Off stage Interview 2020 – Author Devra Davis – 5G, Cell Phones, And The Wireless Revolution: The

we are now rolling what similarities are there between the story of the tobacco industry and the story of cell phones and wireless radiation well it’s a very good question because in fact in the 1980s I was at the National Academy of Sciences where there was a debate do we have enough evidence do we have any evidence that exposure to tobacco smoke is harmful to children after all they’re not smokers why should it matter and at that time it was a serious scientific debate well I think we face the same situation today with respect to wireless radiation and health in that there seems to be a debate on the question but if you look seriously at the data that we now have there’s no debate we know that cellphone radiation is dangerous we’ve known it for years and some an industry have known it for a lot longer than most of us so I think that the similarities are that there was a major suppression of science in the tobacco industry in the 1950s through the 1980s and that only ended with the release of the tobacco papers which were dropped on the desk of a professor Stanton glance at the University of California San Francisco the to disclose how much data the industry had for so long on tobacco to show there were dangers and I think we face a very similar situation today where some in industry have known for some time that you would never want to have a cellphone directly next to your body or certainly not use it as a toy for children

should we assume that all cellphones are properly tested for safety before we’re allowed to purchase them and that if there were any risk to the public from wireless radiation that we would be told unfortunately no we know from data that have recently been released from the Chicago Tribune from the French government which I’m going to be talking about we know that when cellphones are tested directly next to the body they exceed the current radiation limits which are 23 years old which not take into account the fact that cell phone radiation damages sperm increases the risk of cancer damages the nervous system we know all of that so no phones are not adequately tested for safety and I have long said that if phones were a drug they would be illegal by that I mean they’ve never gone through safety testing we test every drug that we take is tested first in animals and then carefully monitored when people are first exposed there’s no monitoring going on right now for the adverse effects of cellphones and I’m going to be dedicating my talk today to two women one is Maria Augusta who died at age 30 unable to find a safe place to live because of her sensitivity to radiation the other is calli Pavano a young woman who was a runner she’s alive but barely she’s suffering gravely from cancer that she developed from having kept her laptop right over her left thigh for many many years and she first noticed the problem of pain in her thigh because she was a runner it’s a very healthy young woman who had no idea that she was putting microwave radiation into her body so no these devices cell phones as well as laptops are not tested the way they’re used and in fact you’ll notice they don’t call them laptops anymore they call them tablets because they belong on tables and they’re tested 20 centimeters off of an adult male body they’re never tested for the little children that are using them in schools around the world today

what is 5g where is it how does it affect me and my family are there any studies talking about the health effects of it 5g refers to the next generation of wireless technology they’ve had two G 3G 4G mostly at this point it’s a marketing device it’s a marketing device the Australian Government has recently issued a notice there are no instruments for testing the 5g frequencies it refers 5g refers to the speed at which transmission can take place so 5g where it will exist mostly in football stadiums at this point can be faster than the other systems however in order to bring 5g to you to your home it will need to have an antenna with 5g capacity in it that also includes 3G and 4G so we’re taking the signals that have previously been kept generally far away on mountaintops or tall and buildings and bringing them to within a few hundred yards of your home actually 100 yards or less perhaps at your bedroom window and that FCC rules have recently been written to allow that the 5g antennas will which will include 3G and 4G signals in them can be placed closer to human beings than ever before they’ve not been tested for safety what data we have on them comes very interestingly from studies from a group of researchers affiliated with the Swiss and French national research teams and they have shown that damage occurs to honeybees from 5g signals and the higher the frequency of the 5g the greater the absorption into the body of these honey bees honeybees they’re critical for agriculture without them we won’t be able to produce food and they are raising the alarms about this and these are scientists who are abort with industry for years who are very concerned about what this might mean so we do not have standards for what 5g is we don’t have a way to test or monitor it and we do have some safety data we know that it can accelerate the growth of bacteria we know that it can cell accelerate the growth of viruses we know that it can accelerate the growth of cancer cells now why would B be exposing ourselves to this in greater amounts without stipulating limitations now we and environmental health trust believe you can have safe G by stipulating that the fiber-optic cable that is the backbone for all of these things be wired to and through the premises wire to and through the premises which means if you’re a bank a police or fire department or hospital and you want the faster speed you wire it to and into and through your premise so you can hook up by plugging in getting a faster speed which is safer safer so be faster safer and much more secure from hacking and that’s what we think is the way to go for new technology we’re not anti-technology we just want to make it as safe as possible and that means that we do not expose billions of children and the rest of us to this untested radiation that we make 5g wired so that we actually do not need the wireless component

