Electromagnetic Frequencies

“Unless you’re willing to give up your wireless conveniences, you need to at least make accommodations to minimize the inherent health risks to yourself and especially your children. Kids growing up today are exposed to an unprecedented amount of radiation and dirty electricity, and we already KNOW that some people simply cannot handle these levels of exposure.

It’s also only a matter of time before this generation of children reaches the age where health deterioration becomes evident. If it’s 30 years, then many of us older folk will die before the health effects become apparent. But 30 years for today’s children is another story—the health effects may hit them before they’ve even entered middle-age!

I also urge you to help spread awareness on this issue. People must be made aware. So please, help educate others, especially those in government responsible for setting exposure guidelines. We recommend you sign the EMF Petition to Congress and support local, national and international advocacy groups in this field.

Also, take as many of these proactive steps as you can to minimize your and your family’s exposure:

1. Have your child avoid  wireless technology: Barring an emergency, children should not use a cell phone, or a wireless device of any type. Children are far more vulnerable to cell phone radiation than adults, because of their thinner skull bones. One alarming 2008 study indicated that that children and teenagers raise their risk of brain cancer by 500 percent if they use cell phones!
2. Reduce your cell phone use: Turn your cell phone off more often. Reserve it for emergencies or important matters. As long as your cell phone is on, it emits radiation intermittently, even when you are not actually making a call.
3. Use a land line at home and at work: Although more and more people are switching to using cell phones as their exclusive phone contact, it is a dangerous trend and you can choose to opt out of the madness.
4. Reduce or eliminate your use of other wireless devices: You would be wise to cut down your use of wireless and electronic devices. Just as with cell phones, it is important to ask yourself whether or not you really need to use them, how often, and for how long. In your home it is usually a very simple matter to run multiple Ethernet cords to avoid the need for wireless internet and to replace wireless routers and wireless/hard-wire ‘combination’ routers with ‘wired-only routers’.
   Camilla Rees of ElectromagneticHealth.org cautions that in testing many homes she finds the ‘combination’ wireless/wired routers often still emit microwave radiation even if you have a hard-wired Ethernet cord plugged into it and believe you’re not using the wireless part of it! 

   “Sometimes when I visit people’s homes they are concerned because of a new Smart Meter, wondering if that is causing their symptoms, but commonly it turns out very high levels of radiation are coming from a ‘combination’ wired/wireless router, both store-bought routers or those provided by the utility. Naturally, this can be dumbfounding, as all along they assumed they were using a safe router and didn’t know that they were being continually exposed to radiation,” she says.

   “This is not to say that smart meters are not  a problem, but very basic home electronics issues need to be ruled out first and the only way to do that is by measuring with a meter.”

   As for portable phones, if you must use a portable home phone, use the older kind that operates at 900 MHz. They are no safer during calls, but at least many of them do not broadcast constantly even when no call is being made.

   Note that the only way to truly be sure if there is an exposure from your cordless phone is to measure with an electrosmog meter, and it must be one that goes up to the frequency of your portable phone (so old meters won’t help much). Many people buy a meter and go searching for older model portable phones at thrift stores, where there is no packaging and one can actually test the phone.

   As many portable phones are 5.8 Gigahertz, we recommend you look for RF meters that go up to 8 Gigahertz, the highest range now available in a meter suitable for consumers. You can find RF meters at www.emfsafetystore.com. But you can pretty much be sure your portable phone is a problem if the technology is DECT, or digitally enhanced cordless technology.

   Alternatively you can be very careful with the base station placement as that causes the bulk of the problem since it transmits signals 24/7, even when you aren’t talking. So if you can keep the base station at least three rooms away from where you spend most of your time, and especially your bedroom, they may not be as damaging to your health.

   Ideally it would be helpful to turn off your base station every night before you go to bed.

   Obviously, apartment living poses special problems, where you could conceivably be exposed to multiple portable phones and multiple wireless routers from multiple neighbors. In cases like this, not only is it important to minimize exposures from your own personal communications devices, but inevitably, you must learn about measuring/detecting and RF shielding or face the consequences of potentially excessive exposures.

5. Use your cell phone only where reception is good: The weaker the reception, the more power your phone must use to transmit, and the more power it uses, the more heating it generates (SAR), and the deeper the dangerous radio waves penetrate into your body. Ideally, you should only use your phone with full bars and good reception.
   Also avoid carrying your phone on your body as that merely maximizes any potential exposure. Ideally put it in your purse or carrying bag. Placing a cell phone in a shirt pocket over the heart is asking for trouble, as is placing it in a man’s pocket if he seeks to preserve his fertility.
6. Don’t assume one cell phone is safer than another.There’s no such thing as a “safe” cell phone. They all create biological effects, and a low SAR phone, depending on the angle with which you use it, or the duration of use, or the location of use, can be more damaging that a higher SAR phone. Consider all cell phones inappropriate in a truly health conscious lifestyle.
7. Keep your cell phone away from your body when it’s on: The most dangerous place to be, in terms of radiation exposure, is within about six inches of the emitting antenna. You do not want any part of your body within that area.
8. Respect others who are more sensitive: Some people who have become sensitive can feel the effects of others’ cell phones in the same room, even when it is on but not being used. If you are in a meeting, on public transportation, in a courtroom or other public places, such as a doctor’s office, keep your cell phone turned off out of consideration for the ‘second hand radiation’ effects. Children are also more vulnerable, so please avoid using your cell phone near children.
9. Use safer headset technology: Wired headsets will certainly allow you to keep the cell phone farther away from your body. However, if a wired headset is not well-shielded — and most of them are not — the wire itself acts as an antenna attracting ambient information carrying radio waves and transmitting radiation directly to your brain.
   Make sure that the wire used to transmit the signal to your ear is shielded. The best kind of headset to use is a combination shielded wire and air-tube headset. These operate like a stethoscope, transmitting the information to your head as an actual sound wave; although there are wires that still must be shielded, there is no metal wire that goes all the way up to your head.”