Cell Phones Towering Near Schools
Posted by Paige
A customer wrote me today to express her concern about Charlottesville City allowing cell phone towers on school property. Schools would receive payment for the towers, but many parents, like the one below, are concerned about the health effects.
Tonight’s City Council Meeting will have open discussion, please attend to learn more and express your thoughts on the subject.
Below is one City Resident’s, and Blue Ridge Eco Shop customer’s, opinion. I’d love to hear yours!
Fry’s Spring Beach Club and Jackson-Via Elementary may want to put cell phone towers on their properties.
I live in Charlottesville on Monte Vista Avenue. My son is due to enter kindergarden at Jackson-Via in August 2008. We’ve recently learned that both Fry’s Spring Beach Club and Jackson-Via have plans to put cell phone antennas on their properties. The significant amount of money being offered to schools by cell phone companies must be very appealing. However, chronic radio frequency radiation (RFR) exposure is not.
Cell phone towers expose us to involuntary and cumulative radio frequency radiation, which includes microwave radiation. Low levels of RFR have been shown to be associated with changes in cell proliferation and DNA damage. These harmful low levels of radiation can reach as far as a mile away from the cell tower location.
The industry claims cellular antennas are safe because the radiation they produce is not strong enough to cause thermal, or heating effects. However, it is the non-thermal biological effects that experts have also found to be damaging.
They have found:
* Increased cell growth of brain cancer cells
* Increased breaks in double and single stranded DNA, our genetic material
* More childhood leukemia in children exposed to RF
* Changes in sleep patterns and REM type sleep
* Headaches caused by RF exposure
* Neuralgic changes including changes in the blood-brain-barrier
* Decreased memory, attention, and slower reaction time in school children
(References available at http://www.cyburban.com/~lplachta/safeweb2.htm)
Each cell within your body is like an antenna: a very sensitive receiver and transmitter of electro-magnetic radiation. Each cell phone tower emits its signal in "lobes" - a circular "flower petal" pattern with a limited radius spreading 360 degrees around the tower. This circle of radiation around the tower is called a "cell." If you’re in a cell, your phone gets good reception. If you’re not, it doesn’t.
The number of antennas that broadcast the microwave signals have been increasing exponentially. We do not want them near our children, who are even more sensitive because of their thinner skulls and still-developing nervous systems.
Here is a video that shows skull penetration of cell phone radiation in children: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwmpdFJijn8.
And here is where you can watch "Public Exposure: DNA, Democracy, and the Wireless Revolution and Electromagnetic Radiation: A Scientific Overview": http://www.energyfields.org/film_order.html.
Did you know that the telecommunications industry lobbied Congress with $39 million to ensure passage of a law that makes it next to impossible for us to oppose towers based on health reasons? Here’s what the Telecommunications Act of 1996, 47 USC section 332(c)(7)(B)(iv) includes:
No State or local government or instrumentality thereof may regulate the placement, construction, and modification of personal wireless service facilities on the basis of the environmental effects of radio frequency emissions to the extent that such facilities comply with the Commission’s regulations concerning such emissions.
In other words, Verizon could sue the city if our planning commission told them that we don’t want towers on schools because of health reasons, unbelievable as it sounds. By and large, the funding for studies that don’t show harmful effects comes from the telecommunications industry itself. Let’s not forget that R.J. Reynolds advertised “more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette” in magazines during the 1940’s and ‘50’s. I write this letter so that our Fry’s Spring neighborhood can be informed and educated as to the well-documented effects of radio frequency radiation.
At last month’s City Planning Commission meeting Steven Blaine, an attorney working with Verizon Wireless, asked the City to allow telecommunications towers on residential and school properties, and to be allowed to conceal or camouflage them. On Tuesday, July 22 there will be another meeting at City Hall and this topic will be addressed at 8pm. The public is allowed to speak. I am going and I hope others will too.
The FSBC manager told me to contact Ed Gillaspie, FSBC president: egillaspie@comcast.net. Please feel free to write to him as well, as he is also the Director of Finance for the city schools.
Below are websites that have more information.
www.bioinitiative.orgwww.emrpolicy.orgwww.microwavenews.comwww.energyfields.org
www.emrnetwork.org
www.mountshastaecology.org/17other01cellphones.html
www.cyburban.com/~lplachta/safeweb2.htm
www.members.aol.com/gotemf/emf/schools.htm
To see where antennas are already near you, go to http://www.antennasearch.com/default.asp
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
CELL-PHONE SCAM TO HIDE THE DANGERS…
In the 1990’s Dr. Carlo was given a $28-million grant from the cell phone industry to put an end to the talk that cell phones were hazardous to your health. Unfortunately, what he found was not what he’d been paid to find. Instead, he discovered that they DO, in fact, cause damage.
The cell phone industry offered him a position for $1 million a year to silence him, but he refused, and started a non-profit institute called The Safe Wireless Initiative to inform the world of this danger instead. I highly recommend you check out his site as he has compiled excellent resources on interventions you can use to maximize your health and minimize your EMR risks.
A Personal Story Of Someone Who Developed A Brain Tumor From Cell Phone Usage:
My name is Enrico Grani and I presently live in Australia. I used cell phones for ten-plus years extensively on-and-off, and because of this I developed a brain tumor!
In 2007, about one week before my birthday, I was diagnosed with a 3 cm by 4 cm brain tumor. I had a stroke (my first one) the previous year in late November 2006. An MRI examination revealed a brain tumor in the area of my brain next to my ear where I always used my cell phone – in the exact position where the cell phone’s antenna was located.
I rationalized that I needed this cell phone for my business. What I didn’t understand was the terrible price I would pay. I thought that if I exercised and ate healthy food, that I would be able to reverse the negative effects – if there were any at all! After all, we were ALL told that cell phones posed no risk to our health. Remember?
My goal here is to try to make you and your loved ones aware of the extreme dangers posed by these microwave-emitting devices. Please read about my experience carefully and thoroughly, and please do not make the same mistakes that I have made.
After I had my first stroke, my left arm became paralyzed and I now have severe cognitive difficulties, and problems with fine-motor movement in my hand. The brain tumor was situated in the right parietal lobe – exactly in the position where I used the cell phone.
I can no longer work as I am disabled, but this does not mean that I cannot make you aware, so that you or your loved ones never endure my fate.
All I can do now with my life is to try and increase awareness of this serious problem.
Being disabled is very hard for me to deal with, as it complicates every aspect of what is left of my life. However, knowing now that my disability could have been prevented, knowing now that numerous scientific studies years ago had already shown cell-phone radiation causes DNA damage and brain tumor development, knowing now that these scientific studies were completely ignored because of industry greed many years ago prior to my tumor, and knowing now that it could have been prevented, is even harder for me to deal with emotionally.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008 12:10:00 AM EDT