asociacion del cancer de mama

dd: good afternoon. hello professor jo hannson.pj: hello, it's nice to hear from you. dd: okay, today we've agreed to talk aboutelectromagnetic radiofrequency exposures. i've just been introduced to you this morning.you are an expert in the health effects of man-made electromagnetic fields and the functionalimpairment known as hyper, electrohypersensitivity, abbreviated as ehs. you are a neuroscientistand longtime researcher from the dermatological unit of the prestigious karolinska institutein stockholm, sweden, which for many of the viewers here in this, united states, may notrealize that is the institute that awards the nobel prize in medicine or physiology.professor, before i introduce myself to the future audience, would you please be so kindto give me a brief summary of your background

and where you're speaking from and whatyou've been doing there in mataro and barcelona, spain, this week.pj: yes, i started in 1972 my medical studies at the karolinska institute. and already in1973 i started my research training at the department of histology and i found myselfengaged in [studies?] regarding the central and peripheral nervous system, that is, thebrain, spinal cord, and the peripheral nerves and ganglia, and it is content of varioustransmitter molecules in different cell types. and that led me to, after my ph.d. dissertation,to look much more into human beings and we started a big project regarding human skinand then we crossed the avenue leading to what you already mentioned, the functionalimpairment electrohypersensitivity. and i

have been here this week in spain, in matarooutside of barcelona, giving lectures, meeting people, having discussions and it has beenextremely fruitful because, as you know, the kind of questions we are going to touch uponwill be relevant to anyone on this planet. i get calls and invitations from every cornerof our beautiful planet and people want me to come there and talk about health effectsof electromagnetic fields. and it could be about, for instance, children in wirelessschools. it could be about cancer victims. it could be about electrohypersensitivity.it could be about neurological diseases. it could be about effects on insects, plants,bacteria and so on. and i have also been honored to give lectures in the united states, forinstance in california, in san francisco at

a very interesting meeting in 2009. and soi am trying to cover as much as i can regarding these issues.dd: okay, as patricia, the coordinator of today's interview, may have told you, myname is debra digiacomandrea. i'm a semi-retired former newspaper reporter, the old-fashionedkind, and a former freelance writer. i live in st. petersburg, florida. i'm not presentlyactively writing, but a few years ago i began to read books on the electromagnetic radiofrequencyissue as a personal interest after a very close physician friend of mine warned me tostay away from microwave ovens and mobile phones. he was similar to two of the fellowsthat attended your recent fifth paris appeal congress in that he treated people for chemicalsensitivities and also was an expert in chelation

therapy to remove heavy metals and toxinsfrom the body. dd: now, i don't have your scientific background,but, we are similar in that we are both from the same age. we grew up in the 1950s andthe 1960s, and we probably heard warnings back then about not sitting too close to thetelevision set when we were little. we probably didn't know at the time about the militarysoldiers who suffered from radar sickness or other illnesses due to wartime exposuresof radio frequencies and radar. and frankly the media and the government didn't talkabout it much here in the united states, except for some university and department of defensestudies, i believe. i first heard about the electromagnetic exposures in the late 1970shere in the united states at the newspaper

where i was working. because in the old dayswe had the video display terminals, the cathode ray tubes, and they were warning pregnantwomen not to sit in front of them for too long due to a possible miscarriage risk. unfortunately,they were not warning us also about the high-powered, two-way walkie talkie radios that we carriedto communicate with the newsroom. so, thousands of miles away from my floridanewsroom, there you were in sweden in the late '70s and early '80s, beginning tostudy the screen dermatitis issue. can you tell me why did you choose that issue of allthe knowledge that you could research or study there; and what did you discover?pj: well, i will be happy to do that. and before it is very interesting that you touchupon the radar damages, for instance, in military

personnel. actually in sweden there was ahuge number of scientific reports that were published in official scientific journals,like in the 1950s and early '60s, and they laid a very strong foundation for the conclusionthat microwave and radiofrequent [radiofrequency] exposures are not good for you at all. butfor some odd reason this are completely disappeared and vanished somewhere in the mid-sixtiesand were not revitalized until the, in the early 1980s. and the reason that i startedto be interested in this was that i actually did something that i very, very rarely do;namely, i listened to a radio program one evening in my laboratory.and it was at eight o'clock, i remember that, and i was about to turn off the radiobecause i could not really concentrate with

the radio program in my ears. but then someonetalked about women, but also men, having started work with these new personal computers withthese big cathode ray tubes and they were starting to report skin problems, skin rashes,irritations, and redness, and sensation of heat and warmth.and she, the woman thatwas interviewed, she was from the trade union[s] in sweden. her name is kajsa vedin ; and sheasked for expertise in neurology. and i'm not a clinical neurologist, but i work inthe neurosciences, so i thought well close enough and it sounded very simple to investigatethese skin alterations. and i also of course knew that we had built a very good foundationregarding normal healthy skin. we knew quite a lot about it.so i thought, well, we could take skin biopsies.

