by Sean Croxton
My friend SAM has a humongous head.
That thing must weight at least eleven pounds.
Then again, SAM’s a pretty big guy in general. In fact, he’s a beast.
Standing in at six-foot-two, his size and mass are about equal to the top 10-percent of all military recruits.
I like to give SAM a hard time about his head. I hope he doesn’t mind me blogging about it.
Sometimes I wonder if there are any brains in that noggin. There are days when I could have sworn I heard water sloshing around in there!
But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. At SAM’s age, I would imagine his brain is fully developed with a nice thick skull. But you never know. His weird habit of talking on his cell phone for only six minutes at a time makes me wonder. Dude doesn’t like to talk much.
Okay, okay! SAM isn’t really one of my buddies. He’s a figment of scientific imagination created back in 1996 to estimate safe exposures to cell phone radiation.
His given name is Standard Anthropomorphic Man.
SAM’s brain is unlike any human I’ve ever known. He has no hypothalamus or medulla oblongata (I love saying that). Nope, his brain is perfectly uniform. In the 90s, scientists poured liquids of differing densities into SAM’s plastic dome to measure how much radio frequency (RF) radiation reached specific parts of his “brain” as a cell phone is held ten millimeters (about 1/3 of an inch) from his ear. (Davis, 75)
When was the last time you held your cell phone 1/3 of an inch from your ear?
SAM may have liquid for brains, but at least he practices cell phone safety. Then again, Blackberry phones come with instructions suggesting that you hold your device at least 0.98 inches away from your body.
SAM didn’t read the fine print.
The Blackberry directive must be there for a reason.
Could it be the fact that cell phone radiation has been shown by multiple studies to breach the blood-brain barrier, leaving our noodles wide open for toxic exposures?
Or could it be that studies from various nations have shown that cell phone radiation causes DNA strands to break in animals, as well as human and rodent cells?
Could be.
The accuracy of these studies can be debated for eternity. But one thing that cannot be disputed is the fact that my head is pretty darn big, but nowhere near the size of SAM’s. Nor are the heads of most women I know. Or even most men I know (with the exception of my Mom’s boyfriend).
And definitely none of the kids I know!
Furthermore, my head (nor yours or your child’s) is NOT filled with “liquids of differing densities”.
What is most disconcerting to me is that these days three-quarters of all 12-year-olds and half of all 10-year-olds have cell phones.
Children’s brains are much different from yours, SAM’s, or mine. Hang out with one for five minutes and I’m sure you’ll agree.
A child’s brain contains more fluid through which RF deposits itself. It has thinner marrow, increasing RF absorption. The skull covering the brain is much softer, offering less RF protection than an adult skull. And the child’s brain cells replicate at a feverish pace, leaving them more prone to increased replication errors.
Also, let us not forget that the lifetime exposure of today’s children to potentially harmful cell phone radiation is much greater than yours and mine.
Sounds like a science experiment to me.
In her book Disconnect: The Truth about Cell Phone Radiation, Dr. Devra Davis writes, “children’s brains and skulls absorb at least twice as much radio frequency radiation as those of adults. Bone marrow can take in ten times more radiation in children than in adults, according to reports from Austrian scientists is 2010.”
Your child is not SAM. None of us are.
Realizing the limitations of using a liquid-filled plastic head to measure safe RF levels, Dr. Om P. Ghandi, professor and chair of electrical engineering at the University of Utah, utilized a biologically based model of the human head to determine where and how invisible RF signals are absorbed. (Davis, 85)
Appearing before Congress in 2009 and referring to Dr. Gandhi’s research, Dr. Davis showed that cell phone radiation goes about 2 inches into the brain of an adult and much deeper through the brain of a five-year-old. (Davis, 85)
Despite an ever-growing mountain of evidence showing multiple problems with cell phone radiation, an alteration of safety standards is out of the question as conflict of interests abound in the committees that call the shots.
Tune in to UW Radio TONIGHT to hear more about SAM and the shenanigans going behind the scenes that keep you itching for the next iPhone with no regard for the potential dangers of electromagnetic waves, which cannot be seen, heard, or felt.
If you’re like SAM you have nothing to worry about.
Six-foot-two.
Two hundred pounds.
A max talk time of six minutes.
And a plastic head filled with liquid.
Good luck, my friend.
Sean
I am seriously concerned with this issue. Thank you for this post it is really informative!
Thanks for reading, Anna!!
Isn’t it odd how few of these “studies” have been replicated?
The most-cited one, that by Leif Salford of Lund University in 2004, on rat brains, has not been replicated exactly by anyone that I’ve found.
Then there are vague statements, such as: “Dariusz Leszczynski, a research professor at Finland’s Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority in Helsinki, has done studies indicating that RF radiation may create a stress reaction in the cells that line blood vessels, leading to a dangerous breach in the blood-brain barrier.”
“may” is such a clever word to use!
And positive results are ignored or dismissed by the campaigners, for example the 2007 Danish Cancer Society study of 421,000 cell-phone users, which “led many in the media to conclude that mobiles are harmless”. Showing how stupid the media must be? This massive study showed absolutely no effect, but was criticised for “excluding business users” — supposedly because they were not billed directly. Strangely, an awful lot of business users ARE billed directly (including me!)—and so, must have been included after all.
Then activists resort to special pleading: “The latency period we have is far too short,” says Dr. Siegal Sadetzki, a cancer researcher at Israel’s Gertner Institute whose epidemiological studies have found some connections between cell-phone use and salivary-gland tumors. By the way, what confounding factors were corrected for? Wheat, for example?
So we haven’t found anything… yet. JUST YOU WAIT AND SEE! You’ll all get sick and die because of these horrible devices.
Puh-lease!