On the harmfulness of microwaves
Rene Tschaggelar
of microwaves. While he considers them harmful at any level, I tend to
be caring less when the level is below -10dBm. We're talking about
frequencies between 10 and 40GHz. I don't have a problem to have the
coax to waveguide coupler open (and operational at -10dBm) while
mounting gear at the network analyzer. Beside that a part of the -10dBm
is reflected, I consider such little power is not harmful on the basis
that sunlight coming with a density of 1kW/m^2 making 1mW/mm^2 is still
orders of magnitude stronger than these -10dBm distributes over a
radian or so. And we can stand the sunlight occasionally over shorter
periods of time unharmed.
How do you guys regard that subject ? Strictly no exposure at no level
at all ?
{BTW. I'm aware of the so called microwave solders in WW2}
Rene
Tim Wescott
AFAIK the only scientifically proven harmful effects of RF is heating. I
have heard (anecdotaly, but not from a member of the tinfoil hat brigade)
that this heating can happen in the brain without the victim noticing it
-- but certainly not at those levels.
But if someone is insisting on being afraid of invisible waves, you
aren't going to convince them.
--
Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com
Do you need to implement control loops in software?
"Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" gives you just what it says.
See details at http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html
John O'Flaherty
wrote:
What if the signal is OOK'ed at 3 or 5 pps, and gets rectified
ionically in the brain, and the modulating signal is picked up at very
low levels across billions of neurons, and triggers a seizure? Not
saying it could happen, but...
--
John
Vladimir Vassilevsky
"Rene Tschaggelar" <no...@none.net> wrote in message
news:49602...@news.bluewin.ch...
FWIW they taught us that some RF bands are considered to be more harmful
then the others (5GHz the worst), and the most sensitive parts of the body
are the eyes and the endocrine system. Although the effect is essentially
the heating, the protection was recommended when working with the levels of
+10dBm or higher.
Vladimir Vassilevsky
DSP and Mixed Signal Consultant
www.abvolt.com
Dirk Bruere at NeoPax
> On Sun, 04 Jan 2009 04:01:56 +0100, Rene Tschaggelar wrote:
>
>> I'm having a continuous argument with a colleague of mine about the harm
>> of microwaves. While he considers them harmful at any level, I tend to
>> be caring less when the level is below -10dBm. We're talking about
>> frequencies between 10 and 40GHz. I don't have a problem to have the
>> coax to waveguide coupler open (and operational at -10dBm) while
>> mounting gear at the network analyzer. Beside that a part of the -10dBm
>> is reflected, I consider such little power is not harmful on the basis
>> that sunlight coming with a density of 1kW/m^2 making 1mW/mm^2 is still
>> orders of magnitude stronger than these -10dBm distributes over a
>> radian or so. And we can stand the sunlight occasionally over shorter
>> periods of time unharmed.
>>
>> How do you guys regard that subject ? Strictly no exposure at no level
>> at all ?
>>
>> {BTW. I'm aware of the so called microwave solders in WW2}
>>
>> Rene
>
> AFAIK the only scientifically proven harmful effects of RF is heating. I
> have heard (anecdotaly, but not from a member of the tinfoil hat brigade)
> that this heating can happen in the brain without the victim noticing it
> -- but certainly not at those levels.
>
> But if someone is insisting on being afraid of invisible waves, you
> aren't going to convince them.
>
Microwave exposure increases bone demineralization rate independent of
temperature
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bsc/jms/2004/00000215/00000003/art00003
--
Dirk
http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff
dalai lamah
> I'm having a continuous argument with a colleague of mine about the harm
> of microwaves. While he considers them harmful at any level, I tend to
> be caring less when the level is below -10dBm.
There are still no conclusive proofs that non-ionizing radiations - i.e.
everything below UV - have significative health effects (besides heating,
of course). Some studies may suggest some kind of correlation with specific
diseases (e.g. child leukemia) but if the correlation was strong enough to
be of any concern, I think we would already have a lot more evidence today.