and we met with this woman and also a physicistfrom chalmers, goteborg on the west coast of sweden and they came to stockholm and yes,funny enough, that is the reason we are talking to each other today because that was reallythe start with the investigations and one should remember at that time, at least insweden, there was a huge interest from various persons and organizations, so for a few yearswe had money. we could do various investigations. we started both with normal healthy skin,but also skin from people with what i coin the screen dermatitis phenomenon thatwe today call electrohypersensitivity. and then, but at the end of the '80s, beginningof the '90s, something happened, i would say; and the flow of money quickly ceasedand it become more and more difficult to investigate

the similar type of persons with, who had andparallel to this had grown dramatically in number; and i remember at the end of the '80s,beginning of the '90s somewhere, i had a guest from the people's republic of china.it was a clinical dermatologist. and i was sitting working with micrographs that we aretaking in our fluorescence microscopes and she came into the room and asked me what iwas doing and i stupidly, you know, said well, you know, this is something you have neverheard about. this is something that we are dealing with in sweden. there are personssitting in front of computer screens getting skin irritations and she said, no, no.that's very common in china, too. so i immediately realized that you do find iteverywhere; and as you pointed out the very

first cases that were reported, they cameactually from united states and norway; and then they were followed by cases from variouscountries, including then sweden and the people�s republic of china.dd: very interesting. is this screen dermatitis still an issue, or is it worse, or has itevolved into other skin issues, allergic reactions or system-wide immune problems?pj: well, you know at that time we concentrated very much on the cutaneous issues, and tobe honest, we sometimes kind of forgot to even ask people what kind of other symptomsthey had; but later on we became a little more scientific, i would say, so we collectedin a study all the symptoms that were reported, and they do have symptoms from, more or less,the entire body, although concentrated a lot

on the skin. but they also have, like, heartpalpitations, problems with breathing. they have problems with the gastrointestinal tract,immune system reactions, headaches, concentration problems, memory problems, et cetera.and in the beginning i remember a colleague saying, oh, don't bother about that,you know. that's so completely unspecific. but these are the classical signs of radiationdamage from, for instance, ionizing sources like ultraviolet light, x-rays, and radioactivityfrom radioactive isotopes; and also they are very specific in the sense that they tellyou that something is wrong in your body due to external exposure from radiation. and now,of course, we are not talking about ionizing radiation, but non-ionizing radiation, likeradiofrequencies including microwaves. we

have different types of long-range waves.we have [power] frequent magnetic fields, et cetera. and more and more information andknowledge were collected. and today, of course, we see that the databasethat describes these phenomena contains probably more than 20,000 applications in peer-reviewed-basedscientific journals; and if you widen your horizon and include all kinds of biologicaleffects, for instance, the x sequences of sharks; the navigation systems of birds andso, i know that there are more than 100,000 publications to electromagnetic fields ofnatural type, as well as artificial types, do have impacts in biology and medicine, that'sfor sure. and when people try to say that this is just imagination and anything likethat, you should never believe them. just

refer them to the peer-reviewed-based scientificliterature. dd: okay.dd: okay. you brought up the other life forms. and i wanted to ask you, does this have somethingto do with a magnetite, or some other gland or structure that are in, say perhaps, thebees, the sharks, the fish, the bird? pj: well, you know, various animals use variousorgans, including the pineal gland, of course, but also other electromagnetic sensory organs;and the interesting thing is i see that you sit in your kitchen and i sit here in a municipalitybuilding and probably exposed to something in the order of 10 volts per meter, but youknow a shark would easily sense 0.05 nanovolts per meter. it's even hard to understandhow little it is, and they have done it for

hundreds of millions of years; and when youswim with sharks, which i strongly recommend by the way, it is very interesting and exciting.they will come to you and they will have sort of a serpent-like motion through the water;and they are then checking if you are alive or dead. and in the final meter they decidewhether to eat you or not; and then they use this extremely sensory organ, sensitive organ,and they are sensoring [sensing?] the muscular activity and through its electromagnetic fields.and of course human beings are not food for these sharks so they turn away. but sharksare not very intelligent, so they will go in a go out, come back again and again andagain, but each time using such miniscule differences in electric fields and the samegoes for, you know, birds and insects and

so on. they can sense differences in the electric,magnetic or electromagnetic fields that are even hard to measure for human beings.dd: okay. thank you. can you tell me how and why you began studying the issues dealingwith melanoma and is there a connection between melanoma and the electromagnetic exposures?was that increasing in sweden and other parts of europe?pj: that's also a very interesting project and question that you bring up. and then itall started actually when the world health organization cancer classified so-called powerfrequent [frequency?] magnetic fields, which is a long word for household electricity andits association to childhood leukemia. and that was in the year 2001 and it was basedon a huge book, american research, by nancy

