electronics and health symptoms

New MA Bill to warn about children and cell phones

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An Act relative to the safe use of hand-held devices by children https://malegislature.gov/Bills/190/SD2053
Chapter 93 of the General Laws is hereby amended by inserting after section 114 the following new section:-

Section 115. All mobile telephones sold or leased at a point of sale or retail establishment in the commonwealth shall clearly and conspicuously disclose, on product packaging, the following notice to consumers:-

“To assure safety, the Federal Government requires that cell phones meet radio frequency (RF) exposure guidelines. If you carry or use your phone in a pocket or the phone is otherwise in contact with your body when the phone is on and connected to a wireless network, you may exceed the federal guidelines for exposure to RF radiation. Refer to the instructions in your phone or user manual for information about how to use your phone safely.”

2 MA Bills to protect kids in schools

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An Act relative to best management practices for wireless in schools and public institutions of higher education.

                 Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives in General Court assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:

            SECTION 1. Chapter 71 of the General Laws is hereby amended by adding the following section:–

            Section 98. The department of elementary and secondary education shall develop best practices and guidance for the purchase and installation of wireless internet service in schools. In developing these guidelines, the department shall consider and prioritize practices that protect the health and safety of public school students and staff.

            SECTION 2. Chapter 15A of the General Laws is hereby amended by adding the following section:–

            Section 45. The board shall develop best practices and guidance for the purchase and installation of wireless internet service in public institutions of higher education. In developing these guidelines, the board shall consider and prioritize practices that protect the health and safety of public institutions of higher education students and staff.

Is your symptom related to EHS?

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“But what does it feel like?” This is the most popular question I’ve been asked in the last three years. In a nutshell — it feels like unremitting, wired, electrified torture. It feels like I am fused with a force field, that I’m no longer human but part of a circuit. It feels like my body is pulsating to an artificial frequency. If I were to check off some boxes in a physician’s waiting room, my symptom list would include numbness, tingling, muscle twitching, vertigo, loss of balance, pressurized headaches, spinal pain, rashes, insomnia, memory lapses, cognitive dysfunction, altered heart rate, tinnitus, fatigue, gastrointestinal distress and urological spasms — just for starters.
My symptoms worsen to torment based on dose and duration of EMF intensity, and diminish only with distance from the offending source. Which means, if there’s something energetically hurting me, there’s no waiting it out, there’s no “maybe I’ll get used to it,” there’s no “Alison, can’t you just deal with it?” And if I can’t shut it down, there is only one thing to do:
Leave.”
–written by Alison Main,  a freelance graphic designer and writer with a focus on environmental health, EMF safety and natural living. You can read her nonfiction essays at uncommonalchemy.me and her published work atalisonmain.me.

Screen time messing up our brains – biologically!

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abnormal braincrop Red areas designate abnormal white matter in internet addicted teens. *

Screen time for humans has now been proven to affect the biology of the brain. Victoria Dunckley, MD explains this in her book Reset Your Child’s Brain. I have friends with unruly children that forget their homework, can’t sleep at night, daydream a lot, and worse yet for the parents, are defiant and belligerent. Studies have shown that video gaming and time staring at screens (including iPhones) are affecting us all – and not for the good. This is an excerpt from an article Dunckley had published in Psychology Today (link on our sidebar).

Multiple studies have shown atrophy (shrinkage or loss of tissue volume) in gray matter areas (where “processing” occurs) in internet/gaming addiction (Zhou 2011 (link is external), Yuan 2011 (link is external), Weng 2013 (link is external),and Weng 2012 (link is external)). Areas affected included the important frontal lobe, which governs executive functions, such as planning, planning, prioritizing, organizing, and impulse control (“getting stuff done”). Volume loss was also seen in the striatum, which is involved in reward pathways and the suppression of socially unacceptable impulses. A finding of particular concern was damage to an area known is the insula, which is involved in our capacity to develop empathy and compassion for others and our ability to integrate physical signals with emotion. Aside from the obvious link to violent behavior, these skills dictate the depth and quality of personal relationships.

