Please take a look at this article.
The UK doctor quoted here is a member of our advisory board, Doctors for Safer Schools.
We know the many advantages of wireless technology but what do we need to do to use it more safely?
Especially children.
Excerpt from The Telegraph: by Florence Waters, 09 May 2015
“Six years ago, Dr Erica Mallery-Blythe moved to the country, stopped carrying a mobile phone and sacrificed a successful career in emergency medicine to focus on a new medical interest – radiation emitted by Wi-Fi, mobiles and other wireless devices.
She is now one of the country’s few professional advisers on medical conditions related to radiofrequency (RF) radiation and other electromagnetic fields (EMFs).
'.. as soon as I started digesting the literature on EMFs it was a no-brainer,' she says of her decision to relinquish wireless gadgets.
'I wasn’t willing to take that kind of risk for something that was purely convenient.'
• Wi-Fi fears: three-year study into health risks of mobiles to children's brains
Her interest in EMFs started in 2009 after she began noticing increasing trends in certain symptoms – headaches, insomnia, fatigue and palpitations, but also more serious conditions including brain tumours in young people, fertility problems and accelerating neurological diseases such as early onset Alzheimer’s and autism. As yet there is still no scientific proof that relates these diseases to radiation, but Mallery-Blythe is among a not insignificant number of scientists and practitioners concerned by those studies that do highlight cause for more precaution.
Over the past few years, as Wi-Fi, laptops and iPads have become increasingly prevalent in classrooms, Mallery-Blythe says ‘hundreds’ of families have sought her help with what they believe to be EMF-related diseases and health issues.
One such case is that of nine-year-old Jessica Lewis’s family. In the autumn term of 2011, Jessica started to complain that she was getting bad headaches at school. She was also feeling overly tired, developed rashes on her legs and her parents said she looked “completely washed out” after school, particularly on Mondays. A quick internet search threw up a forum where parents had written that their children complained of similar symptoms after installing Wi-Fi.
Later that term, at a parents’ evening, (her father) noticed a Wi-Fi router near Jessica’s desk in her new form classroom. As it turned out, Monday was the day of the week the whole class worked on laptops.
When a local GP backed up Lewis’s suspicions about Wi-Fi being the probable cause of Jessica’s headaches, he went to some lengths to try to convince Spotbrough Copley Junior School in Doncaster to use wires instead of Wi-Fi, even offering to pay for the school building to be wired with cables.
In February, insurance market Lloyd’s of London informed schools that it was excluding liability coverage for injuries “resulting from or contributed to by electromagnetic fields, electromagnetic radiation, electromagnetism, radio waves or noise”, which means that school officials could be personally liable for exposing children and staff to microwave radiation.
'The Government is expecting head teachers to decide whether risk versus benefit is worthwhile. This seems unfair to me,' says Mallery-Blythe. ‘Most teachers don’t even know that RF is currently classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) as a Group 2B carcinogen, which means it is a possible cause of cancer in humans. There is a vast amount of published literature documenting the harmful effects on every biological system. Most people understandably don’t have time to read and digest it all.’
• Ban mobile phones and wireless networks in schools, say European leaders
As well as founding the Physicians’ Health Initiative for Radiation and Environment (PHIRE) to inform doctors of the issues and advise on best health practice, Mallery-Blythe gives talks to teachers around the country, in which she presents scientific studies that reveal both short and long-term effects of EMF exposure.
Associate Professor Olle Johansson, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, compares putting an iPhone near a baby’s head to ‘putting it next to several electric train engines’, pointing out that working with train engines is Sweden’s highest occupational exposure allowance.
Johansson has been researching the biological effects of radiofrequency (RF) wireless radiation for more than 30 years, but says it has become “extremely hard to get funding” in this area. ‘Given the importance of the subject I’d say that’s more than enigmatic.’
He predicts a ‘paradigm shift’ in attitudes towards EMF. We are currently living in an environment estimated to contain more than 10 billion times more RF radiation than it did in the Sixties. ‘If this environment is safe we’re talking about in the order of 15,000 to 25,000 papers – in peer-reviewed scientific journals – all being wrong. That has never happened before.
We just want to see some precautionary action put in place, and we’re not seeing it.’
Wi-Fi at home: Dr Erica Mallery-Blythe’s advice:
Try to keep your mobile switched off and don’t use it unless you need to. Keep it in flight mode when it is on and never carry your mobile close to your body, even on standby.
Don’t use Wi-Fi for internet. Instead use an Ethernet cable and buy a router with no wireless capacity or disable it.
Disable Wi-Fi on your computer or tablet by disabling the wireless card via the control panel or putting it into flight mode.
Replace cordless landlines with corded ones. Most cordless telephones give off radiation whether they’re in use or not.' ”
I have lectured about this at A4M events and covered this issue extensively in my book, A Wellness Guide for The Digital Age - more details at SaferTechSolutions.org
This might also be one of the reasons why our kids can't sleep at night?
And maybe it's not just your busy mind and busy life keeping you awake at night?
— Last Edited by Kerry Crofton, PhD at 2015-05-15 16:28:42 —
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