Dear Santosh Helekar,
Saw your long emails, most of these are cut-paste and I have seen similar
arguments presented by cell tower industry lobby.
You have given examples of coffee and pickles (all these are being given
by cell operators) but let me ask, how many times, people eat pickles in
a day, may be, a few times. How many cups of coffee, people drink,
may be, a few cups. Class 2B classification implies that limited use
is acceptable, overuse is not. Similarly, limited use of cell phone is
fine and limited cell tower radiation is fine.
It is quite obvious from your emails that most of your material is
being taken from the sites, which supports cell tower industry.
I do not want to communicate further with you, who supports cell tower
industry and not humanity.
**********************************************************************
Girish Kumar
Professor, Electrical Engineering Department
I.I.T. Bombay, Powai, Mumbai - 400076, INDIA
Tel. - (022) 2576 7436, Fax - (022) 2572 3707
email- [email protected], [email protected]
Blog - http://profgirishkumar.blogspot.in/
**********************************************************************
On Sat, 22 Mar 2014, Santosh Helekar wrote:
Dear Prof. Girish Kumar,
First, let me say that my object here is simply to present accurate and reliable
information provided by genuine scientific experts and expert committees in the
EMF and radiation biology/medicine fields. I do not particularly care whether
it convinces you to abandon your position or not. Similarly, I would let other
people decide who is right and who is wrong in this matter.
My position based on reading the arguments on BOTH sides, and at least
20 original research papers with BOTH POSITIVE and NEGATIVE findings is the
following:
1. There is NO unequivocal scientific support for any plausible mechanism by
which extremely low power cell phone radiation can cause any kind of biological
effect on human, other animal or plant tissues. There is no evidence that at
this
low power microwaves raise the temperature of a biological tissue even slightly.
Even if tissue heating were taking place, it in and of itself is not harmful to
the body. Otherwise, daily physical activity would have been harmful to health.
2. Almost all properly conducted randomized human clinical trials have produced
negative results. I have gone through all of these papers. In my next email
I will list them for you. These findings are the only ones that count because
if there is no real effect in humans then all the other test tube, cell culture
and animal studies are purely academic with no significance to public health.
I am not sure how the Bio-Initiative Report can list 3800 references, if it
does. When I did an independent search in a reputed scientific literature
database I came up only with 1939 such reports. Of these only 1635 reports
are concerned with an effect or lack of effect. Of these only 749 are concerned
with cell phone and WiFi frequencies. Of these only 175 have to do with human
beings. Of these only 77 are epidemiological case control or cohort studies.
Of these 38 showed no effect, and 22 showed an effect. The remaining 17 are
ongoing.
Your claim that I have cherry picked with respect to BIR 2012 does not hold
water because I was trying to see what scientific experts and peers in the
field were saying about that report. I forwarded you all substantive reviews
that I could find without cherry picking. If I have overlooked anything please
let me know. The fact that BIR 2012 has cherry picked with a bias to only
one side is clear from the fact that it claims that these low power low
frequencies are harmful to health, and makes ridiculous recommendations
based on this biased conclusion.
If we follow their recommendations, we would have to give up electricity,
radio, TV, radar, cordless phones, WiFi, internet, satellites, computers,
cell phones, microwave ovens, etc. and live inside a copper wire cage to protect
against cosmic radio waves and microwave background radiation. In short, we
would have to revert to the 17th century.
Please note that the burden of proof rests on those who propose that
there is an effect i.e. a positive result. You cannot prove a negative.
In science, even if one properly conducted observation or experiment yields
a negative result then that is enough to falsify a hypothesis. That is why
when scientific and public health organizations state that the evidence for
harmful effects of cell phone radiation is INCONCLUSIVE, they mean evidence
for the positive effect, not the negative result. We could be doing experiments
with negative results till the cows come home. It would be ridiculous to
claim that, that there is a negative result, is inconclusive, on that basis.
In the case of cell phone radiation there are hundreds of studies with
negative results. How do you explain them? There is not a single positive
result that has been replicated. This tells me that these single non-replicated
positive results were due to some non-specific factor(s) or some
other factor such as the ambient ultraviolet or infrared light, since
these were not measured and controlled in any of these experiments. They
are also likely to be statistical anomalies. A coined that is tossed
1000 times lands heads (effect) about 500 times and tails (no effect) about 500
times.
As far as the WHO classification of 2B (possibly carcinogenic) is concerned,
it is meaningless from the practical standpoint. Among the common things
that are classified as 2B by WHO are coffee, coconut oil and pickled
vegetables. Salted fish is classified as 1 (carcinogenic). Shift work
and wood are classified as 2A (probably carcinogenic). Are you going
to campaign against the consumption of these items?
As I said above, in my next email I will list all the randomized human clinical
trials that have been published without cherry picking any of them. You can
then read all of them, and tell me why most, if not all of them, show negative
results.
