Örjan Hallberg
"... that you do not disclose your manuscript either internally or externally, and of course, do not send it to any journal" 1998-05-18
www.bod.se
Before the bubble bursts... Örjan Hallberg Before the bubble bursts...
With this book, the author wants to pay attention to how public health suddenly deteriorated from 1955, and became even worse after 1997. Despite these clear signs, expert authorities seem to be extremely reluctant to try to find out the cause, since large economic interests can be threatened. But now sickness figures pile up to form clear and more disagreeable patterns. The book addresses a number of public health problems, but the clearest warning signal we see today in the rapidly growing skin cancer rates. In the long run, you will not be able to hide the truth behind thick layers of sunscreen. You just have to hold your breath until the bubble bursts...
A book about our officials’ unwillingness to determine the cause behind the rapidly crumbling public health in Sweden and other Nordic countries since the fall of 1997.
Introduction "All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed, then meets the violent counterattack, and finally it is accepted as self-evident." Schopenhauer
T
his writing has been done mainly during the years 2000-2004. By writing a chapter now and then I could give a general picture of how my research on public health and radiation progressed step by step. The results are normally reported in medical journals, but I thought that a more general description could also have its place somewhere. The first draft was printed in duplicate; my mother got one around her 90th birthday for now twelve years ago. Since much of the results are presented in graphical form, I have mostly referenced published work. A few charts I let remain in their places in the text. My work has led to many contacts with experts and authorities. Of these, I have learned that large public health problems are not addressed in the rational and logical manner, as one should expect. Instead, industrial interests too much influence. Lobbyists influence our politicians and expert bodies, so that the results that may be troublesome for the industry and dismissed as unscientific nonsense instead to inspire deeper research.
Politicians are often basically amateurs, who have come up through a career through the municipality, county council, and parliament and might end up in government. But some experts at dealing with problems they are certainly not. Is not politics too important to be handled by politicians? The problem is now approaching such proportions that it resembles an iceberg. We only see a little of the total mass of problems, which so far is hidden in statistical databases, most located in draft form at the individual researcher's desk. The risk is that right now we are about to stock up future cancer cases to such an extent that it will be very difficult for us seniors to take care of all fifty year olds in the future. We may have to take care of the babies too, if the parents can no longer manage the situation. We should start preparing now; before the bubble bursts... I also want to say a big thank you to my wife Inger, who put up with my grubbing on these issues during all these years. Therefore, I dedicate this book to her, which hopefully gives a clear picture of all the papers I have written, and that she has not yet had time to read...
Farsta 2015-01-23, Ă–rjan Hallberg
Š 2015 Örjan Hallberg Printing and publishing: BoD ISBN: 978-91-7463-661-1
Contents 1. The biggest risk with electromagnetic fields... 2. Can an electrical engineer write in a medical journal? 3. Company punishment and lung cancer 4. Sweden’s immune system is weakened 5. But can really authorities be wrong?
6. Pieces in the puzzle come on place 7. The cell phone is challenging people’s nerves 8. Future deaths from Alzheimer's disease 9. Now things start to happen... 10. But the end is near 11. Epilogue – ten years of follow-up
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4 13 28 40 64
71 77 81 86 99 110
The biggest risk with electromagnetic fields... “If you send another email such as this one, it is the last email you send!�
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t was 17:08 pm, March 7, 2000. The company expert on radiation had called me up at the office significantly enraged that I had expressed myself somewhat hesitant about the healthy with large-scale electromagnetic field exposure. "You should come by with your sectarian grubbing in the connections between EMF and diseases. It leads nowhere."
It all began April 27, 1998. The evening newspaper Aftonbladet had an article about skin cancer and I noticed a chart with a curve, which increased sharply from 1960. At first I thought that the curve showed the cumulative amount affected but soon I realized that it showed that the number of people, who becomes ill, increases significantly from year to year. Normally, I work with
graphics that will show curves that go down every year. The failure rate of electronic products normally declines with time as damaged or poorly made products are replaced with probably better copies.
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This is the first part of the so called “bathtub curve�. Normally, the failure rate of electronic products is very low after a few years of operation. But sometimes it happens that the frequency increases again when one speaks of "wear-out". This happens fortunately very rarely, but if it occurs it can lead to very expensive consequences. Was this an example of "wear-out"? Now the diagram suddenly became very interesting. The text espoused that the increasing incidence of the disease was due to changed sunbathing habits. We had started to go south on holiday and thus became subjected to more UV light than before. But do we really full 10 times more of sun tanning than we did before 1955? I started to doubt. If it was vacation trips, which were causing the increase then should that particular part of the population, who make these trips, be extremely affected. Say that only 10% of the population often goes on holiday in the sun. Then the increase for this group should be expected to have been a factor of 100 greater than for those who have not changed their sun exposure. And such a difference should be able to demonstrate in that case. I started thinking....
