the base station, you're not able to distinguish between near field and far field anymore. The background levels of these information-carrying radio waves in most major cities now are just as high as what we saw five years ago in the near field around a cell phone. So this is not just a cell phone problem. This is an ambient concentration problem.
Information-carrying radio waves are being triggered everywhere and that's why the solution has got to be changing the infrastructure - moving away from wireless back toward fiber optics.
Now the huge irony is that by the middle '90's in all the western world, North America, South America, and Europe, we were well on our way to a fiber optic infrastructure for telecommunication; and when the governments decided that they were going to auction off the broadband frequencies - and make money doing that - they in effect went into bed with the industry, and now both the Government and the industry had a vested industry of rapid deployment of the infrastructure. Wireless infrastructure was so much easier and quicker to get out there that the fiber optic infrastructure was abandoned. And that's where the problem began.
But what most people don't realize is that in most cases there are already significant fiber optic spines in place around the world so that converting to a fiber optic infrastructure is not a matter of tearing everything down and starting again. Over a period of two to three years tremendous progress could be made as part of a gradual transition from wireless to fiber optic and minimizing the amount of wireless transmission is something that is everybody's best interest.
So this is not [just] a cell phone problem; this is a societal problem, and the shift also from a scientific debate to a medical problem - both of those items make this probably as serious an issue as we're ever going to have to face.
EON: Would it be true to say that this is probably the largest unauthorized biological experiment in history?
GC: There's no question that this is the largest health experiment that we've ever had. You know, we have never had penetration of 2.4 billion things into society that are potentially dangerous, ever. This is unprecedented in history and it's global. And what we're doing with our children…the wifi in schools in experiment, this is nuts! This makes no sense at all, and when you hear the rationale that is offered by the wifi companies and by the providers of the instruments and by the Government, it's an absolute breech of public trust. This experiment with the children in schools is just inexplicable; it's criminal.
EON: Can you talk a bit about your paper that's just about to come out?
GC: Well, we have a series of papers, you know. The interesting thing here is as we've continued on this work with the mechanism and the pre-market testing, you know it's necessary for us now to put all of this out in the open literature. So we have about a half a dozen papers that we have in various stages of development.
But one of the first papers that will come out in a few weeks has to do with a series of 350 severely autistic children who we have looked at. And the interesting thing there is that we're able to identify very clearly that the mechanism that we've found as operating clearly in these children; that when we are able to take away the electromagnetic radiation exposure, and then put these children through very aggressive detox, we're able to see that - over a period of several weeks - they begin to clear heavy metals based on the molecular weight of the heavy metals.
And what that indicates is that the active transport channels are opening. As the electromagnetic radiation or the information-carrying radio wave exposure subsides, that is a proof that the mechanism is operating, but it also gives us very optimistic views on what we can do with these children. Because what we've seen is that after about 40 weeks when the heavy metals like mercury begin to clear, the symptoms go away. Unfortunately, when the children then go home and they're back in an environment where there are information-carrying radio waves, the symptoms come back. So we're not there yet, but we have a tremendous opportunity here to help these children.
And the thing that we have identified here is a very important link to these information-carrying radio waves as a causal factor. So this hopefully will trigger folks in other clinics around the world to say, you know we're seeing the same kind thing, and to try some of these interventions that we are going to be writing about and to move us down the line.
EON: Please explain more about what you call the 'mechanism of harm' in these cases.
GC: What happens is this: depending upon where you are in the world, you have different levels of exposure to heavy metals and that's why we've had autism for a long time. We have an accumulation of these types of toxins. They change the physiology of the cell membrane and when the cell membrane is not able to communicate with surrounding cells, you have this disruption of communication and that is indeed one of the four pathologies in autism and other neuro-behavioral conditions where you have this disruption of intercellular communication and things are just not adding up, the connections are not being made.
Now in the middle 1990's, the Center for Disease Control in the United States made a recommendation that children should have vaccinations at birth. So, before they would leave the hospital they would have had at least the MMR vaccination regimen, and by the time they are two years old most kids have had about 20 shots as part of their immunization scheme.
In some of these vaccinations you have a chemical called thermerisol which is a mercury-based compound that helps deliver the active material in the vaccine intracellularly, inside the cells. And what happens is that you have this at-birth vaccine, so that now you have a high concentration of heavy metals including mercury circulating in the system.
