The soundtrack is from an audio recording of an interview conducted by Tonio Epstein and scientist Arthur Firstenberg that was published on Soundcloud by WGDR, Goddard College Community Radio, Plainfield, United States,on April 6, 2018. https://soundcloud.com/wgdr/the-magical-mystery-tour-apr-6-2018-the-hidden-dangers-of-wireless-cell-phone-radiation Duration of the interview: 57′:35”
Arthur Firstenberg is a scientist and journalist who is at the forefront of a global movement to tear down the taboo surrounding this subject. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University with a degree in mathematics, he attended the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine from 1978 to 1982. Injury by X-ray overdose cut short his medical career. For the past thirty-five years he has been a researcher, consultant, and lecturer on the health and environmental effects of electromagnetic radiation, as well as a practitioner of several healing arts.
Arthur Firstenberg’s website: http://www.cellphonetaskforce.org
Summary of THE INVISIBLE RAINBOW – A History of Electricity and Life by Arthur Firstenberg
Full transcript of the interview:
Tonio Epstein: Your concerns are of a nature that are not well recognized in our nation.
Arthur Firstenberg: Not yet. They’re not well recognized in very many places in the world yet.
Tonio Epstein: But in some countries, they have been studied pretty well, haven’t they?
Arthur Firstenberg: In Russia and Ukraine, and in the former Soviet republics. Yes, they were studied quite thoroughly. Unfortunately, when the Iron Curtain fell, Western telecommunications companies invaded that part of the world. And now everybody there is also addicted to their cell phones. So although on the books, they officially have greater protective measures and more stringent limits, in practice, it’s not very different from here. And the average public doesn’t know it anymore. Although they are still teaching the effects of biological effects of radiofrequency radiation in medical schools in Russia, at least.
Tonio Epstein: So maybe we could begin by talking about the electrical nature of life and how the brain and the heart and our nervous systems are essentially like finely tuned electrical systems.
Arthur Firstenberg: Yes, they are and we are kind of gets a frantic about that. In science, medicine. I went to medical school for three years, and we use electricity, incredibly much in diagnosis. And often in treatment of various diseases, electrocardiograms, electroencephalogram, electromyograms, x rays, MRI, we use it to restart the heart, your PEMS devices, pulsed electromagnetic fields, devices to treat various neurological disorders, mental disorders, but we’re in denial about the fact that it goes the other way that our cells are electric that our nervous system operates electrically, we tend to concentrate on the action potential as a signal that accompanies the movement of chemicals, the transport of sodium into ourselves a transfer of potassium out of ourselves. And we forget that the essential signal that begins all that is electrical. And in fact, as you know, for reading Dr. Becker’s book, he discovered that the cells that used to be regarded as packing material, namely the schwann cells, the perineural cells that surround the nerve cells actually carry what’s occurred. And that our heart workflow electrically, this is how electrocardiograms work, if you stop the conductive pathways, your hearts can stop. So yes, and our brain is, is increasingly since the advent of cell phones, particularly a brain is increasingly being modeled as a very complex digital computer. And in fact, that’s probably not true. Also, as Becker pioneered the work to show that there’s a whole other aspect to our brain and our body, and then our organism that is analog, and that transports real electric current, not just pulses of information. And this is consistent with what has been known for over 5000 years. In China. Acupuncture is really a sophisticated lexical model of human body that was discovered long ago.
Tonio Epstein: And it’s thoroughly studied, the way electricity flows through the body and the way our organs, our systems function in relation to the flows of energy, and the blockages and energy and how to work with those things.
Arthur Firstenberg: Correct. And not only the flows within our body, but the flows into and out of our body. We have this concept of the contents and Chinese medicine and the chakras, Indian medicine in the point of the bottom of your feet, kidney one. And acupuncture is called bubbling springs. Why because that’s where the energy or electricity as is being studied by many people in China to be equivalent bubbles up from the earth into your feet. And the light on the top of your head is where it bubbles down, so to speak from the sky is it’s a continuous circuit between the sky to our body for acupuncture meridians, down into the earth.
Tonio Epstein: right, and the Chinese, they talk about it as between heaven and earth, and the earth is electrical, and our atmosphere is electrical as well. And there’s a dynamic relationship between the two.
Arthur Firstenberg: Correct? Yes, so we live in what’s known to atmospheric physics, as the global electrical circuit, the upper atmosphere and the ionosphere, are largely charged ions, electrons, protons, charged oxygen atoms, and electricity travels with great facility, to the ionosphere. And everybody knows that lightning is an electrical phenomenon. What people do not so much know is that the earth is also a good conductor and conducts electricity. Our electrical utilities use that to good advantage because a lot of the return currents from your house, back to the power plant absolutely travels to the earth. This is why houses and appliances are grounded, because the earth is a good conductor. And the part of this circuit that is relating closes the circuits through the drift of atmospheric ions, between earth and sky, and they go through our bodies. And this is the part of the electric circuit that we actually live and breathe and stand and work in an electrical field, about 130 volts per meter. This is what travels from sky to Earth via atmospheric ions through the top of our heads who are acupuncture meridians and down into the earth.