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Two weeks earlier. Why are kids so long these days? It was a question I had asked myself many times before. Did we live on the breadline in older times or do we nowadays get foods that contain growth hormones? Is it perhaps the industry profit that motives and underlie our longer children? Have Japanese begun gobbling up hormone-packed beef fillet the last few decades, since there are now plenty of Japanese people in colossal size, at least those living in Western countries? Daily News (DN) featured a small item which told us those children who were born in the summer months in average were 7 mm longer than those who were born in the winter months. The reason for this was considered to be the light conditions. More light produces less melatonin and melatonin is a hormone, which among other things affects body growth and is also an important component of our immune system. I got the data from the National Service Office and made a diagram of the 18-year-olds height during the 1900s. It seemed like we started to grow when we got the TV. Children sit longer in front of the TV and more recently, computer games and get screen radiation, which might have the same dampening effect of melatonin as sunlight. With some data encyclopedic, I got a curve over the last 10 000 years. I linked this phenomenon to monitors (possibly) so I sent a copy to Olle Johansson of the 6
Karolinska Institute on 4 April 1998. It was the first email in a series that would prove to be far above 1000 mails with time.
When the radio came to the village The Skin Cancer diagram in Aftonbladet gave me no peace. Why did this problem start right around 1960? The changed travel patterns did not seem to be a convincing argument. Was it really in 1960 it started? The chart went no further back but showed no leveling off. Maybe it was before? I hooked up the Internet and started searching the data. It turned out that there were data from 1952 and that a clear increase in the number of patients started in 1955. In 1955, I was 13 years and we lived in Ljusdal. But in 1957 we moved to F채rila where a neighbor had bought a TV. Round about 20 children from neighboring houses would gather around the TV in the evenings. Up on Vall책sen rose a tall mast eventually that would give us an even better picture than the one we got from the Arbr책transmitter. I remember I was looking at the mast and wondered, 'can it be good to the health to get lots of radio waves straight through the body?' How was it - did we not get the FM radio at the same time as TV1? Up in F채rila we had in the late 1950s something called wire radio. You could take the radio 7
signal by connecting into the telephone jack and could skip the crackling medium-wave AM, that worked best in the evenings. It was a precursor to today's broadband that allows us to take the radio and soon the TV via a fiber optic cable in the houses. But we sure got FM radio at the same time. Pretty soon the radio competed wire out and everyone bought small portable radios that did not need to be connected to a wall jack. FM and TV1 then came while the curve of the number of skin cancer cases began to soar. I decided to follow more to find out how the expansion of radio and television proceeded. Encyclopedias, a visit to Telia's library and a number of visits to the Internet soon gave a clear picture of how many people had access to radio and television each year. Through the Internet, I also made estimates of corresponding data in the United States, in terms of both FM coverage and number of skin cancer cases. The interesting thing was that the expansion of the United States took off around 1974 while it started in 1955 in Sweden. Now it was a relatively simple matter to make a quick analysis of the link between radio expansion and skin cancer incidence. Oddly enough, it turned out that both data sets yielded almost identical dose-response curve. This whole investigation I made during two evenings in front of the Internet, more difficult than that wasn’t it.
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This should Ericsson see But what did this mean? Are there more cancers, which are affected by RF energy? Should not we be wary of further large-scale deployment of radio systems, our mobile systems, for example? I wrote down my results in a single report and sent it to the Ericsson Corporate Communications Lars Stålberg. This was on 14 May 1998. The reply came on May 18 from Christer Törnevik where he says: "My recommendation is that you do not disclose your manuscript either internally or externally, and of course, do not send it to any journal." The distribution list showed that the response had been sent to a number of senior managers at Ericsson, among others to my own boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss named Ingemar Nilsson. He was responsible for the development of the fixed network and ought to be interested in things that could increase the interest in this. But from Ingemar I heard nothing on this issue. He died by the way in an elevator relatively soon thereafter. At this point, I had been commissioned to operate an environmental management project for the entire division and thus became its environmental coordinator. Of the steering committee, I had also been asked to follow developments regarding electromagnetic radiation that it considered to be an important environmental issue. Since Ericsson already had a team of experts in this field whose mission was to support "independent" research and to monitor progress and to write soothing brochures, my involvement was seen with disfavor. Christer wrote: “I would also like to know by whom you have been asked to monitor developments regarding radio communications and possible health effects.” 9
In summary, I can say that the relationship between me and the expert group was somewhat strained.