Cheers,
Santosh
On Saturday, March 22, 2014 9:57 AM, Prof. Girish Kumar <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Dear Santosh Helekar,
I was hoping that you will do some serious homework but all you have
done is to reproduce the material, which is generally supported by
cell operators and their associates.
Bio-Initiative report 2012 has given 3800 papers, i.e. not cherry picking.
Just like you had asked me, now let me ask you how many papers have you
read, how many of these are peer reviewed, how many of these are flawed
according to you and why? If you call yourself a Scientist, then
please go through all these papers, critically review them and then
may be write your own research papers and get them published and so on.
Also, many papers which claim there are no health hazards, have you
read these papers, found flaws in them and write papers about their flaws.
Let me quote a famous name, Dr. Michael Repacholi, who was head of EMF
project of WHO and founder chairman of ICNIRP, please read about him in
the attached files, Michael-Repacholi-admits-interference.docs
During his tenure WHO recd. large funding from industry and that's why
till 2007, WHO kept on denying there are health hazards due to cell phone.
Similarly ICNIRP guidelines always support industry as it was started by
this same person, Dr. Michael Repacholi.
Why many Govts. support industry? Let us take an example of India.
The biggest amount of scam happened in the telecom sector in India and
according to CAG report, amount was 1.76 Lakh Crores. Govt. made
67,000 crores for 3G auction and in Feb. 2014, made 61,000 crores for
2G auction. For the Govt., telecom sector is a big cash cow, so they
will try to give facilities to them in return.
May I ask you, why are you cherry picking some of the website materials,
which supports cell phone industry? By the way, even industry says
there are no conclusive evidence, they do not say there is no evidence.
IARC states limited evidence and classified as Class 2B but WHO wrote as
no conclusive evidence, why? Also, WHO classified as Class 2B and not
Class 3 and Class 4.
In fact, at a DOT meeting on Jan. 17, 2014, I had asked the committee
members, when 1 crore people get affected by cell tower radiation, then
they will accept it is conclusive. I got the reply from one of the
DOT officials that even then they will not admit, it is conclusive as
according to them, 1 crore is less than 1% of the population of India.
These people do not care even if 1 crore people suffer!!!
**********************************************************************
Girish Kumar
Professor, Electrical Engineering Department
I.I.T. Bombay, Powai, Mumbai - 400076, INDIA
Tel. - (022) 2576 7436, Fax - (022) 2572 3707
email- [email protected], [email protected]
Blog - http://profgirishkumar.blogspot.in/
**********************************************************************
On Fri, 21 Mar 2014, Santosh Helekar wrote:
Dear Prof. Girish Kumar,
As promised, I want to offer you feedback on the Bio-Initiative Report
2012. The report appears to have been assembled in a hodgepodge manner by two
co-editors, one a man named David Carpenter who is a physician, and a woman
named Cindy Sage who is an environmental consultant. Her consultancy practice is
called Sage EMF Design. Please
see: http://www.silcom.com/~sage/emf/cindysage.html
As I had suspected, there is a lot of cherry picking of non-reproducible
and flawed studies with positive results in this report. Indeed, some research
papers cited were retracted by the original authors subsequently. But the BIR
2012 does not mention this fact. The negative studies are largely ignored,
contrary to the important precept in science, which regards even a single
instance of falsification as the basis to reject a hypothesis.
In general, it is a misleading and shoddy report. That is why many experts
and expert committees in the EMF field have roundly criticized and rejected this
report, and its 2007 version, which was, for the most part, the same as the 2012
version. Here is a devastating critique of the 2012 version entitled
"Picking Cherries in Science: The Bio-Iniative Report":
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/picking-cherries-in-science-the-bio-initiative-report/
This critique is written by Kenneth R. Foster, an eminent professor of
Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Lorne Trottier, co-founder
of Mattrox, a video and graphics manufacturing firm.
A critique of 2007 version by scientists at the Australian Centre for
Radiofrequency Bioeffects Research is the following:
http://www.acrbr.org.au/FAQ/ACRBR%20Bioinitiative%20Report%2018%20Dec%202008.pdf
Here is an excerpt from the conclusion in this critique:
QUOTE
Overall we think that the BioInitiative Report does not progress science,
and would agree with
the Health Council of the Netherlands that the BioInitiative Report is
"not an objective and
balanced reflection of the current state of scientific knowledge"
(page 4). As it stands it merely
provides a set of views that are not consistent with the consensus of
science, and it does not
provide an analysis that is rigorous-enough to raise doubts about the
scientific consensus.
UNQUOTE
I am also attaching herewith another critique published as a review article
in the radiation safety journal "Health Physics", by The Committee on
Man and Radiation of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
For a more scientifically balanced and responsible report, please see the
following produced by the Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified
Health Risks of the European Commission Directorate General for Health and
Consumers:
http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_risk/committees/04_scenihr/docs/scenihr_o_022.pdf
Cheers,
Santosh
