RE: "No Comment" and related matters

["Bjorn Cedervall" <bcradsafers@HOTMAIL.COM>]

>Is there nothing that can be done to protect a person's name and scientific 

>reputation when their

messages are taken out of context?



---

Or otherwise distorted.



When I and some three professors wrote an article (July 18, 2002) about 

mobile phones in the Swedish morning paper Dagens Nyheter (large and 

dominant and the Stockholm region in particular) the head title was changed.



I was the person who submitted the article. I therefore know that we wrote 

"Exaggerated fear of mobile phones". In the newspaper the title read: 

"Mobiles phones are not dangerous" (two words in Swedish).



As we never stated "not dangerous" I called the responsible person the next 

day and asked if he could publish a note saying what the correct message was 

supposed to be. He responded that it wasn't important and that he had had to 

make a title with two words.



The article was quickly translated into English and spread worldwide (I may 

have a copy myself somewhere??) - with the wrong title of course. Then we 

were quoted for that at anti-"EMF"-sites and also in Microwave News (approx. 

Aug/Sept. 2002). I decided not to argue with Microwave News as they seem so 

uninterested in sources and facts anyways.



Anyone dealing with risks knows that you can't prove that something isn't  

dangerous. Therefore essentially anything constitutes a potential risk. 

Therefore such a headline causes image damage to the four of us. In a sense 

it was even crazier because we discussed in the article the impossiblilty of 

proving that something isn't dangerous.



I brought this up plus a couple of other distortions a few months later at a 

meeting (in Stockholm) between journalists and scientists. My point was that 

it often was the most critical sentences that (like about causality) that 

were distorted the most. Those parts that require careful writing so that 

they won't be misinterpreted.



Then a TV journalist (who I understand headed the acrylamid alarm in their 

channel - TV4) stood up and essentially said that I was wrong about being 

upset for this and that it wasn't our business to have opinions about the 

headlines they make. He also attacked us for writing in Dagens Nyheter 

(which is a high impact newspaper in Sweden) - how else are we supposed to 

reach the people we want?



There are other informations "out there" (on the WWW) about me that are 

totally misleading but in most cases I have decided not to respond. If they 

want to lie or distort it is up to them. These sites usually name dozens of 

other people - top decision makers, professors and so on - with very biased 

negative messages - therefore I feel that I am in good company :-).



Side track:

Some of these people seem to have an agenda - like they may be fanatic about 

fighting mercury in dental fillings (oral galvanism - many of these people 

are now electrohypersensitive (EHS) or microwave sickness cases instead). We 

have a lot of mercury fillings in Sweden and live longer than most other 

people so that detail can hardly be a problem for a majority of the 

population.

We had another disease in Sweden some 20-25 years ago - with the same 

symptoms as those for EHS. It was against a special kind of self copying 

paper. This disease almost exclusively occurred in Sweden - there was also a 

little of it in Denmark and among Finnish people who have Swedish as their 

native language. The people who wrote about this in the journal 

Psychosomatics* believe that the vector is psychogenic - think about that 

and the WWW. Sorry about this side step but I notice that EHS now is 

increasing in Denmark. One woman in Japan (probably with western roots) is 

doing her best to make them EHS there.



The EHS are according to my opinion exploited by some media folks + a few 

scientists. This creates a synergism - at least in Sweden. The journalists 

make their career and money on it and so do some of these scientists. The 

money profit for the media people is seldom illuminated - I guess I am not 

alone about guessing why...



My personal ideas only,



Bjorn Cedervall  bcradsafers@hotmail.com

http://www.geocities.com/bjorn_cedervall/

----

*

>From Medline:

Psychosomatcis. 1995 Jan-Feb;36(1):1-11.



The environmental somatization syndrome.



Gothe CJ, Molin C, Nilsson CG.



Department of Medical Rehabilitation, Huddinge Hospital, Sweden.



Patients with environmental somatization syndrome (ESS) believe that their 

symptoms are caused by exposure to tangible components of the external 

environment or by ergonomic stress at work. ESS is distinguishable by mental 

contagiousness and by the patients' focus on the external environment as 

cause of the illness. The presentation is often polysymptomatic, and 

epidemic outbreaks may appear. The patients usually refuse alternative 

explanations of their symptoms and discredit and reject any suggestion of a 

psychogenic etiology. It is important to distinguish between hygienic 

problems and ESS problems, particularly when poor and inadequate hygienic 

factors are present simultaneously with an ESS epidemic.



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