Tonio Epstein: And all life exists in a very similar way from animals and insects to plant life as well.
Everything is is completely dependent on it, and affected by everything that’s in the atmosphere electrically.
Arthur Firstenberg: This is what’s very important. And this is why I wrote my book. This is what we, our society is in denial about, and has been in denial that for a very long time, resulting in the fact that we are broadcasting electricity now freely through the air without a thought as to what it’s doing to us and what it’s doing to our environment. And I’m talking specifically now about wireless technology, cell phones and the like.
Tonio Epstein: And throughout this book of yours, you share documented research and studies that demonstrate the actual effects of various forms of electrical technology on our physical health. And before we get into that stuff, I thought we could maybe explain the difference between some of these different technologies, how they’re related in the electromagnetic frequency spectrum, Arthur Firstenberg: historically, or what exists today, I guess it’s all of a piece but my book starts back in the 1700s.
Tonio Epstein: Well, let’s let’s explore some of the history of it.
Arthur Firstenberg: Electricity was originally thought of as a property of life, that as far as Isaac Newton, and it was used originally in medicine for almost two centuries before we started using it intensively for lighting our houses and powering our machines. It was used as a panacea to treat many forms of diseases, deafness, blindness, paralysis, arthritis, you name it, people tried to cure it with electricity. That was called electrotherapy with success in many cases. In the year 1800, Italian physicist named Alessandro Volta came along and invented the electric battery. And he made a momentous pronouncement that electricity in fact, doesn’t have anything to with biology. There was a heated debate between him and his countrymen Galvani, as to who was correct was electricity simply an aspect of life that we have made, figured out how to make use of, or was it irrelevant and extraneous to life and the view that it was extraneous in the life won out, and we began to use electricity for things like electric lights, telegraph wires came first, actually, in the beginning, all we had was direct current, at first from friction machines, producing static electricity. And then the electric battery was discovered, and it was still direct current only flowed in one direction from the positive to the negative pole, when alternating current was eventually discovered, so you have electrons oscillating in the wire back and forth many times a second, what we have in our house wires, nowadays, you’re in the US and in Canada, vibrate back and forth. 60 times a single, it’s called 60 hertz or 60, cycle electricity. In Europe, it’s 50 cycles, then you can oscillate that much faster. And the other aspect of this is that each time the direction changes, it creates a changing electromagnetic field. Every time you have electricity passing through a wire, even direct current around the wire, you have an electromagnetic field. And it decreases rapidly with this, but it goes out into the universe pretty much forever.
A changing electromagnetic field produces a wave of changes, that also travels out into the universe. And that traveling change in the electromagnetic field is called electromagnetic radiation. So when you have electricity going through a wire creates an electromagnetic field around the wire, when the electricity changes. For example, when it goes back and forth, alternating current changes direction, the changes in the field radiates through space forever. And it’s called electromagnetic radiation. It basically is a signal telling every other wire in space, every other electron and space, move in this direction. Whether it hits an electron can be miles away, the electron that gets hit by that wave starts to move. So changing electromagnetic field produces electromagnetic radiation. When that radiation hits the wire someplace else, it induces electric currents in that wire. If it hits your body, it induces electric currents in the wires in your body, what is the wires in your body they are your nerves, they’re your blood vessels, they’re your acupuncture meridians, so every time you get hit by either natural or artificial electromagnetic radiation, it induces electric current to flow in your body. And the problem is that alternating current basically doesn’t exist in nature. To some degree it does when when lightning strikes, it produces very low frequency vibrations. The Earth’s magnetic field is direct current. So most of what we live in, except for very low frequency waves from lightning is direct current we’ve introduced, alternating current, much more powerful than any natural fields that we evolved with. And we’ve increased the frequency, way beyond anything that we’ve evolved with. So when we get hit with radio waves, from radio stations, and they’re tiny, tiny, very, very high frequency radio waves from cell phones and cell towers, this also induces electric currents and any wire and and all the wires in our bodies, which we did not evolve with, and which interfere with the natural electric currents that flow through our bodies that are not used to those kinds of frequencies that used to those kinds of power levels, and our bodies are the equivalent of very complex electronic machinery that are getting interfered with.