wertheimer and edward leeper in denver; andthey had looked upon power lines and association with clusters of cases of childhood leukemia;and they published in 1979 the classical paper in the journal science where they then producedfinal results and showed that there was such an association.and a collaborator to [of] mine, ã–rjan hallberg and myself, we then sat down and said well,maybe there could be similar associations to other cancer forms. and in the meantime,now we are somewhere around 2002, 2003. knowledge has, of course, has also arisen regardingthe association between certain brain tumors and exposure to radio frequent [frequency]fields, especially microwaves from mobile telephony which, in parenthesis, leads upto the world health organization classifying

also radio frequent fields, may 31, 2011,and their association to certain brain tumors. but coming back then to malignant melanomas,which by the way, is the most rapidly increasing cancer form in sweden and in quite a few othercountries, and we have an increase in health studies the number of new cases per year,which is in the order of six percent, which is really an epidemic development. and thenwe started to plot, you know - when i went to my basic science training i had excellenttraining in medical statistics; and i remember particularly a woman said to me that beforeyou do anything always plot your data so that you can see them on a sheet of paper.and before i continue i will say that i had as a lecture[r] in experimental and clinicaldermatology, i had often met medical and dental

students and i had talked about that the reasonwhy scandinavians got more and more skin cancer was because we got more and more money inthe '50s. we were able to fly to the mediterranean and expose ourselves to more and more sun.and twenty, thirty years later on, people got skin cancers. but you know when we startto plot the data, it turned out to be completely the opposite and in laymen's terms, a patientwith skin cancer first died[?]. [21:00] then he or she got the disease and thereafter theywent to the mediterranean. so it was completely the opposite. it didn't match at all, youknow. and i'm not ruling out the sun, not at all. but there was some other factor obviously;and to make a long story short, then we started to plot against various environmental exposuresand our eyes fell upon the idea of [___?]

resonant fields.and in sweden, and i know in many other countries, the [background] ____?____ resonant fieldsare the so-called fm radio bands which have the frequency of about 100 megahertz, meaningthat the half the length is 1.5 meters, meaning that you and i, we sort of stick out intothis ocean of electro-genetic [or did he say magnetic, not genetic? [ stimulants, beingexposed to the energies and when we plotted this we could see that for each country whenthey turned on and rolled out their fm radio system, then you also had initially what wecall a prevalence- based mortality, meaning that people that were very ill with malignantmelanomas quicker died. they were kind of executed by these very, very fun fm radiosignals. and later on you saw a similar incidence

increase - and for each country it madesense. we could even break down countries to landscapes or to counties or similar; andfor united states you could break it down to your fifty states and see that it combinedalways in a straight line. we wrote then a number of papers and we had published i wouldsay the order of at least ten in this particular field checking more and more into effects.dd: very interesting. this sounds similar to something i read here in the united states.there's an epidemiologist, sam milham. perhaps you've met him. he found a correlation witha rise in 20th-century degenerative disease trends like cancer, diabetes, cardiovasculardiseases when we began putting electricity in homes. he also found increases in cancerwith exposures to dirty electricity and/or

large numbers of cell towers or radar towers and in particular he pointed out marin county, the area north of san francisco, whichi believe has the largest number of - the highest rate of breast cancer in the unitedstates, despite the fact that there are many professional, wealthy individuals who livethere that can afford organic food and the best types of preventative medical care.so, these similar correlations, is that something that you presented in a 2002 paper cancertrends during the 20th century and you were showing that health issues were coincidingwith, say, the introduction of radio in the '20s, fm radio in 1955, color tv in 1969,and then also the switch from analog to digital phones sometime in the late '90s?pj: yes. and you are talking of course about

dr. sam milham who has written a lot aboutthis, some very interesting papers and books, and maybe you know, i mean, this is of coursea hypothesis that needs to be further investigated. but maybe we are not talking about rocketscience at all. maybe by spraying people with astronomicallyhigh levels of energy compared to natural background you will heat cells and some cellsthey will actually feel quite well about that. there is a huge number of studies showingthat the immune system initially is activated. it's trying to sort of fight off, but ina happy way, you know, it's very good. it's very active. but after some time it deterioratesand it deteriorates rapidly; and that could in itself explain all the things that youmentioned: the dramatic increases in various

cancer forms, prostate cancer, breast cancer,and also increases in diabetes, et cetera. and again, i want to point out that we donot rule out all other confounders, not at all, i mean, the whole lifestyle factors mustbe investigated and corrected; and that goes for sweden and united states and spain andeverywhere, you know. we are living quite artificial lives.and you also mentioned breast cancer which unfortunately is on the rise not only in theunited states, but also in other countries, and when you treat breast cancer you use achemical called tamoxifen i'm sorry, i just got something in my nose. tamoxifen:the treatment with tamoxifen is effectively hindered when you expose persons to electromagneticfields. so maybe they don't get breast cancer

