In a fascinating opening talk at last week’s EMF Hazards Summit, Dr Magda Havas told us about the article which was posted through her front door – with no sender or address – that enabled her to track down Dr Zory Glaser. Dr Glaser was a US government scientist who, in the 1960s and ’70s had catalogued over 2,000 scientific references on the biological/health effects of microwave radiation. The research dated from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s and had been drawn from all over the world. It reveals that almost everything that we know know about microwave radiation today – both its harmful and its beneficial effects – was already known 50 years ago.
After some negotiaton, Dr Glaser agree to give his archive to Dr Havas who has subsequently scanned much of it and placed it on a dedicated site while including certain updated pieces on her own site. You could easily waste a number of hours in fascinating historical exploration – I have….
Early history
The first step towards microwaves was the invention of electricity by Edison and Tesla in the late 19th century followed, in the 1920s, by Marconi and Tesla’s discovery that you could use the airwaves to transmit sounds. Then in the 1940s the development of radar (effectively microwave radiation and the precursor to our wifi) was given a huge boost by the war – and the first signs that it could have harmful effects on health started to appear.
Prewar, the newly discovered heating effects of microwave radiation were being harnessed for beneficial medical purposes. It was known that increasing bodily temperature can kill pathogens and viruses so could microwave radiation be used to artificially raise body temperatures and thus combat disease?
However, as the war continued and the use of radar increased, reports appeared of radar operatives suffering unusual numbers of headaches, increased numbers of cataracts, baldness and sterility. A study by the Mayo Clinic on dogs showed that, subjected to microwave radiation, the dogs also had increased cataracts and testicular degeneration – explained by the fact that neither the eyes nor the testes can thermo-regulate so were unable to cope with the increased body temperatures.
Post war
In the early 1950s a research programme was set up jointly by the US army, navy and airforce to assess what level of exposure to microwaves was safe. But, as Dr Havas pointed out, this was the Cold War and the military were more concerned with protecting their ability to use microwaves for military purposes than they were about the health of its operatives. The researchers were primarily physicists with little understanding of the body or any possible health effects that radiation might have on it. The guidelines that they drew up therefore were based purely on their heating effects.
Despite the further research carried out in the 1970s (all documented in the Glaser archive) that showed that that even low levels of radiation could damage DNA and chromosomes, was mutgenic, caused cancer and had reproductive, hormonal, neurological and immunological effects, the guidelines still only cover the thermal effects of microwave radiation.
Why did this not come to light earlier and why is it still ignored?
This research was government sponsored and controlled by the military who had no desire to see their use of valuable radar systems being limited by health risks which they regarded as being acceptable in the pursuit of the greater military good. Most of the material was ‘grey’ in that it was at least partially controlled access and so it was left to moulder, like the Glaser archive had Dr Havas not been alerted to it.
More recently interest in suppressing reports of damage to health, human and other, has moved to the telecoms industry who have taken full advantage of the money-based American political system to ensure a compliant goverment attitude. Effectively the industry bank rolls budding politicians both to get elected and then to get re-elected thus ensuring that, when in power, they will do nothing to affect their sponsors’ bottom lines.
(Another talk at the EMF Summit by Robert F. Kennedy Jr detailed exactly how this works.)
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