Tonio Epstein: And electrical engineers understand how various more sensitive electronic equipment can be disrupted and even destroyed
Arthur Firstenberg: It causes radio frequency interference, and they have the heart and all the equipment so that all this stuff is flying around doesn’t interfere with each other, that they forget that we also right, very delicate electronic machines. And we also have to be taken care of so that all this stuff flying around doesn’t interfere with us. Right? It’s producing a soup out there, of what you could call dirty electricity. We have this concept of dirty electricity in wiring, which you can easily detect. With an am radio if you have a handheld battery operated analog, not digital, a radio, and you tuned it to the beginning of the dial where there’s no spacing, and you turn it on, if there was no dirty electricity around you, you will hear a gentle hiss. But if you bring it next to your wall, where there’s wire phone to or next to an electric light switch or next to an outlet, in most people’s houses, nowadays, the radio will buzz and scream and produce all kinds of loud noises. That’s called dirty electricity. Because all these electronic devices are plugged into a wall. And they’re producing high frequency alternating current, the various weird kinds of stuff. And it’s going into our house wiring, and it’s radiating at us. And this is making us sick. And this has been called dirty electricity. Dr. Samuel Millam wrote a book called dirty electricity in 2011. That’s the basis for for some of my research as well.
Tonio Epstein: Out of curiosity, is there any such thing as clean electricity that isn’t harmful? That’s manmade?
Arthur Firstenberg: Well, good question. To some degree, all manmade electricity is harmful. And that has been the case since we started using static electricity. As you saw in the beginning of my book, that there was harm to some degree that can be cleaned up. There are engineering solutions, the electromagnetic field around a wire is an unintentional field, and you can shield it, you can put wires and you can bury them, and you can configure them so that you can minimize the electromagnetic fields coming out of it. As soon as you start putting alternating current to it, the shielding problem becomes more difficult, but not impossible. The difference between all of that, and wireless technology is that suddenly we’re broadcasting it deliberately over every square inch of the earth. That is dangerous, and that cannot be fixed.
Tonio Epstein: Right? It’s not contained.
Arthur Firstenberg: That’s right, it’s no longer contained.
Tonio Epstein: So using the analogy of of a fire, contained within the fireplace, it’s very useful, but if it gets out, it can destroy everything.
Arthur Firstenberg: Well, we make the analogy to microwave oven. As long as the microwave oven is shielded and the door is shut. It’s useful, you can put food in it, it’ll cook it, you don’t want the door open while you’re cooking your food, because then it will cook you what a cell phone is, is a small microwave oven with the door open. It’s an uncontained source of microwave radiation that you’re putting next to your head.
Tonio Epstein: So let’s get into the effects. And and let’s start by talking about the historical connections between the rollout of each new level of electrical technology and the illnesses that erupted at the same time.
Arthur Firstenberg: Okay, the first technology that was actually harnessed for uses outside of medicine was telegraphy – telegraph wires. And it was harnessed very quickly, in a very big way with millions of miles of telegraph wires, a circle around the Earth. Starting in the 1840s, 1850s, 60s, 70s submarine cables were laid, it went worldwide. And a new disease was started to be reported in the medical literature that they called neurocedia now, we call that nowadays, anxiety disorder. But from the time it was first described, which was in 1860s. Until about the turn of the 20th century, it was considered a physical disease, not a psychological disease, as we think of it today. And they searched and searched and searched and searched for a cause. And it affected enormous numbers of people throughout the Western world. And it seemed to follow the courses of the telegraph wires, that whenever telegraph wires were laid, all of a sudden, that part of the world, people would come down with neurocedia. I make the cases that this is due to exposure to electromagnetic fields. In 1889, alternating current essentially was harnessed, it was invented by Nikola Tesla. And his patents were adopted by Westinghouse. And all of a sudden we could transmit electricity long distances with little loss of power. And this was harnessed, extremely rapidly, so rapidly that we went from virtually zero use of alternating current to intensive use of alternating current in one year and the year was 1889. 1889 was the year of the first great modern influenza epidemic. And this went worldwide. And it lasted for years. And it killed a couple million people not as intense as the 1918 epidemic. we fast forward to 1918 when the United States entered World War One, and Marconi had sold the world that you could make use of radio waves, and demonstrated one of the first transmissions of 20 years before but when the United States entered World War One, we made intensive use of radio technology for the first time as part of our war effort. And after World War One is when the development of commercial radio began. I make the case in the book that the Spanish influenza epidemic was caused by the sudden change in the Earth’s electromagnetic environment by the worldwide use of radios.
Tonio Epstein: How close were they related? time wise, the Spanish influenza epidemic and the implementing of radio technology
Arthur Firstenberg: extremely close. The Spanish influenza began in American bases in this country where were soldiers were trading the use of radio waves. And the installation of the most powerful alternator. 50,000 watt alternator in New Jersey, by the United States for use in communicating overseas occurred in September of 1918, which is exactly when the Spanish influenza epidemic became so deadly.