but you stop the effectiveness of the mostcommon treatment, meaning that the woman still will die.dd: whoa. okay. the media, the mainstream media here in the united states doesn'tseem to pay attention to this electromagnetic radiofrequency issue. but since you've justbeen talking about the breast cancer, i will bring up that recently within the last yearin the mainstream media, there was cases reported of younger women in their thirties and forties,and also several 21-year-old women who developed breast cancer without any other factors believedthat could have influenced it, except for the fact that they were carrying their mobilephones in their undergarments and the tumors were determined to be in the shape of thecell phone in a pattern and in a location

not usually found. now is that something thathas also happened there in europe? pj: yes, unfortunately it is. and you know,both in the united states and in europe you can buy, as a woman, a bra with a specialpocket to put your mobile phone into and i sort of scream when i see that; and i screamsimilarly high when i see people with baby prams with a small baby in it, and they arethrowing their mobile phone or tablet down, because it's convenient to have it whilethey are pushing the baby, in front of them and i want to tell them, don't do that,you know. this exposure is just gigantic and people don't quite understand the levelsof exposure we are talking about. neither the microwaves nor the power frequent magneticfields.

you know a small mobile phone, that equalsseveral electric train engines; and no father or mother in the world would throw severalelectric train engines down to a baby, but they do it without even realizing it. andas we said before, compared to natural background, the exposure levels when we talk about microwavesfor wireless telecommunication, that's just understood in biblical terms, you know. it'senormous exposures. i have also today heard about similar cases regarding, for instance,kidney tumors [29:49] when a woman carried their mobile phone on their hip. so my recommendationis to not carry it at all. just avoid it because the risks are too high.and it's interesting also, i know in the united states you have a very clever expression,namely follow the money; and it's

interesting to see that, for instance, froma legal liability point of view, the operators, the manufacturers, the world's insurancecompanies, the radiation protection authorities, as well as the world health organization,they have all completely abandoned ship. they do not take any form of responsibility atall and when i was at the conference in london 2004, there were representatives of the operators,the manufacturers and the insurance companies, top lawyers from u.k., the united states andso on. and they all summarized that for them, and it was 2004 already, for them it was nota question of if there were harm to human beings; the question was only whois going to pay for it and they said in unison they were not going to pay for it.and i think if you doubt some test tube experiment

or some investigation using clinical epidemiology,follow the money. they don't doubt this at all. they have already repositioned themselvesand therefore when i am contacted by the medical lawyers, because they are your biggest lawfirms in the united states, they are preparing for lawsuits regarding brain tumors and theyhave realigned their aim. they are not aiming at the operators or the manufacturers; theyare aiming at the american state because that's the only level left actually from a responsibilitypoint of view dd: and could that be because the manufacturersand sellers of the mobile phones have put a warning in the fine print of the phonesor the booklets that go with them? pj: yesdd: telling people

pj: and also, you know, i mean they areso completely aware of this; and i remember at this conference in london they talked - barristersand lawyers - they said that the tobacco scandal, the bhopal scandal in india, and the dow corningbreast implant scandal, they were really the last times when any corporate industry everwould be [have? -32.34] liability in a court of law. they have learned their lesson andin all these licenses and agreements they write very, very detailed that they do nottake any responsibility whatsoever; and also, you know, the world health organization cancerclassified both the radio frequent as well as the power frequent fields, they clearlytell the consumers back off because we are backing off.dd: well, that's very disappointing. i was

holding out hope that perhaps when the legalsystem here in the united states began to get on board in filing the lawsuits that thatmight pj: they will. but the target is not the manufacturersor the operators. the target is the american state, because like in sweden and in spain,the governments, parliaments, senates, congresses whatever you call them they are theones responsible for the rollout. and it's interesting, like in sweden, the telecom operatorsthey went to the swedish parliament and said very nicely, is it alright that we wholebody irradiate the entire population 24/7, wherever they are, with something[dot,dot, dot] . they didn't say the rest, namely, that the world health organizationhas cancer classified and the swedish parliament

said yes, that's exactly what we want.we want to have a complete coverage of the entire population because the european unionhas decided that we should roll out this communication device and hopefully, i mean - and i wantto really stress this hopefully you and i and others that are critical, we are completelywrong. it is actually safe. we should really go down on our knees and beg to god that itis safe. but that would also mean that in the order of 25,000 scientific papers andan endless number of books, articles, commentaries, letters to editors, and so on all at thesame time must be completely wrong. and that has never, ever happened before in science,so it's a very small probability that it will be true this time. but i hope reallyit is safe, but i guess then i will also believe

in that elvis presley is still alive.dd: it's possible (laughing). anything is possible.pj: well, anything is possible, but hardly likely i would say, you know.dd: we've been talking about the cancers and i wanted to switch and ask you, have younot also done studies regarding the thyroid gland? and i'm bringing this up becausehere in the united states there are so many people, especially women, who take syntheticor artificial synthetic or natural thyroid supplements. and for many years we have sat,especially women in offices, in front of these computers, so i wanted to find out what youthought about that if you have found associations between exposures to computer screens or electromagneticradiofrequencies and specific or some types