let me explain because it gets to be confusing very fast phones today the phone voice part of the phone is operating on 4G or 4G LTE that’s a frequency of about 2.4 billion cycles a second 5g will operate at five billion up to a hundred billion cycles a second there are no 5g phones the 5g voice activation in the phone doesn’t exist phones will always be using 4G LTE for the next ten years according to industry engineers what 5g does is allows you to download to your wristwatch or your cell phone a movie a game or pornography so that you can get it in seconds and as opposed to minutes that’s what it does it gives you a faster speed for videos and games it does not give you safer or better voice connection so to call it a 5g phone is a misnomer it has 5g capacity for video for photos but not for voice it works in the NFL stadiums now and if you go to some of these major stadiums you cannot escape it but there’s no data on its safety and there’s lots of reasons for concern about it including that raised by Israeli physicists radiation experts who say that the capacity of non ionizing radiation to damage DNA is very much like the capacity of x-rays to damage DNA ionizing and non-ionizing radiation are different but they both can damage DNA DNA is the basic building block of all living cells whether plants or animals or us and our DNA is at risk from exposure to 5g radiation

why have over 200 scientists called for a moratorium on the rollout of 5g well I’m one of the 240 scientists that have called for a moratorium on the rollout of 5g because we have concluded that there are not adequate safety data look the question is this do you want to take experiments on animals which we have some of and regard them as a prediction of human effects in order to prevent human harm or do you want to say wait we need to prove human harm first if we take that position we’re basically treating ourselves and our children like lab rats in an experiment with no controls

how can individual people do something to stop the rollout of 5g on their own in their own town their city or state what our 4G and 5g streamlining bills unfortunately at the federal level a law was passed that basically removes any control from local authorities the federal government can can come in and with the providers say we want an antenna here and here and here and you as an individual have no say well we’re doing an environmental health trust now is organizing a major lawsuit against this law and we have grounds of violation of the Administrative Procedure Act and the National Environmental Policy Act both of which have been ignored by the FCC when it recently issued a new order saying we have concluded that despite 23 years of new data on the science we’re not going to change our approach to evaluating wireless radiation for phones or anything else including by the way 5g which didn’t even exist 23 years ago when these standards were set so we in environmental health trust are organizing a major legal challenge to this led by senior litigators formerly with the Justice Department the Department of Energy and working also with the Natural Resources Defense Council we are raising right now we have to raise $50,000 more and we’re quite optimistic we’re going to succeed in doing that at the website eh trust org because we know that that’s the only thing we can do right now is to challenge the federal law which does say you as an individual you as a town have no say-so over where the antenna is located nor how much money you can get for having it posted right on a street lamp or public utility poles so basically this law says the industry can come and they can use publicly funded resources namely telephone poles and utility poles and they can put the antennas on them and you don’t get any increase in revenue for it beyond $250 a year

does my local town have the right to say no to 5g or is it a national thing your local town can and should join with a hundred cities that are now in a lawsuit that’s being reviewed at the Ninth Circuit on the west coast that is saying we object to this heavy-handed federal government law that has just been passed that’s one thing your city can do the other thing they can do is they can stipulate that any antenna that is applied that is built must be monitored for its emissions and there’s the kicker there’s no known technology for monitoring for this they haven’t even agreed on what the 5g standard is at this point so they want to build it first and then figure out how it’s going to work and we are going to be the guinea pigs in that experiment

you book the secret history of the war on cancer which is an incredible read about how leading scientists knew in the 1930s the radiation and chemicals and pesticides were harmful to our health but because of money and industry power and things that happened in World War two a lot that got buried we’re focusing on treatment rather than prevention how would you compare this story to the story of cell phones and wireless radiation today unfortunately there’s some very important parallels between what happened in the 1930s with respect to pesticides radiation chemicals and tobacco and that is the following in the 1930s as an example in Argentina there was a very important Institute for the Study of tobacco in the 1930s and it got completely forgotten in the run-up to World War two also there was no internet back then so it was very hard to find and share information people had to go actually talk to one another what an amazing idea and we don’t do that anymore there are some many advantages of the electronification of communication there are no question about it one of the disadvantages though is it’s rather easy to ignore things if it doesn’t exist on the internet maybe it’s it’s not considered to be real to many people and so as a consequence we face a situation where it there is the capacity of the large search engines to overlook shall we say suppress science that is inconvenient and we have a lot of inconvenient science here a lot of inconvenient science showing that there are dangers from wireless radiation the International Agency for research on cancer concluded in 2011 which is almost 10 years ago that there was enough evidence at that time to say that cellphone radiation was a possible human carcinogen since then a number of scientists associated with the International Agency for research on cancer or scientists like dr. James Lin associated with the I Triple E the electrical engineer experts that give advice have all said wait a minute we’ve got a lot more science now this is a human carcinogen