Tonio Epstein: Okay, I just wanted to clarify that. Yeah, continue with the historical progression
Arthur Firstenberg: 1957 and 58 was the erection of incredibly powerful Civil Defense radar stations, again, by the United States, from coast to coast and throughout Canada, and Alaska and into the oceans and on airplanes. And that also coincided with the next epidemic of influenza in 1968, was the first launch of military satellites. And in fact, pretty much the first launch of satellites period, there was Sputnik there was a few isolated satellites. In 1968. in one fell swoop, we doubled the number of satellites in the sky, and that coincided with the Hong Kong flu of 1968. Now people will be resistant to the idea that influenza is not an infectious disease. But this is why I spend two whole chapters on it in my book, even back in the deadliest epidemic, practically that has ever occurred in history. Since the 1918, Spanish influenza, there were heroic efforts to try to demonstrate the infectious nature of this disease. Doctors in various universities, recruited hundreds of healthy people, and brought them to the bedside of the sickest influenza patients, and try to infect them try to infect them by collecting secretions and mucus. folks who are beings from very sick people, and had Healthy People swallow it, put it in their eyes, put it up on the nose, inject people with sick people’s blood, they were totally unable to infect a single healthy person with influenza, from sick people during the deadliest epidemic this world has ever known. The same thing was tried in horses. Influence affects horses, so they try to infect healthy horses with the secretions from sick horses also failed. So it’s fascinating some of the old Scientific Reports make interesting reading, shall I say. But the existence of an influenza virus is well established but the relationship between the virus and the disease is actually in question. And the relationship between influenza and electricity is very strong. And that brings us up to today. This is the wireless revolution. Which is really the impetus for writing my book, because I’m the president of the cellular phone Task Force. We were formed in 1996, when digital cell phone technology came to the United States. And the impetus for my helping to start this is my own injury by electromagnetic energy back when I was in medical school, which is what prevented me from finishing my fourth year. So I already was studying this since the year 1980. And I lived in New York City and I had a support group, namely of other people who were injured either by chemicals or electricity. And when we saw what was coming, namely, the wireless revolution, something had to be done about it. So I started this organization. And I learned pretty quickly. Number one, people didn’t want to hear about it. Number two, politicians didn’t want to hear about it. Number three judges didn’t want to hear about it. The FCC didn’t want to hear but in other words, political action, on this particular environmental issue was not gonna get us very far by itself. And I quickly realized that the public needed to be educated.
Tonio Epstein: Well, if you wrote that Congress passed a law in 1996, that made it illegal to regulate wireless technology on the basis of health.
Arthur Firstenberg: That is amazing. And that is correct. Yes, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 actually says that states and cities may not regulate wireless technology, on the basis of health, that this is completely up to the FCC. And if the FCC permits it, it has to be permitted by your city and your state.
Tonio Epstein: So why would Congress do that? Why would politicians get on board with such a ludicrous notion?
Arthur Firstenberg: Well, actually, it almost wasn’t that way. This was due to the machinations of the telecommunications industry, in 1995, the Environmental Protection Agency drafted its own regulations, which would have been mandatory throughout the United States, and would not have prevented anybody from from regulating this. And they were set to release them. The Telecommunications Industry Association, I think it was actually the PCI, the personal communications industry association, lobbied Congress, to prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency for regulating wireless technology took away all of their funding for their regulatory activity, and awarded exclusive authority over health to the Federal Communications Commission, which has no expertise whatsoever in health and safety. And the Telecommunications Act of 1996 originally did not have that provision in it, but it went into committee. It was a house Commerce Committee back in June or July of 1995. And what it came out of committee, it had this little sentence in there, no state or local government or instrumentality thereof, may regulate the environmental effects of radiofrequency radiation to the effect that it complies with the Federal Communications Commission regulations. And it doesn’t even say health, it says environmental effects. So I seriously doubt that any of the congressmen who voted on this bill knew that they were prohibiting states and cities from protecting their health of their citizens, but it tests and President Clinton signed it. And this has been a stumbling block for people all over the country since 1996. Not only from stopping cell towers from appearing everywhere, but even from going to their city councils and talking about health, because if you talk about health, the next sentence of the consultations act says that the telecommunication company can sue the city since everybody has been silenced. Scientists have been silenced. They’ve been thousands of studies saying this stuff is harmful. But even if you are a scientist, you can’t go to your city council and say, Hey, this is harmful, don’t put it up. You can’t even talk about it.
Tonio Epstein: So is there much hope for changing that legislation?
Arthur Firstenberg: Well, I think not until the public is educated. I think judges will not stick their necks out at this point. Everybody’s on their cell phones, everybody’s addicted to the technology. This is the multi trillion dollar industry, it’s probably the wealthiest industry in the world. No judge is going to stand up against this industry until the public is on their side, no legislator is going to stand up to the industry until the public is on their side. They all have to happen together.
Tonio Epstein: So the public has to demand it.
Arthur Firstenberg: Correct. The public not only has to demand it, but the public has to realize what they’re doing to themselves. The public has to realize, and I have a chapter on cancer. I have a chapter on diabetes, I have a chapter on heart disease, the public has to wake up to the fact that most of the cancer, diabetes and heart disease that we have in our world is being caused by wireless technology and specifically by your cell phone.
