On February 24, 2011, Italy’s Supreme Court upheld the criminal conviction of the industrious and dynamic Cardinal Roberto Tucci. What was his crime? Polluting the environment with electromagnetic waves from transmission towers occupying over one thousand acres of land surrounded by suburban communities.
The case sprang from a medical report released in 2001 by a public health agency that showed unusually high numbers of people, living near this forest of Vatican Radio antennas to the north of Rome, that had contracted or died from leukemia.
For decades, residents in those communities had vehemently voiced their concern that the transmissions were destroying their health as well as causing an epidemic of childhood leukemia.
At the request of the Public Prosecutor’s office in Rome, which was considering bringing charges against the Vatican for negligent homicide, Rome Judge Zaira Secchi ordered an official investigation by the National Cancer Institute of Milan.
The results, released November 13, 2010, were distressing. Between 1997 and 2003, children aged one to fourteen, who lived between 3.7 to 7.5 miles from the Vatican Radio’s antenna farm, developed leukemia, lymphoma, or myeloma at eight times the rate of children who lived further away. And adults who lived within the same distance from the antennas died of leukemia at almost seven times the rate of adults who lived further away.
Before the industrial revolution, electricity and life had been divorced from each other, aside from forms of electricity found in Nature. However, once industry began its voltaic reverberations, over a century and a half, millions of miles of electric wires eventually clothed the earth, exhaling electric fields that now permeate all living things.
The exquisite sensitivity of even the normal nervous system to electromagnetic fields was proven in 1956 by zoologist Carlo Terzuolo and Theodore Bullock. In the interest of expedience it appears this reality has been systematically shoved aside and has since been ignored.
It was Biologist Allan Frey, the most active American researcher into the effects of microwave radiation on the nervous system, who stated in an article published September 25, 2012 in The Scientist, “During the Cold War, a group at Brooks Air Force Base (AFB) was tasked with reassuring residents when the Air Force wanted to install radar (microwaves) in their neighborhood. To meet that responsibility, the Brooks group hired contractors to write Environmental Impact Statements to justify the placing of the radars–an obvious conflict of interest. Even worse, when a scientist did publish findings that might indicate a risk, Brooks selected contractors to do experiments that suggested the scientist’s research was invalid or not relevant to the safety of Air Force radar.”
After Frey and his colleagues had revealed that “exposure to very weak microwave radiation opens the regulatory interface known as the blood brain barrier (bbb), a critical protection for the brain,” the Brooks AFB group selected a contractor to supposedly replicate Frey’s experiment. For two years, this contractor presented data at scientific conferences stating that microwave radiation had no effect on the bbb. After much pressure from the scientific community, the contractor finally revealed that he had not, in fact, replicated Frey’s work.
American scientist and journalist on the subject of electromagnetic radiation and health, Arthur Firstenberg, who I referenced in last week’s column, suggests, “Every person on the planet is affected by this invisible rain that penetrates into the fabric of our cells. Everyone has a slower metabolism, is less alive, than if those fields were not there. Regardless of diet, exercise, lifestyle, and genetics, the risk of developing diseases is greater for every human being and every animal than it was a century and a half ago.”
Back on October 9, 2002, an association of German doctors, specializing in environmental medicine, began circulating a document calling for a moratorium on antennas and towers used for mobile phone communications. Electromagnetic radiation, they said, was causing a drastic rise in both acute and chronic diseases. Three thousand physicians signed this document, named the Freiburger Appeal after the German city in which it was drafted.
In our Country, six years earlier, 1996, President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act (TCA) into law. Unthinkably, Section 704 of the TCA prohibits municipal and state legislators from refusing to permit installation of telecom equipment based on health or environmental concerns (Wouldn’t the mining industry relish such an edict!).
Firstenberg implicates, “The problem is that we are all being electrocuted to a greater or lesser extent, and because society has been in denial about that for more than two hundred years, we invent terms that hide the truth instead of speaking in plain language and admitting what is happening.”
When I attempted to discuss this issue with Mr. Firstenberg, he would only accept my call from a landline … hmmm.
Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works, as well as other topics. At times the column is editorial in nature.
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