Research has also demonstrated loss of integrity to the brain’s white matter (Lin 2012 (link is external), Yuan 2011 (link is external), Hong 2013 (link is external) and Weng 2013 (link is external)). “Spotty” white matter translates into loss of communication within the brain, including connections to and from various lobes of the same hemisphere, links between the right and left hemispheres, and paths between higher (cognitive) and lower (emotional and survival) brain centers. White matter also connects networks from the brain to the body and vice versa. Interrupted connections may slow down signals, “short-circuit” them, or cause them to be erratic (“misfire”).

*Source: Lin, Zhou,Lei, et al., used with permission. Victoria Dunckley, MD article in Psychology Today.

Dave’s Story

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I was apprised of your site on the internet and this contact address in your goal to maybe create safe havens for EMF sensitive people. I sincerely hope this can come to pass, but at my age it will most likely be too late for me personally, but at least others to come after me that are younger may not have to go through as much as what I have had to.

I think a big part of my EMF sensitivity is from 35 years of working around very intense electromagnetic fields at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in ground communications here in Florida. Most especially after about 1980 when a lot of computers were installed everywhere out there. I have found that digital electronics are far worse for making people EMF sensitive than are the old analog fields. Presently I cannot go on long trips because I cannot stay in motels because of chemicals used to clean the rooms and chemicals used in washing blankets and sheets such as scented detergents and fabric softeners, etc. Also in most  motels you get rooms with televisions, wi-fi, and even small electrical substations right on the other side of bedroom walls, along with some walls fronting on drink machines and icemakers. All of these put out strong EM Fields. I had a camper van that I used for a couple of trips, but it is now ruined because the area where I live here in Florida is full of mold, and now even though my van doesn’t leak, it’s now full of mold and makes me sick to sleep in it.

The other problem with travel is that after about a hundred miles or so of driving under high tension power lines either across the highway at intervals of parallel to it, my EMF sensitivity gets far worse with severe sharp pains in my head when next to or driving under these lines. The more exposure there is, the worse it gets, so that I eventually have to get off the highway and stay some where to recuperate. Then when I get back on the highway it starts all over again. So as a consequence I am confined mostly to this area where I live and cannot travel any more than about 75 miles from home. To make matters even worse, eating out in restaurants with allergies to all foods and on a strict rotation diet becomes a near impossibility when traveling unless I eat only pre-packaged junk from convenience stores that I know the exact ingredients of. (Believe it or not that is safer than restaurants in most cases, but of course maybe not as nutritious.

Dave Watkins, Florida.

 

EHS can be trigger for MCS, Chronic Fatigue, Fibromyalgia, etc.

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The term electromagnetic hypersensitivity or electrosensitivity (EHS) referred to a clinical condition characterized by a complex array of symptoms typically occurring following exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMFs) even below recommended reference levels and is followed by remission through the complete isolation [1, 2]. The most frequently claimed trigger factors include video display units, radio, televisions, electrical installations, extremely low-frequency ranges of electromagnetic fields or radio-frequencies—including the so-called dirty electricity due to poor isolation of electric wires and telephonic lines, wireless devices, and wi-fi—fluorescent lamps and low-energy lights, appliances with motors, photocopiers, microwave transmitters, and high tension power lines (reviewed in [3, 4]). EHS is characterized by a broad range of nonspecific multiple-organ symptoms implying both acute and chronic inflammatory processes, involving mainly skin and nervous, respiratory, cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, and gastrointestinal systems, in most cases self-reported in absence of organic pathological signs except skin manifestations (reviewed in [2, 5]).

Clinical similarities and frequent comorbidity between EHS and the other medically unexplained multisystem conditions of environmental origin, like multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), fibromyalgia (FM), chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), sick building syndrome, Persian Gulf War veteran syndrome, and amalgam disease, to which EHS is often associated [6, 7], have induced many authors to hypothesize that these so-called idiopathic environmental intolerances (IEI), more extensively also defined as sensitivity-related illnesses (SRI) [8], may share common genetic and/or metabolic molecular determinants connected with an impaired capability to detoxify xenobiotics (for review, see [6, 9]).