Tonio Epstein: Okay, and that was where I wanted to go next, and the mechanism or how this electrical technology causes these diseases.
Arthur Firstenberg: Okay. First is the fact that it does. And this was discovered, by as I mentioned him before, Dr. Samuel Millam, retired from the Washington State Department of Health. He wrote his little booklet called dirty electricity back in 2011. And these amazing charts where this book from the 1930s and 1940s when President Roosevelt rural electrification program was going on. So there were charts from 1930, there were charts from 1940, that as soon as a state was electrified, the rate of rural cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, quintupled, all of a sudden, the areas that had been electrified, had five times as much of these diseases as areas that were not electrified. This was shocking. And also, people didn’t want to hear it. I took his work back to about the year 1800s. And I found not only that, what he said was true, but it has been true for a long, long time, that before we encircled the earth with millions of miles of telegraph wires, there was basically no such thing as diabetes, it was an extremely rare disease. If you were a doctor, you were lucky if you saw two cases in your whole lifetime. Even doctors who wrote books about it didn’t see more than two cases in their lifetime. One or two cases, cancer was a very uncommon disease, heart disease not exist, except in old people and in infants, because of congenital disorders. This was true, up till about the 1850s. In the 1850s, and 1860s. All of a sudden, wherever electricity came, you started to see arise in these three diseases specifically, and this has continued up to today. And I’ve correlated it with each advance in electrical technology. And the explanation has to do with what goes on in ourselves. And in fact, in the powerhouses in ourselves where we metabolize our food, that’s called the mitochondria. The last step in metabolism is the electron transport system in the mitochondria, where the electrons from our food get combined with the oxygen that we breathe, and we essentially burn our food and produce energy. electron transport is subject to interference by electromagnetic field.
Tonio Epstein: Which sounds very obvious. Yeah.
Arthur Firstenberg: And what happens when you interfere with electron transport, you can no longer excessively metabolize sugars. So they back up into your bloodstream. And you get diabetes. What happens when you can no longer efficiently metabolize fats that’s accepted into your bloodstream fats get deposited into arteries, when you get heart disease, the flip side of it is, you’re not making good use of the oxygen that you breathe. So all your cells are some degree oxygen stores, and cancer thrives in an aerobic environment and aerobic metabolism is in fact, how cancer is easily diagnosed nowadays, is because cancer cells use enormous amounts of glucose in anaerobic glucolisis. That’s how cancer is diagnosed, you take a picture of the body, and the areas that show up as having high radio labeled glucose are the areas where you look for cancer. So those three diseases are going to be increased if you interfere with electron transport. And that’s exactly what’s happening.
Tonio Epstein: And reading your book, everything you present makes a very, very convincing argument for this.
Arthur Firstenberg: I didn’t make this up. I’m very good. At piecing together pieces of a puzzle, I’m very good at seeing the overall picture. All my sources for historical or original sources, all my sources for the science, and I didn’t invent all this either. There’s Dr. Martin Blank, and Reba Goodman at Columbia University. Until they retired, we’re talking about the interference of electron transport by electromagnetic fields. And there are others. Everything in my book is documented in detail in the bibliography, the bibliography is almost 140 pages long, because I knew that everything that I’m saying was going to be controversial. And it needed to be thoroughly documented and it is.
Tonio Epstein: So maybe we could get into some of the studies of the effects on animals and insects, birds and bee colony collapse is a huge issue these days.
Arthur Firstenberg: Yeah, the bees is one of the most interesting parts of this. There is a lot of evidence nowadays, that Colony Collapse syndrome in the honeybees is due to electromagnetic pollution, largely from cell towers. And there is anecdotal evidence all over the world, that these tend to disappear in the vicinity of cell towers. There’s been work explaining this, but let me go back again to the history that the first instance of reporting of something like this occurred on the Isle of Wight Yes, off of England, where Marconi built his first radio station. And immediately back in 1904, the bees started to disappear from that island, and it was called Isle of Wight disease. And I go into the history of that also, because colony collapse disorder did not emerge from nothing. It had a whole history going back to 1904. Except it’s gotten a lot worse and dramatically. So in modern times, again, coinciding with cell phone technology, the most dramatic experiment was done, I believe, in Switzerland by Danielle Favre. Maybe getting him mixed up with somebody else. But there was a dramatic experiment, where they exposed honeybees to an actual cell phone, and then showed it both took samples of the bees MIMO web, which is the source of the blood. And within 10 minutes after the exposure to a cell phone. These were practically not metabolized in their food, that the sugar levels rose to very high levels in their blood. The fat levels was very high levels in their blood, the protein levels, the amino acid levels rose to very high levels in the blood, metabolism. And it all it took was 10 minutes today. And that metabolism is very, very much faster than ours is so it shows up first. But it’s spectacular. You asked about birds, there have been surveys of birds and highlight Alfonso Bell Maurice studies in chapter 16. Because he specifically took surveys of all the different birds and via delete, stay where he lives and works. He’s a wildlife biologist. And he showed how all the different species were very much more common in areas which are no cell tax, and they became less and less common, the closer you got the cell tower there and he observed the behavior and described their behavior, storks and sparrows. He did experiments with amphibians, raising them in tanks, shielded and non shielded. Also very dramatic, the shielded tanks, those tadpoles that he weighs, they were both a balcony of a building, like the fourth floor of a building that was 200 meters away from a cell tower, the shielded tadpoles, or with the shielding practically died. It was very traumatic. And so it makes you ask the question, why are so many species of amphibians disappearing from remote wilderness, it probably has very much to do with. We don’t treat radio stations and radar and cell towers, which we put in remote wilderness as environmental fault. And they are.