of irregularities in the thyroid gland whetherit be in rats or humans or other life forms? pj: yes it started, you know, in sweden ifwe go back to the early 1980s. physicians, clinical doctors started to try to explainthese new screen dermatitis/electrohypersensitive people by saying that, and i quote, theywere just menopost-menopausal women. but then men came along. then they said thatthere were people with low education. and then professors, lawyers, doctors, and soon, also became electrohypersensitive; and then they said, oh, it's people witha high education, actually. and they talked about imagination and they even actually putthe blame on you, because they talked about a mass-media-driven psychosis when peoplemade video calls or newspaper articles, then

others would start sensing, well, maybei'm a little bit electrohypersensitive, too.and then we decided to solve this but actually changing from human beings to rats. and asyou know, rats, they do not watch television or computers. they don't listen to radio.they don't read newspapers or books; and still when exposed to the very same typesof exposures they do get exact same type of, for instance, skin alterations that we hadshown in human beings and also unfortunately i must say they had quite dramatic changesat the cellular and molecular level in the thyroid glands, pointing to that this maybe again mimicking the classical ionizing radiation damage when the thyroid is involved.and but here we're talking about non-ionizing

radiation, but still involving this criticalorgan, and as you say when you have a population that you have to supplement with natural orsynthetic hormones and you place them in front of very strong radiation sources, maybe it'stime for something i have inaugurated: namely, the institute of common sense for common sense.dd: thank you. okay. let me also ask you: are the mobile phones, the wifi, the celltowers affecting our melatonin levels? and would that possibly be one reason why we havethe rising cancer rates and the rise in breast cancer?pj: again a very interesting area. there are quite a number of papers. but i have to behonest and say that here the picture is not one hundred percent clear. you can find publicationsnot showing alterations as well as publications

showing upward or downward changes in thelevels of mela-melatonin. so here it's still an open question.but its connection, of course, to cancers cannot be ruled out; and also its connectionsto nighttime sleep cycles or the whole 24-hour cycle it's also very important and i'veseen recently papers looking at nighttime sleep and as you know it's divided intofour stages; and the stage 4 is called the rapid eye movement sleep or the dream sleepand it's completely obliterated when we expose people to electromagnetic things andthat's scary because this dream sleep periods during the night are the periods when yourbody is supposed to repair itself. and now we come to this year's nobel prizein chemistry, which was partly awarded to

the swedish professor tomas lindahl has beenlooking at [cyclative? 40:17] dna damage and repair cycles and i am trying to reach him i will try to write to him because i want to know what he has seen using ionizingradiation. is it damaging too? could that be mimicked using non-ionizing radiation?and i already know the answer because that's one of the areas which has been most replicatedand have very steady knowledge and again the initial study is from an american scientist,professor henry lai and his coworker narendra singh in seattle, united states. so this isa very, very important area to pursue further; and i wish we could do more.i always feel bad because many, many intelligent and caring persons like yourself are askingthese very important questions and i would

love to be able to sort of say oh, i run tothe laboratory immediately. but nowadays and since many years back, it's very difficultto get any form of funding and i have even written to the swedish government asking themto send the documentation giving the clear, green light saying that it is completely safe.and so far after many years i haven't got a single sentence, not a word, not a period.not a comma. nothing. because i think, you know, if it is safe, then i want to go somewhereelse in society and have other people without functional impairments or disease and problems.but i get nothing. dd: that's sounds very frustrating.pj: it is. dd: we have an expression here in the unitedstates that the canary in the coalmine, the

bird warns us of danger. what is it in ourbodies that is that canary in the coalmine? is it the skin changes? the increases in cancer?the allergies? the immune system responses? or is it now the electro hypersensitivityissue? pj: well it's all of it actually, you know.and i always tell people that we should be very happy that we have the persons with electrohypersensitivity because they will tell us that something is wrong and it was also partlythe basis for giving or recognizing them here in sweden as a functional impairment or disabilitybecause such a recognition puts the blame, not on the person, but on the environment.and as you say something is wrong in the coalmine, the yellow canary birds fell off their sticksand died because the air was not good enough

and the miners knew that they had to surfaceas quick as possible. and maybe we need to surface in the same way and we should reallybe happy that they are telling us that something is wrong.and then not so nice of course on top of that you have all these cancers, diabetes, allergies,asthmas and so on, i mean like in sweden more than fifty percent of children up to the ageof 14 have asthma, allergy, or some other form of oral sensitivity just a scandalto say the least, you know. and for the whole population, all ages, it's more than a third we have also more than a third that have severe sleeping problems, et cetera, et cetera,et cetera; and i'm not again ruling out other confounding factors, but with all thispublished information shouldn't we react