The Internet has data so it is enough Can you ask for any better boost to get started with research than with opposition that smells blackout? Now I was really committed and spent many evenings to collect data, mainly via the Internet. It turned out to be plenty of skin cancer statistics available from most countries. Some countries have apparently been hit hard while others, even sunny countries, are performing very well. There are excellent databases, providing both data and mapping information. When I worked through all this information I was struck by the thought: Maybe it's a lot more people involved in making nice databases than actually using them for something good? With all this information available, why would not all of the world's problems already have been analyzed and corrected by now? But who wants to solve problems anyway? It is the problem that allows us to develop and maintain databases. Problems lead to research money. There are problems that justify the existence of many authorities, traffic safety administration, Social Board, etc., etc. Cancer is a problem of course. The consequence is that we need to raise money for the Cancer Society. Lots of doctors and specialists have their daily subsistence thanks to the cancer. The medical industry is entirely dependent on the need to permanently develop and produce new, expensive medications and therapies. Without this
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problem all Sweden might stand still, maybe we would get deflation. Probably is nobody interested in resolving this problem, the one who tries will surely encounter stiff resistance and perhaps lose his life. There may already be some who have tried - where are they today? The more I analyzed data from different countries, the clearer became the image: Something drastic happens in the Western World in the mid-1950s. From that time the cancers ran away more or less simultaneously in many countries. At the same time authorities began to invest in computer records to monitor the development. But not to do anything about it? The increase in skin cancer was coinciding with the introduction of FM radio in many countries. But funnily enough, eastern countries seemed to be more or less immune to this. I had also come across information about asthma and allergies from different countries. Also there I saw that the eastern countries were more spared. Maybe communism was not so crazy after all? Or was it some other factor that played in? The experts explained in articles that the difference was due to 'our Western life style'. Without explaining what now this really is. Was it so that McDonalds hamburger spread skin cancer and asthma? Or was it that we Westerners kept us in the sun while the Communists crouched in the shadows? Some pundits felt that we have it so clean and nice here in the West that our immune system does not have anything to do. Therefore, it attacks its own body and creates allergies, asthma, rheumatism and all sorts of misery. That should probably be investigated in more detail, I thought. 11
The map image begins to emerge. If it was not so that the Communists are constantly sneaking around in shadows under the cover of bushes and thus are avoiding skin cancer it must be something else. I decided to follow the track on the radio and visited Telia's library to get a picture of what FM radio was widespread in the world. It turned out that the international authorities had divided the world into different radio regions. The West had been given frequency band 87-108 MHz, whereas China, Japan and the Eastern Bloc had a lower frequency range around 70 MHz for its FM transmitters. What is FM actually? Well, it means Frequency Modulation. It thus varies the frequency a little as the sound waves while the amplitude is constant. Even at night when sleeping and the station does not transmit any information so goes the same fundamental frequency on the air as an eternal howl, which we fortunately cannot hear with your ears. Unfortunately, we might have bad luck and happen to sleep in a direction such that this constant tone ends up in resonance with our bodies. We can be in resonance 8 hours straight if things go badly. How useful is it to have the antenna currents that are in resonance with arms, legs and trunk all night? Any school boy/girl can figure out that half the wavelength at 100 MHz is 1.5 m. Hm ... What is now the world map when it comes to frequency allocation for FM and the occurrence of skin cancer? I found one picture of Telia's library and the second picture I managed to get through GLOBOCAN, 12
IARC's online database. The maps showed that 100 MHz is used, inter alia, in Western Europe, USA and Australia. These areas also have the highest incidence rates of skin cancer.
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Can an electrical engineer write in a medical journal? “... Do not send it to any journal”
C
hrister Thörnevik’s request not to publish any of my results was obviously a strong incentive to make an article that came out in a well-known medical journal. As a relatively well-known expert in reliability engineering over the world, I was not unaccustomed to writing and publishing articles. I had at least 20 different works published in renowned journals and at international conferences. At one point I also wrote a chapter in a book together with, among others, Göran Grimvall.
But writing a medical article and have it accepted into a medical professional journal was perhaps a different matter. I took up the thread again with Olle Johansson of the Karolinska. Via an e-mail I told him that I had an article on my desk, and I wondered if he would be willing to contribute a section on how electromagnetic fields may affect the cells; an area which I understand was his specialty. He replied kindly that he could probably do so, but because he gets so much material and letters and e-mails a draft must be largely completed before he wanted a 14
Örjan Hallberg
"... that you do not disclose your manuscript either internally or externally, and of course, do not send it to any journal" 1998-05-18
www.bod.se
Before the bubble bursts... Örjan Hallberg Before the bubble bursts...
With this book, the author wants to pay attention to how public health suddenly deteriorated from 1955, and became even worse after 1997. Despite these clear signs, expert authorities seem to be extremely reluctant to try to find out the cause, since large economic interests can be threatened. But now sickness figures pile up to form clear and more disagreeable patterns. The book addresses a number of public health problems, but the clearest warning signal we see today in the rapidly growing skin cancer rates. In the long run, you will not be able to hide the truth behind thick layers of sunscreen. You just have to hold your breath until the bubble bursts...
A book about our officials’ unwillingness to determine the cause behind the rapidly crumbling public health in Sweden and other Nordic countries since the fall of 1997.