Tonio Epstein: And they affect plants as well, their studies of how forests were affected by radar stations,
Arthur Firstenberg: especially in the Cold War. Yeah, this was this is the documented in Germany near the border between East and West Germany, where there was lots of radar aimed at that border. And they had the term “Waldsterben” forest death. And it specifically happened in areas that were highly irradiated.
Tonio Epstein: So there’s an interesting paradox of the people who are most affected by this technology, whose health is affected the most, you think it was the young and the infirm who would be most affected. But studies show that it was actually the healthiest members of the population and the people in the age between 15 and 30, who are most susceptible to particularly the influenza outbreaks.
Arthur Firstenberg: Yeah, this was a peculiar aspect of influenza, and still is a peculiar aspect of influenza over nowadays, we hear advertisements selling old people and infants to get vaccinated. But in fact, influenza more often makes you sick, if you are between the ages of 20 and about 50. And the stronger you are, and the healthier you are, the more likely you are to get influenza. And this was very dramatic in the 1918 flu epidemic. So much so that doctors started to worry that their advice to their patients to stay healthy and to be fit and strong, was actually killing them. Because it was the strongest healthiest people that were getting influenza and dying.
Tonio Epstein: Is there any logic to why that happens that way?
Arthur Firstenberg: Well, they never figured it out. And people who have specialized in influenza, since then has not figured out why. My theory is that it is the strongest and it hit pregnant women very hard too – those of us who are most vital. In other words, people in their young age, people who get pregnant, people who are very much connected to the world are also very much more connected to our electrical environment. We have much more Chi flowing through us, or acupuncture meridians. This is vitality that we get from the world, when the global electrical circuit becomes polluted, essentially, with dirty electricity. Just like when we plug our electronic devices and computers into the wall, we pollute our wiring with dirty electricity. We’re actually polluting our bodies with dirty electricity when we throw this stuff out into the world. And those of us who are most connected to our environment, are most susceptible to being disturbed by it.
Tonio Epstein: And then there’s the people that are saying, well, we’re living longer than ever before. So what’s all this uproar about illness and disease.
Arthur Firstenberg: I also have a chapter about that. Chapter 14 in the invisible Rainbow is about exactly that. That metabolism is being disturbed. And when you when you slow down your metabolism, it’s like putting us into a mild state of suspended animation. And of course, if you metabolism slows down, you’re going to live longer. And it’s very interesting. The most reliable way to extend an animal’s life in the laboratory is to restrict its intake of food. This is called in longevity research calorie restriction. That if you restricted animals intake of food throughout its life, it will live longer, and it will live much longer. You can double A mouse’s life simply by cutting its food intake and here to add it’s like it’s slow flows better its metabolism. But that’s a healthy way of slowing down the metabolism. When you cut down your intake of food, you rate a metabolism decreases your rate of disease also decreases. It turns out that when you irradiated animal this can be non ionizing radiation experiments bear this out. And we have researched that they expect rats radio waves throughout their life. And we have research where they expose animals, various types of animals to ionizing radio atomic radiation, x rays, gamma rays, for their whole life, that if the dose is small enough, it won’t kill them. But it will make them sick. But they live longer than animals that are exposed to gamma rays, at low doses get lots of cancers, but on average, they live longer than the unexposed animals. And the same thing with radio waves that is going to expose animals to radio waves throughout their lives, like laboratory rats, they get more cancers but on average, they live longer.
Tonio Epstein: So if they’re not killed, if if they don’t die of their of their disease, they live longer.
Arthur Firstenberg: So you can reset your metabolism in one way, and have you become healthier, or you can reset your metabolism in another way and live a sicker longer life. And that’s exactly what we’re doing now. In our world in the 21st century, we’re living sicker, longer lives and the length of our lives is not primarily is to some extent, but it’s not entirely due to modern medicine. Some of it is due to all the electrosmog that we’re living in.
