Re: Mobile phones: Cancer & chromosomes

["Bjorn Cedervall" <bcradsafers@hotmail.com>]

>I cannot identify all your abbreviations, but you should know that >the 
>Swedish Radiation Protection Institute (SSI) is since years (or >rather 
>decades) involved in research of EMF. I think to remember >that you are 
>based at Karolinska Sjukhuset, so SSI is just a few >steps from you.
This is correct (I am in the hospital area but the departments I am 
affiliated with belong to the Karolinska Institute - they are now located 40 
and 100 meters from SSI respectively (previously same building as SSI), and 
I also know many people at the SSI including those few who are involved with 
the EMF issue. I cannot however tell the authority people what to do - but I 
know that they have staff who understand a lot about the problems with 
sensational media married to those scientists who are at least 2-3 standard 
deviations away from any consensus opinions.
Some of the SSI people there are quite tired of the massmedial alarms that 
have been - and they have also tried to express their opinion at times. One 
example was one year ago when our largest morning paper (Dagens Nyheter) 
published an article about mobile phones (I reported it here at Radsafers). 
The article was written by a scientist here - claims were about heart 
disease, cancer, stress, asthma, allergies and other problems. Six 
references/studies were given -most of which have not been able to repeat. 
One of the SSI staff wrote an excellent article pointing out the 
misinterpretations and deceptive text parts in the first article but Dagens 
Nyheter refused to publish it.

Most people probably don't care much about the frightening massmedia reports 
but there is a lot of mysticism with some people and when they read the 
mobile phone articles they become scared of power line magnetic fields also 
(there was a report half a year ago about this one "elallergic" (el=short 
abbrev. for "electricity") lady who lived in a house wagon - it was to be 
put into a cave to protect her - from one article I saw other people were 
supposed to follow her if there was room enough in that cave. Obviously the 
mentioned lady has some kind of tragic problem. At one of our major 
electricity companies, all "elallergy" cases were in office environments - 
not where the highest electricty field work places are located. Few people 
stand up and point out the distinctions between observations and 
interpretations/speculations (take for instance that acetyl choline 
statement about the rat experiment we just read about). Many of us have also 
been asked to "keep a low profile" and not respond to the massmedial 
fallout. With this follows all sorts of weird political decisions and 
because of various relations the "low profile syndrome" (I think this is 
much a Swedish phenomenon) wins. I think that it is unethical, not to 
provide decision makers, media people and the public with the alternative 
(consensus) information - regardless of whether it is right or wrong - these 
other groups should at least have an overview about the other information. 
Lots of money could probably be used in smarter ways for the sake of public 
health.

My personal ideas and thougths only,

Bjorn Cedervall   bcradsafers@hotmail.com

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