is it accurate that insurance companies have refused to cover mobile operators for years now because of the risk being so high can you explain that in more detail well think about what insurance companies do they’re basically handicappers they look at the risk and they decide well we’re going to invest in this one because it’s very low risk and we’re gonna stay away from those well since 1997 some of the participants in Lloyd’s of London have refused to cover any health damages from electromagnetic fields since 1997 most recently Swiss Re issued a white paper in which they referred to 5g as potentially the next asbestos they said literally using a British term it will be off the leash meaning out of control and for that reason the large telecom companies are all self-insured and with this multi trillion dollar industry they can afford to be self-insured there are lawsuits now there will ultimately be won by people who have suffered brain tumors many of them dead because of their cell phone use and even though the industry will have to pay billions it will not affect them at all

you recently said that the safety standards for our phones today are based on tests that were developed 20 years ago and that they were developed for military and medical uses for people who didn’t speak too much 6 minutes can you explain that in more detail the standard for testing cellphones today is based on first a rather large head of a fellow more than 6 feet tall weighing well over 200 pounds who spoke for 6 minutes and the test was how hot did his brain get during that call that was the sole test for every one of the world’s 7 billion phones in operation today it still is yet we know from the Cleveland Clinic and all infertility clinics for men around the world that the first thing the doctors say to a man is having trouble getting his wife pregnant is please take your phone off your body and out of your pocket because the more time you spend with your phone or other device close to your body the lower your sperm count is going to be

in Chapter three of disconnect what did you mean by the war that started it all well the whole development of microwave technology took place in World War two and it’s a good thing for us that it did because with microwave which is allows you that the base of radar you could detect flying things in the air in time to avoid them and the magnetron was developed originally developed in England but manufactured in the United States and was transported over to the United States under highly secret circumstances in a boat imagine if that boat had been sunk during the war and once we had the technology to develop the magnetron that led to the development of radar and that allowed England to predict and therefore to avoid the German aircraft that were then bombing the hell out of England

can you sum up in 15 seconds everything we talked about here today wireless radiation it’s bad for your health we know that now some people are very sensitive to it like Maria August other people suffer from cancer as a result of it like cally Pavano we should stop making people into the guinea pigs to prove that it’s dangerous and start to pay attention it’s far better to prevent harm than to prove it exists

what’s the one thing I must do today talk to your children talk to your family so that they know that a cell phone is a two-way microwave radio and I believe that we should stop giving phones to children except for emergency uses under limited circumstances and we need to rethink the way we use wireless radiation in our homes wired connections whether for your laptop or your phone are always going to be safer and more secure use your cell phone like an answering machine know that when the signal is weak the phone is going to work harder because it’s smart it’s going to put more radiation into you and into the environment and your battery will drain so think of it this way if your battery is draining out faster its draining into you it’s a bad circumstance phones have changed our lives a lot for the better but we have to be smart about how we use them

why do you feel it was important to come here to the real truth about health conference and speak because everyone listening to me today is connected to people they care about because people who pay attention to this meeting are people who already are concerned about their health and they understand that while there are things you cannot control you don’t get to pick your parents the majority of our health is determined by the way we interact with the environment broadly conceived and this is an avoidable environmental hazard that we need to understand and do something about

for people that want to learn more about your work where should they go please look at our website eh trust org go to our Facebook page and like us and follow us on Twitter at safer phones and share information we’ve got these safety cards in Spanish and English that warn women not to put phones in their bra we have information for men as well about how to avoid and why to avoid keeping phones in the pocket whether they’re concerned about pregnancy or simply sexual function and we’ve got materials for parents of young children to be shared with their teachers superintendents with information from the American Academy of Pediatrics about how to use cell phones always on speaker mode or with a wired headset and finally we have new information on 5g and your health and why you need to protect yourself and why if you do that your brain will work better your mood will be more elevated sleep in the dark and understand that you need to protect yourself and you need to practice safe tech