And then you're exposed to the information-carrying radio waves, that trigger the protective response by the cells close to down the active transport channels and trap the heavy metals in the cell. And when the heavy metals are trapped, they disrupt the protein physiology on the inside of the membrane. That is then picked up by messenger RNA. That damage information is carried to DNA and when the cell goes through mitosis, the damage information appears in the daughter cells. So what you have is an environmentally induced genetic change that results in severe impairment of intercellular communication.
EON: In San Francisco, for example, Google and the mayor have gotten together and they're going to provide a great public service by providing free wireless communication everywhere in the City. What do you think of that?
GC: Well, this is such a misguided thought process. It's a huge mistake. Based on the science that we have. I mean, we know that wherever you have information-carrying radio waves, you're going to trigger adverse biochemical reactions at the cellular level. So the idea of providing wireless exposure now to these people is inconsistent with good public health.
The thing that's more serious about it is that a lot of these people who will be giving “the benefit of wireless” are people who are in lower socio-economic groups. They have very poor health care, very poor nutrition. Their systems are already stressed from a health point of view, and now you're putting an overlay exposure on them that's going to further compromise their immune system and other defense mechanisms and you're really putting on these people something from a health point of view they cannot handle.
This is another classic example where the politicians are treating something as a political or public relations issue and they're overlooking the public health and safety aspects of it.
EON: So there's a latency period involved here, right? I mean the symptomatology's not going to show up for 15-20 years.
GC: No, no, no. That's not the case. You have a latency when you're talking about tumors. With brain tumors you may have 8-10 years and in fact the epidemiological studies that have been published from around the world clearly show that after 10 years of exposure you begin to see a significant increased risk of tumors.
But with these other symptoms that we're talking about, because this is a biological mechanism, and the information-carrying radio waves trigger these protein receptors, there's no threshold and there's no latency. The only time lag is dependent on how efficient the person who is exposed is at being able to overtake the damage, so that what you're going to see in vulnerable populations like children the symptoms are going to be there very quickly - within weeks to months.
EON: What are some of the symptoms that people can look for or understand that may be caused by exposure?
GC: Well, if you look at the mechanism, this is disruption of intercellular communication. So what this means is that where you have neurological connections that are necessary for things like learning, focus, you have attention deficit problems, behavioral problems in children, difficulty sleeping, unexplained anxiety, panic attacks. All of those conditions are consistent with disruptive intercellular communication.
And when you take it to the second stage, now you're looking at colds that won't go away. You know, you have the flu and your immune system is not efficiently getting rid of it. People develop hypersensitivities in their limbs, peripheral neuropathy, tingling in the fingers and toes. All of these are signs that you have a pathology operating and the intercellular communication disruption is consistent with all of those.
So that the difficulty we have here is that these are common symptoms that most people would not immediately associate with this cell membrane reaction but we know that that's real. In our registry we have tens of thousands of people who have made reports. All around the world now we're talking to groups of patients who have symptoms, debilitating symptoms. We have instances where performance of children in schools has diminished when these schools are next to bay stations. We don't have a lot of data yet on the wifi experiment, but we have enough from the mechanistic understanding to know that we're putting our children in danger and the effects are very subtle but they're real effects.
I mean, when you have a young person who's not able to focus and you have a young person who has a learning deficit or an attention deficit, this is disruption of their neuron-connections, their intercellular communication in the nervous system. Again, we're absolutely convinced that the only answer here is to change the infrastructure and that's what we're recommending.
EON: Are there any countries that officially recognize this?
GC: Well, there are some countries that recognize electro-sensitivity. I know Sweden is one, a few other countries; but those are countries that in order to have medical care delivered there has to be a recognition because it's mainly socialized medicine.
What we're hoping is that we can go to the private clinicians, you know, to the primary caregivers and educate them about the symptoms and the therapeutic interventions that are available and put this in the hands of the patient and the doctor. This is not a problem that's going to be solved by the government. Government is very inefficient at solving societal problems and this is something where we want the doctors and the patients themselves empowered to help themselves along.
EON: You mentioned earlier the 'noise field' as a possible protective device. What's a 'noise field?'