especially the big momma and the big papa namely our governments and parliaments and the health authorities shouldn'tthey really put the moratorium on this? and i've also said it's high time to startdeveloping tomorrow's green human-friendly technology and so far there are only a fewcountries, like spain for instance, __, norway that are very interested in relocating thehuge profits from the oil and gas industries to other areas, and one such area is human-friendlytechnology of various types. so maybe soon in the future we will not buy mobile phonesfrom motorola or ericsson or nokia; they will all become norwegian.dd: oh thank you. i didn't know that. there was a book in the early since you broughtup the possibility of health problems that

may be created by other things in the environmentother than the electromagnetic radio frequencies, there was a book in the early 2000s by excuseme if i don't pronounce her name correctly --- a book bypj: could i stop you, you are breaking up terribly, impossible to hear you. could youstart again dd: yes. you brought up the issue of possibleother things in the environment pj: yes.dd: there was a book in the early 2000s by gunni nordstr'm, a scandinavian journalist.she wrote about the dangers of environmental illness caused by electromagnetic fields andchemical emissions and that is being one reason why she believed those combined exposures,and also the fact that we weren't paying

attention to that, was one of the reasonswhy we moved the manufacture of mobile phones and computers to asia where they're notso possibly strict about paying attention to those types of emissions and chemicalsused to make those products, and are contained in those products. she was warning us abouta synergistic negative effect, a combined effect, of the electromagnetic frequencieswith chemicals. so, do we know: are the people who have beenexposed to certain chemicals more electrohypersensitive? or do the electro electromagnetic radiofrequencies make us more susceptible to the chemicals and toxins? or is it both or allscenarios? pj: eh to begin with i would like to saythat gunni nordstrã¶m, who nowadays is a

retired writer and author of several booksand more than one hundred excellent articles - she's one of the top journalists evertogether with her colleague [carl von scheele ? 47:31] and they have written a number ofarticles and books and she has done a tremendous job, and she also got interested, as you say,in the combination with the environmental chemicals, for instance flame retardants,and then electromagnetic fields and that was based upon a brilliant work by a professorin england, [denis henshaw ? 47:54], and his coworkers that showed that these chemicalsare being moved in electromagnetic field differences. and that means that when you sit in frontof a video display terminal or computer screen or use a mobile phone or a tablet, maybe youare actually much more exposed to these chemicals

because they are concentrated. and many ofthese plasticizers and flame retardants and other chemicals, they are very well knownas being mutagenic, carcinogenic, and [____-genic ] and so on, so they are bad for you. andas you say, it is just too little known here. much more needs to be done regarding investigations.i'm sorry that gunni nordstrã¶m is retired because she has always behaved like a professor,i would say. dd: i noticed in the abstract of the recentfifth paris appeal congress that you attended in brussels, belgium, in may, that on the thatin the conferences on electromagnetic fields and the chemicals, there was a fellow conferenceexpert, a dentist from iran, who said there is increased release of mercury from the fillings,the dental amalgams in our teeth after exposure

to electromagnetic fields generated by thephones and also by mri machines. then similarly there was another scientist talking aboutdental implants amplifying the emf exposures in our jaw area and possibly our cranial nerves.so i'd like to ask you, if i put my glasses on, should i be concerned? are our metal devicessuch as jewelry, the glasses, the silver fillings, the gold crowns, the metals in the tattooinks, medical implants are these acting like an antenna that are attracting more ofthe electromagnetic radiofrequencies to us? pj: uh, they are acting as antennas. thatdoesn't mean that they attract more, but they will be dissolved and altered and thisis actually quite an old knowledge. the first studies they were done in sweden on professionaldivers that lost their tooth fillings because

they used tools that produced high levelsof power frequent magnetic fields and i could easily understand that these coils had then____ fields that corroded metal dental implants. and that goes for any such material in yourglasses or inside your body that they will be affected by these electromagnetic fields;and there has been quite a few studies throughout the years clearly showing this - and i meanif it's just a corrosion, okay then, but the corrosion products like mercury couldthen act as a very active poison in your body and that is definitely not something you wouldwant to have there. so again, i don't know the english expressionfor that, but in sweden we say that you jump out of one boiling pot into another one, youknow, even hotter than before, and you do

it because society is moving forward. thingsare being developed. everything should be nice, easy, happy, fun, you know. but maybeby doing all these inventions and manufacturing and selling them, we are selling potentiallyvery dangerous exposures direct exposures to not only human beings but of course toall the living creatures on the planet. dd: can you tell me what - is there somethingabout our bodies that allows us to attract or absorb the electromagnetic radiofrequencies?is it our high water content, our bones, the magnetic minerals like iron, copper, the chargedparticles in our bodies? what is it about us humans that make us susceptible?pj: i don't think we are more susceptible than anyone else. bacteria, plants, insects,birds and other types of animals, et cetera