Tonio Epstein: And with the proliferation of cell phone technology, and also wireless internet, broadband, and satellites, as well as cell phone towers and microwave towers. In your book, you say that we’re on the verge of a whole new generation and wave of an increase of all of that.
Arthur Firstenberg: We are, as it’s been in the news lately, it’s called 5G. And it’s being planned both on Earth and in space, like Earth, the telecom companies are gearing up for this new thing that they’re calling the Internet of Things that’s going to be served by a kind of service calling for 5G wireless technology. And it’s going to be totally different than the kind of cell phones and internet connections that we have now. It’s actually going to be phased arrays, which is not in my book, because when I wrote my book, this was not on the drawing board yet. But it’s going to require small cell towers with antennas on existing utility poles is how they’re going to do it. But every block in every city in the world spaced about two to 300 feet apart throughout the world, you’re going to use millimeter wave. Each cell site is going to have thousands of tiny antennas, it is focusing beams at your cell phone at your wireless hub in your house. The intensity of radiation that will be hit with will increase astronomically. The second thing that’s on the drawing board is doing this with satellites in space. Only recently, Elon Musk of SpaceX. Just last week, he got permission from the FCC to launch his first 4425 satellites into space that’s already been granted. Gradually, SpaceX his plans are for 12,000 satellites, completely blanketing the earth with phased array antennas, super high speed internet from only 200 miles of altitude. They’re going to radiate every square to the earth, there’s going to be no place remote enough where you’re not getting irradiated. The fact that these are still hundreds of miles above our heads is not reassuring. In light of what has happened historically, that every time we have to radically changed the properties of the Earth’s electromagnetic field, which is called the magnetosphere. It has had dramatic effects on health down here on Earth. And so we are sounding the alarm is a new organization relatively new that was founded three years ago, called guards. It’s the global union against radiation deployment in space. Guards has a website stopglobalwifi.org. My website is cellphonetaskforce.org. That’s what my book is for sale. Also. The Invisible Rainbow is only for sale on our website, cellphonestaskforce.org. It’s not available from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
Tonio Epstein: Okay. So I’m curious, do we adapt to these technologies being in the environment.
Arthur Firstenberg: To some degree we’ve had to adapt, if we wouldn’t have adapted, we wouldn’t be here, to some degree animals adapt. And that has been sold historically, for example, with homing pigeons during the 1930s and 40s. When the proliferation of radio stations all over the planet, people who possess polling stations in the military ready use them for communication season started to get lost all over the place and some looser orientation. they’ve adapted to some degree. But we’re not adapting anymore. Yes, to some degree we’re functioning, but we’re getting more cancers, we’re getting more heart disease, we’re getting more diabetes, we have more refugees, from this technology, you talked about people who are affected These are people who are consciously is that the we’ve been injured, I was injured back in 1981, I was in medical school. So I feel was that I couldn’t use a cell phone if you paid me a million dollars to do it. And there are people that my organization besides education and advocacy and some litigation, we’re a support group. And we’re a support group for the thousands of people who are calling me all the time. And we have a board of directors that are scattered all over the United States that do some of the same work. These are people who’ve been driven to their homes, are able to work, living in their in many cases in their cars in remote places. Until I can’t anymore, it’s a tremendous refugee problem is like, if you have a cell tower built near your home, you get so sick that you can’t live at it anymore. If you live in an apartment building and your neighbor on the other side of you all has Wi Fi access point, you gotta move, the utility company comes and puts a smart meter smart electric meter on your house, you gotta leave and how many people is this happening to tremendous numbers of people, there have been surveys done not only by individual scientists, but by universities, by governments establishing that from three to five to maybe more percent, the numbers increasing of the population of any given area in the world will tell an interviewer I’m sensitive to electromagnetic fields, I can’t be around power lines, I can’t be around wireless technology. Though, if you extrapolate that to the whole world. And you make adjustments to the fact that maybe half the world doesn’t even have access to internet yet, as a conservative number, still 100 million people out there and have their lives disrupted by electromagnetic radiation out of those, and I’m talking from personal experience, from the sounds of the people that have called me, at least one out of five, one out of four of them have eventually been displaced from their homes. So you have conservatively a population of 20 million refugees in the world. It’s a terrible thing. This is also why I’m doing this work.
Tonio Epstein: So from this problem, there’s a whole new cottage industry of mitigating technologies to help your help. Are there any effective mitigating technologies available that can help people?
