May 2004... Sir William Stewart has been reappointed the chairman of the U.K. National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB). Sir William, who also heads the Health Protection Agency (HPA), will now lead the board through March 31, 2005. (The government plans to make the NRPB part of the HPA.) In May 2000, Sir William chaired the Independent Expert Group on Mobile Telephones and Health, which in its final report, Mobile Phones and Health, recommended a “precautionary approach” be applied to the use of handheld phones by children (MWN, M/J00).

 

May 2004... W. Ross Adey died on May 20th at the age of 82 after a long battle against a series of bronchial infections. Adey, a medical doctor, was a towering figure in the EMF community, who was equally at ease talking about the most recent papers in the biological and medical literature or dissecting the arcane engineering details of an experimental setup. He is perhaps best known for discovering, with Suzanne Bawin, the first non-thermal effect of electromagnetic radiation during the 1970s: They showed how ELF-modulated RF signals can lead to the release of calcium ions from cells. While at the Brain Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, he worked with the Department of Defense on Project Pandora, the super-secret program that sought a way to use electromagnetic radiation for mind control. In the late 1970s, Adey set up a new lab at the VA Hospital in Loma Linda, CA, where he carried out studies on the role of power frequency EMFs in the promotion of cancer and later, on the potential cancer risks following exposure to cell phone radiation. As the chair of a committee of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP) investigating ELF health effects, Adey made waves by recommending strong action to curb public exposures. He endorsed a 2 mG exposure standard for 50/60 Hz EMFs (see MWN, J/A95). This was too radical for the NCRP leadership and today, close to ten years later, the council continues to refuse to release his report. Adey prompted another stir when his studies of long-term exposure to cell phone radiation pointed to what appeared to be a protective effect —that is, exposed mice developed fewer tumors (see MWN, M/J96, J/A96 and S/O99). Motorola, which paid for Adey’s experiments, repudiated this finding and soon afterwards stopped supporting his lab. It closed down a short time later. In an interview with Fortune magazine in October 2000, Adey urged that research continue: “There is a big task ahead to define what the lowest level of safe exposure could be,” he said, predicting that, “Wherever we go we will be immersed in a sea of low-level pulsed microwave signals.” A memorial service will be held in a few weeks in the Los Angeles area.

 

May 2004... Very weak radiation can have a profound influence on a robin’s magnetic compass. A group led by Prof. Thorsten Ritz has shown that 7 MHz signals of less than 100 nanowatts per square centimeter can disorient the bird’s migratory flight. The new findings appear in the May 13 issue of Nature. It is not clear what the mechanism of interaction may be, but Ritz thinks that it is unlikely to involve magnetite. Rather, he believes that a radical pair mechanism — that is a chemical reaction — is at work. “Since the artificial field’s oscillations were too rapid to influence magnetic material like magnetite, it suggests that the most likely mechanism for magnetic orientation in these birds involves tiny changes to magnetically sensitive chemical reactions, possibly occurring in the eyes of the birds — we are not sure,” Ritz noted in a press release issued by the University of California, Irvine, where he teaches biophysics. “These very weak oscillating fields block the ability of the birds to sense the static field,” Ritz told Microwave News.


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