GC: Noise field technology is interesting. It was developed by the military back in the '80's and early '90's. The military for a long time had concern about these information-carrying radio waves and the reason is because when the intercontinental ballistic missile technology became available, the idea the was that you could send a missile across the water and then press a button and the missile would explode when it got to its target. And when that button was pressed, a radio signal was sent. The idea of having stray radio signals on ships and planes is very dangerous so what they began doing was putting communications personnel inside encased cubicles so that they were able to do their communications, but without having stray radio waves giving them the risk of these munitions exploding at the wrong time. And these guys began to get sick. They began to get microwave radiation poisoning.
So the military in the '80's and into the early '90's had a vested interest in protecting their communications personnel while protecting the rest of the soldiers on the ship. So the noise field technology was pretty much developed within the military, and then afterwards was made publicly available in the early 1990's.
The noise field technology essentially takes a generator and releases a low energy random magnetic field, and that random magnetic field attaches to the information-carrying radio wave. And the sum total of the magnetic field and the information-carrying radio wave is a random field that has incoherence, and the cell membrane protein receptors can't 'see' it so it makes the information-carrying radio wave 'invisible' to the cell membrane receptor. So that series of bio-chemical responses I mentioned - the closing down of active transport channels, the disruption of intercellular communication - it doesn't happen because the information-carrying radio wave is not recognized.
EON: How is a 'noise field' is generated?
GC: Well, there are two different versions of the noise field. One of them is an active noise field, which is a version that requires a power source to actually generate the noise field. That is the first generation noise field that comes directly from military work and that is a table top device or an add-on to a cell phone battery. That's the active noise field, not widely available yet but folks are working on it and on how you make this more readily available.
The passive noise field was developed by the Russians. That is a nanotechnology that's polymer-based, where, in the presence of a 1 MilliGaus magnetic field, the actual magnetic field itself triggers the passive noise field. And there's a systematic degradation of the polymer that generates energy. Molecules fall into a honeycomb-like structure within the nano-polymer, and that increasing energy results in random magnetic fields, energy that have random magnetic field properties that attach to the radio signal.
Now the passive noise field technology does not require a power source but it systematically degrades, so the polymer in whatever application, whether it's an application in a wireless internet transmission device, or a point of use, has to be replaced every 18-20 months as the technology exists now. Though these technologies are available, they're not widely available. And, in fact, the active and passive noise field applications to the fiber optic infrastructure with minimal wireless transmission is only now in development, so that we have a situation where technologies are now being focused on the protective aspects. Up until a couple of years ago we didn't have that, so we're in a little bit of a race against time, but I think hopefully we'll win that.
EON: One last thing. You probably heard reports lately that the U.S. military has a PR campaign to make acceptable the deployment of a new crowd control device which is like a huge ray gun kind of thing that supposedly creates heat on the surface of the skin and will discourage crowds from charging police. Is this the same kind of thing?
GC: You have two things. The military are working on lots of things with microwaves and electromagnetic fields. The device or the technology you're talking about is really controlled microwaves. It's not information-carrying radio waves; it's more like the microwave oven approach that causes the surface heat.
But they also have devices that they're working on where they're actually using scalar waves to send information and that information can disrupt intercellular communication and cause confusion in opposing military groups or crowds.
It's interesting that while one branch of the Government, the health authorities, ignore that any of this even exists, you have another branch of the Government putting it to very interesting uses - same technology, different agency, different belief structure.
It's really a shame because we have patients out here who could benefit greatly simply by the health protection people talking to the military people about what they know.
Our main message now is consumer empowerment. The Government is not going to fix this for you. The industry is certainly is not going to fix it for you. And we're trying to give consumers the tools that they need to protect themselves. There's no need for people to be victims here. That's what our main message is.
Dr. George L. Carlo is Chairman of the Science and Public Policy Institute. His organization runs the Safe Wireless Initiative project, the stated aim of which is to promote safety and empower consumers to protect themselves and their families. Their site: http://www.safewireless.org/
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Interviewers Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle are Co-Directors of EON, the Ecological Options Network - www.EON3.net They can be reached at Info@EON3.net . Their award-winning television documentary PUBLIC EXPOSURE: DNA, Democracy and the 'Wireless Revolution' remains the definitive film on the public health dangers of cell phone technology. It has been broadcast on Link TV, and is in use by EMR activists around the world.