Arthur Firstenberg: Well, the International Institute of building biology and ecology, teaches courses and certified practices, but to diagnose mitigate chemical contamination and electromagnetic contamination of homes, nothing they can do about infrastructure, cell towers, radio towers, stuff like that. They can go into your home, and they can take measurements, by myself have a large box of equipment that can do this. I’m not trained better on self trained. But you can go to their website, what is it hbelc.org, approximately like that. It’s the Institute of building biology and ecology. And you can find a list of practitioners in your area, this is how they make a living. And so that way, the case of of how large this population is that they serve, as far as Is there anything effective, there are ways that you can shield yourself. There is also an industry of manufacturing shielding fabrics, shielding curtains, shielding therapies to sleep under, paints that you can buy in various stores that are impregnated with silver particles. So you can take your houses with the shielding material, plastic that is impregnated with metallic elements that can shield your windows, you can actually shield your whole house, you can build a house out of metal, you can do this. It’s not healthy. It works to a degree. Why is it not healthy, you’re cutting yourself off from the Earth’s electromagnetic fields. It’s not a healthy thing to do in the long term. But it’s an emergency measure. And because there’s nothing else you can do in this world, lots and lots of people are doing it until they can’t anymore as they move out into their cars. And then they call the help, where should I go? What can I do, and some of them don’t survive some of them suicide, and it’s an enormous problem, there’s not a real good answer. And a lot of companies are selling the snake oil devices, little discs, you can put on your cell phone supposed to normalize the radiation and things you can plug into your wall to attendance, you could wear those kinds of not of work, and many of them are harmful. The A lot of them put out what they call a Schumann resonance field of eight hertz, which is supposed to duplicate the resonant frequency of the earth. More radiation is harmful doesn’t work.
Tonio Epstein: So then there’s really not much hope for
Arthur Firstenberg: the hope is we’ve got to stop it. Right? This is a threat. This is political activism, its political activism, it’s it’s a planetary emergency as a threat to life on this earth, in my opinion, is more immediate threat than global warming, as global warming is going to kill us. So eventually, if we don’t do something about it, this is going to kill us in a couple of years if we permit 5G to come from space.
Tonio Epstein: And there’s no way to really effectively and healthfully stop it or block it,
Arthur Firstenberg: go live on the ground. We shouldn’t have to live this way. And most people are oblivious. That’s why I’m on the radio. That’s what I’m consenting to give you an interview. That’s why I wrote my book. That’s why I helped organize guards that founded the cellular soul Task Force in 1996. And has to be done has to be stopped.
Tonio Epstein: So how can people get involved in this? How can people do something to make the most of their energy and activism?
Arthur Firstenberg: contact me via my organization’s website. It’s CellPhonetaskforce.org. Contact Guards, which is stopglobalwifi.org. And get involved with us with very few people? Would I say very few. Yes, we’re spread all over the globe. Yes, there are scientists that butting their heads against the wall just like us activists are butting our heads in. There was an international scientist appeal for a 5G moratorium that has been submitted to the European Union. They’re also not getting heard, what 236 scientists have signed that so far. It’s it’s a drop in the bucket. We need more people. We need more awareness. We need people to realize when they pick up their cell phone and make a call, they’re hurting themselves. They’re Destroying Themselves. They’re hurting their health, it’s interfering with their sleep. This is why people so many people need sleeping medications and things it depresses first thing is awareness. Second thing, get rid of your cell phone 3rd thing call us up, contact me contact Guards. buy my book. It’s the invisible rainbow and history of electricity I’d like it’s for sale on my organization’s website. But a few other websites. But yeah, go to CellPhonetaskforce.org. And you can find my book there.
Tonio Epstein: Well, this is a very disturbing and harrowing issues.
Arthur Firstenberg: If we get rid of wireless technology. Remember how the world used to be in 1995. And I’ll leave your audience with that. It’s like we can be so much more alive. Our bodies can be so much more healthy. This is how well we’ve had cell phones. Okay, most of us.
Tonio Epstein: Okay, so you’re talking about we can stop using cell phones, we can at least get that level of of relief,
Arthur Firstenberg: not just stop using the we have to throw it away. Because as long as you have it. You are perpetuating the infrastructure. Right? You pay for your cell phone. The telecommunications company is required by law to serve you. That means all the cell towers that means 5G that means all these satellites. Yeah.
Tonio Epstein: Yeah. This is the largest industry on the planet at this point,
Arthur Firstenberg: is the largest issue of the planet. And it’s the largest cause of disease. And people tell too, with we’re going to get rid of cell phones. That’s not going to happen. But I have to tell them, well, you want the world to continue. You want to put it into like how much do you value life on earth? You have to make a choice.
Tonio Epstein: Yeah, that clarifies the issue very well. And that’s a great note to end on. Thank you so much for all your work, and for your time today. It’s been a very interesting conversation. And it’s a fascinating book.
Arthur Firstenberg: I expected to be reviewed in a environmental history journal shortly.
Tonio Epstein: And that was Arthur Firstenberg. He’s been hailed as the Rachel Carson of the 21st century. After graduating from Cornell University with a degree in mathematics, he attended the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine, when an X ray overdose cut short his medical career. For the past 35 years. He’s been a researcher, consultant and lecture on the health and environmental effects of electromagnetic radiation.