See the website http://www.SAFEhelpsyou.org for more information on developing projects for referrals to areas that are safe for persons with EHS andMCS.

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S. J. Genuis and C. T. Lipp, “Electromagnetic hypersensitivity: fact or fiction?” Science of the Total Environment, vol. 414, pp. 103–112, 2012. View at Publisher · View at Google Scholar · View at Scopus
R. Richman, A. J. Munroe, and Y. Siddiqui, “A pilot neighborhood study towards establishing a benchmark for reducing electromagnetic field levels within single family residential dwellings,” Science of the Total Environment, vol. 466-467, pp. 625–634, 2014. View at Publisher · View at Google Scholar
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H. Seitz, D. Stinner, T. Eikmann, C. Herr, and M. Röösli, “Electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) and subjective health complaints associated with electromagnetic fields of mobile phone communication-a literature review published between 2000 and 2004,” Science of the Total Environment, vol. 349, no. 1–3, pp. 45–55, 2005. View at Publisher · View at Google Scholar · View at ScopusL.
L.Korkina, M. G. Scordo, I. Deeva, E. Cesareo, and C. de Luca, “The chemical defensive system in the pathobiology of idiopathic environment-associated diseases,” Current Drug Metabolism, vol. 10, no. 8, pp. 914–931, 2009. View at Publisher · View at Google Scholar · View at Scopus
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Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity from Microwave Technology Finally Medically Proven

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Documented study links electromagnetic hypersensitivity as a real-time health issue that actually can be verified using standard medical procedures and testing capabilities. An international group of researchers aced it when they published their findings from the clinical study “Metabolic and Genetic Screening of Electromagnetic Hypersensitive Subjects as a Feasible Tool for Diagnostics and Intervention” in the November 2014 issue of Mediators of Inflammation. Please click on the link to read the entire study.

[ed. extracted from the study] In this study, the working hypothesis was that EHS, as previously proposed for MCS and other environmental SRI [19, 22], may as well be based on aberrant responses to physic or chemical xenobiotic stressors through airborne or other routes of exposure, due to inherited or/and acquired dysfunction of the chemical defensive system, that is the interrelated network of phase I and II xenobiotic-metabolizing and antioxidant enzymes [19]. Based on the results of our past clinical studies on MCS, FM, and CFS, we sought to assess if similar profiles of metabolic or genetic dysfunctions could be found in those subjects self-reporting EHS phenotype. To this purpose, we measured possible alterations of a previously identified panel of twelve blood redox and lipid parameters and frequencies of selected genetic mutated variants of a set of drug-metabolizing enzymes and transcription factors with first-line roles in the detoxification of physical and chemical xenobiotics, in a group of 153 patients self-reporting EHS symptoms, co-morbid in most cases with different degrees of MCS symptoms. Results were compared to those obtained on 147 MCS patients without EHS symptoms and on a healthy control group of 132 age- and sex-matched subjects, all groups enrolled within the Italian population.

Among EMFs emissions recognized as trigger factors in the group of 153 patients self-reporting electromagnetic hypersensitivity-EHS, video display units and television were the most frequently reported sources (75% of patients), followed by mobile and landline phones (53%) and by domestic appliances (48%). Further developments must necessarily include a more objective and standardized classification of individual electromagnetic sensitivity scores, to conclusively assess the proposed parameters as a distinctive and specific panel of disease biomarkers for EHS. Our findings will hopefully contribute, in combination with the so-far putative genetic-risk factors, a better molecular definition of environmental-borne sensitivity-related illnesses and a tool to discriminate single SRI comorbidities, based on sufficiently proven molecular evidences able to gain clinical consensus.

See the website www.SAFEhelpsyou.org for more information on developing projects for referrals to areas that are safe for persons with EHS andMCS.