- we are equally susceptible to it and weare built of the same type of molecules, the same type of cells and your question isvery, very important. unfortunately, as a scientist we still don't have a clear-cutanswer. but there are a number of molecules that can act even themselves as antennas,for instance. we have ionic flows across cell membranes that could be of interest.and again i want to point out professor henry lai in seattle - he has done a number of veryimportant studies showing alterations, changes, transport [__] a lot of different moleculesin our body when he subjected experimental animals to exposures, including for instancetransmitter molecules, and it's interesting to see that when test persons are exposed,for instance to mobile telephony, or power

frequent magnetic fields, you see very clear-cutchanges in the electric pattern of the brain the so-called eeg and you see changesin transmitter transport and ionic channels opening and closing and so on, you know. andalso you can see in behavioral experiments the decrease in concentration capacity, decreasein short-term memory, a decrease in learning capacity and et cetera. so maybe these funthings that allows us to communicate right now actually, maybe they are at the same timedumbing us down, at least to a certain degree. dd: i think i would probably agree with that.can you tell what the purpose or goal of that fifth paris appeal congress was? has the worldhealth organization yet answered or addressed the concerns of your may 2015 meeting?pj: well, i have to surprise you because i

was at the conference. i participated as alecturer there. but i could not sign their appeal because the appeal wanted to go againstpeople with electrohypersensitivity. you know they are recognized as a disability or functionalimpairment, but the appeal wants to instead give them a status of being patients witha diagnosis and some kind of treatment treatment, i don't even know what it's all about.and i couldn't sign such an appeal because the swedish recognition of electrohypersensitivityputs the entire blame on the environment. it's the environment who should have aninternational code of diagnosis. it's the environment that should be treated. and thetreatment is very simple and you've already touched upon that. it's what i would callelectro-sanitation, meaning shielding and/or

distance to source of exposure. and of course,don't get me wrong. a person with a functional impairment in sweden or anywhere else withinthe united nations countries is of course allowed to go to a doctor. an electrohypersensitiveperson may have a headache and want to have a prescription for aspirins and naturallythey can do that and already [ __ ] they've got an icd code classification based uponthe symptoms. so it's no problem but the culprit is, and will always be, the environment.and with this fifth paris appeal, i just could not sign it. so that i cannot really answer.i have no insight into where it's going, what it is doing. and i also see that manyelectrohypersensitive persons and their relatives around the planet are upset because they don'twant to be sent into a corner as patients.

and you know from a legal point of view, beinga patient and you're half a micron away from being a psychiatric patient. but if youhave a functional impairment recognition, that's the largest legal umbrella anyonecan have on this planet and they are completely protected against any such attacks. and thereforei'm not surprised that people with electrohypersensitivity that they are upset [ at this problem ].dd: okay. thank you. is one of your goals at this point to have the world health organizationreclassify mobile phone radiation from a class 2b carcinogen, meaning possibly carcinogenic,to a stricter classification such as 2a, a probable carcinogen, or higher? what wouldyou like to see? pj: well, at this point i still think 2b isenough. umm, it sends a message good enough

to society that these gadgets are not safe.the knowledge regarding 2a or 1 classification is still lacking, but on the other hand ifwe move away from my dry scientific look upon this and just talk about moral and ethicalissues and the fact that we are talking about toys, i would favor a class 1 classificationdefinitely. because, you know again, americans you have the saying that it's betterto be safe than sorry. the other opposite outcome to have people getting brain tumorsor childhood leukemia in the future, it's not very tempting at all.dd: okay, i believe at a past lecture, you mentioned a safe distance from a mobile phoneis five to ten kilometers, which here in the united states would be three to six miles.do you still believe that? or would you increase

the distance now?pj: you are breaking up again. but i think you asked about the distance to radiationsources and at the meeting in 1998 - that's a long time ago in [ uddevalla - ?] onthe west coast of sweden and i believe it was a meeting for like three, four days, umm,including professor henry lai and other world experts. i remember i asked a very similarquestion to a physicist. having heard all the presentations of biological and medicaleffects, and then i said hey, if we buy a mobile phone and a hands-free gadget, howfar away from our body do we need in order to be on the safe side? and then he saidexactly like this: well olle, it's hard to give an exact figure, but it would probablybe enough to put it away five to ten kilometers.

you know a mobile phone is an extremely strongradiation source. you have to remember that the microwave exposures from a 3g, the thirdgeneration mobile phone, compared to a natural background is a quintillion times higher - that'sa one with eighteen zeroes behind. so it's an enormous radiation source; and thereforei do understand that this physicist was correct. and then i remember i was in a radio interviewin sweden a few weeks after that and i mentioned this figure; and the day after a teacher inhigh school physics called me and said that that was the most stupid thing that he hadever heard. he had calculated that it was enough with 500 to 1,000 meters; and theni still said what's the beef? how long arms do you have? i should be able to dialthe number you know. and then he just hang

up being really angry with me.dd: similarly in 1997, 18 years ago, you said that there is only one hygienic safety valueof electromagnetic radiation pj: yes.dd: .000001 watts per square meter (u w/m), the natural background during cosmic activities.what does that mean? like the way we lived before we be - came to put electricityin our homes? can you explain? pj: yeah. you know the public exposures recommendationyou have in the united states is ten million microwatts per square meter. if you dividethat figure with the figure you mentioned then you get the difference, for instance,between artificial radiation, microwave [ exposures ? _____ and the natural background; and that'sin the order of a quintillion [quintillionth?]

