I am always lecturing my friends and girlfriends to not spend so much time talking on their mobile phones. I often hang up on them after a few minutes as I get a headache from speaking on the mobile phone. It all goes back to when I had to supervise a set of television commercials in the Moscow countryside but had to prep an expensive hair commercial with the London office of Grey Advertising at the same time. Only a very powerful telephone would hold the signal. A model from Siemens was found. It worked and I was able to talk for half an hour at a time if necessary. Signal clear as day. I was delirious and spaced out afterwards. To my everlasting good fortune that telephone was subsequently lost in the back of a black cab (and no the cabby didn't return it) while on a junket to London related to said hair commercial.
Curiously cellphone studies with negative results - cancer, loss of brain capacity - for the industry lead to research funding removal and persecution. At the same time the big cellphone and mobile network providers are taking out huge liability insurance contracts. I don't have the time now to document the above but at one point I did do the research and will stand by those statements.
Sticking a mini-microwave beside your head is not going to improve your health or mind. End of story.
It turns out that cellphones are not only harmful to people but absolutely fatal to bees.
Radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.
Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.
The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.
CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned....
The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world's crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left"....
German research has long shown that bees' behaviour changes near power lines.
Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a "hint" to a possible cause.
Birds and the bees sounds better.
The spread of the problem sounds likely to me.
Blanket coverage by cell phone base antennas came first in the United States.
I imagine that the base antenna has to be quite close to the hive (or on the route to food) to cause this problem.
Countries with limited cellphone converage will be fruitful.
Perhaps mankind will eventually learn not to believe big industries claims for healthiness.
Cigarette manufacturers claimed for decades that smoking was good for your health, before finally admitting that it was neither bad nor good. Only after decades of lawsuits did they concede the obvious which is that smoking is bad for your health.
My mother told me this story from her childhood in Vancouver.
They used to go to Woodwards to do their shopping. In the shoe department, there was a very neat machine that the kids liked to play with. Put your foot under a panel and then pulled a lever. On a screen in front of your eyes, you could see the bones of your feet.
You could use it as often and long as you liked. The machine was there to help the shoe saleman scientifically find you the right pair of shoes.
If you haven't guessed already, the machine was an xray machine. And children were spending whole minutes radiating themselves with no lead protection.
It was only a few years later that Woodwards removed the xray machine. I hope not too many of those children have bone or blood cancer now.
Later in the same article some other cellphone studies are cited:
Blue-chip Swedish research revealed that radiation from mobile phones killed off brain cells, suggesting that today's teenagers could go senile in the prime of their lives.
If you value the long term health of your brain, don't use your cellphone for more than a minute or two at a time!
While you are at it, stop believing the claims of major companies that their products are good for you or your dog. They just want your money. As long as your dog doesn't up and outright die, they don't mind how sick the pooch might get eating their manufactured poison. But that's a story for another day.