times. and therefore in 1997 at a trade unionmeeting in stockholm and in a small room i remember we were just a few people. i saidthat it was high time to introduce what we in sweden would call a hygienic safely levelinstead of a recommendation or guideline; and i said only the natural background couldbe regarded as a safe exposure and in this room was one of my most harsh opponents presentand he said the following, and i quote, i never trust what olle johansson says. butthis time he is completely right. dd: well, isn't that reassuring.pj: it is. and i was kind of flabbergasted, you know, to hear him speak out in such anhonest way and say that yes, you are so completely right in this. and that was1997, you know. we are talking about the first

and second generation wireless systems. todaywe have added too many more systems of various types, so many more gadgets. especially childrenhave been given, for good reasons, for kind reasons, more and more exposure. and it cango from a moral and ethical point of view very odd that parents, at least in sweden,they are forced to send the children to schools that are wirelessly based, meaning that theyexpose the children to something that the world health organization already cancer classified[in] 2011; and for the power frequent fields 2001. so it's fantastic because just imagineif these schools would be filled with cigarette smoke, no mother and father in sweden wouldsend them there, you know. but they are filled and to a biblical proportion with invisiblenon-ionizing radiation of the very same type

that harms anything from bacteria, tomatoplants, and honeybees, mice, rats and so on, all the way up to human beings, and no oneseems to react. dd: so is there a safe place with no electromagneticradio frequencies or has that option disappeared due to our global satellites and all our devices?pj: well i mean there are of course safer places, and if you for instance buy a minethat is not used any longer and live in it or you buy a faraday cage or some other similarinstallation. or if you move to sweden actually because sweden has huge parts of [? __] space.it is extremely isolated. no one is living in the forests. only moose and reindeer andthat kind of thing. and the operators, they don't burn money you know. so they don'texpose these vast areas and there you have

what we in sweden call environmental refugees people that cannot live in the modern society and they have had to leave it andthey live like in caravans, tents, huts, whatever; and far, far away from any modern facilities[ ?] and modern shops and whatever you need. and fortunately they are not very many insweden based on the population of more than nine million. they form a group of around800. and right now there is a huge debate in sweden because sweden is invaded, i wouldsay, with refugees from syria and iraq and so on; and they are coming in the hundredsof thousands and people are asking questions: how should we be able to take care of themand so on. and i couldn�t help myself thinking wow, should they end up as theseenvironmental refugees in a snow-covered caravan,

two hundred kilometers from the nearest foodshop? dd: yes, yes, you brought up a very, verydisconcerting problem: the refugees. we're very upset many of us here in the united statesabout that too, even though it may appear that we don't seem compassionate at times.i wanted to ask you also, on the horizon do you know if industry is perhaps developingsafer tech frequencies that may be more compatible with our physiology?pj: i couldn't say i know they are doing it, but i'm sure they are trying to. andyou know sometimes huge international corporations are starting in garages in california. sowhy not again? why not some young women and men sitting in a garage somewhere inventinga new tool for long-distance communication,

whatever it will be, but in a green human-friendlyform of it. and i'm pretty sure that the industry is already trying to do somethingsimilar. but at the same time, you know, i guess if i was the head of motorola or nokiaor ericsson, or something, i would feel pretty safe because they have handed all the responsibilityfrom a legal point of view to governments and parliaments, and the governments and parliamentsstill say yes, we want to have more, more, more, more. and they don't pay any attentionto experts such as sam milham, yourself, henry lai and so forth. and that could be a hugemistake to turn your back upon asuch a very poisonous snake.dd: okay, uh, i believe i'm going to be close to my time limit here.pj: yes you are. yeah, yes you are.

dd: yes, i wanted to ask you one last thing.at this point at your.after your long career at the karolinska institute, is there somethingthat you still wish to accomplish or is there something that youre working on that you'dlike to tell us about? pj: well i mean the wishes i have for the few years remainingon my life, it's of course that i'm completely wrong. i wish that all the things that wehave been talking about will vanish and it turns out the ___ [ radiation ] - it doesnothing. but as i said before that would be sensational because every day in my computerthere are two, three, four, five, six new publications of high quality and very importantresults adding to the previous 25,000 papers. so the probability for my wish to come trueis very nil, i would say. and apart from that

i just wish you a very nice continuous dayin sunny florida. dd: thank you very much. and enjoy barcelona.pj: thank you. thank you. dd: thank you. and i believe we�ll conclude.thank you. ----------- end of interview ---------