Probably if you lower your average driving speed of 5 km/h, your survival
rate will be improved a lot more than worrying about microwaves. :)
Dirk Bruere at NeoPax
> Un bel giorno Rene Tschaggelar digitò:
True, but its another cumulative risk factor.
And it seems that cumulative risk factors might already be showing
epidemiologically in everything from asthma and allergies increasing, to
the phenomenal rise of autism to sperm counts in men decreasing by 60%
in 50 years.
Joel Koltner
news:6scmkgF...@mid.individual.net...
> And it seems that cumulative risk factors might already be showing
> epidemiologically in everything from asthma and allergies increasing, to the
> phenomenal rise of autism to sperm counts in men decreasing by 60% in 50
> years.
Those increases could be due to everything from microwaves to pollution to
green house gas levels to higher fat in diets to the decrease in the number of
pirates on the high see... and there are people who are fully convinced of
pretty much all of these causes, with the possible exception of the pirates.
Don Klipstein
>dalai lamah wrote:
>> Un bel giorno Rene Tschaggelar digitò:
>>
>>> I'm having a continuous argument with a colleague of mine about the harm
>>> of microwaves. While he considers them harmful at any level, I tend to
>>> be caring less when the level is below -10dBm.
>>
>> There are still no conclusive proofs that non-ionizing radiations - i.e.
>> everything below UV - have significative health effects (besides heating,
>> of course). Some studies may suggest some kind of correlation with specific
>> diseases (e.g. child leukemia) but if the correlation was strong enough to
>> be of any concern, I think we would already have a lot more evidence today.
>>
>> Probably if you lower your average driving speed of 5 km/h, your survival
>> rate will be improved a lot more than worrying about microwaves. :)
>
>True, but its another cumulative risk factor.
>And it seems that cumulative risk factors might already be showing
>epidemiologically in everything from asthma and allergies increasing, to
>the phenomenal rise of autism to sperm counts in men decreasing by 60%
>in 50 years.
I would blame the rise on autism on greater detection, maybe also on
increased known risk factors for *bad things for children in general* such
as increased smoking by women, decreased breastfeeding, worsening diet
over the decades, children born to older parents, increase over the
decades in children born by mothers using recreational drugs, and increase
in single parent poverty households (where health and childrearing
generally suffer).
Nowadays that people need to be more capable to hold a semi-decent job
than before in order to meet today's greater job demands, all sorts of
mental conditions become more apparent or more greatly in need of
treatment. Maybe nowadays autism is more afordable to detect and treat,
or less embarassing to fail to hide.
Low sperm count - I would blame mainly increase of looking for it, worse
diets, and increase of sedentary lifestyle (latter two being bad for all
sorts of things). Maybe also men on average are keeping their gonads
warmer than before by staying indoors more than they used to and wearing
longer shorts in the summer than they used to.
I have trouble believing that sperm count decreased 60% in 50 years
anyway. I suspect low spem count got more-looked-for during the past 50
years since people started marrying later in age and then wanted a few
years of income-earning freedom before having children, and when couples
first trying for children in their late 20's had quite their share of
fertility difficulties...
With all the stuff we have now that we did not have before, the greater
cancer rates we have now than before 1900 can be largely explained by a
small number of factors. As in other than microwaves, electromagnetic
fields, and something like 99% of the chemicals in our lives that did
not exist in the Garden of Eden (or are not known to the Luddites to have
existed in the Garden of Eden, such as formaldehyde).
- Don Klipstein (d...@misty.com)
Jon Kirwan
Klipstein) wrote:
><snip>
> I would blame the rise on autism on greater detection,
I actually asked Dr, Steve Edelson the question of whether or not that
explanation was sufficient to account for the modern rates, at dinner
together a while back. An unequivocal "NO!" is what I got. My
daughter is profoundly autistic and, it turns out, the rates for that
type of autism (which has a much longer track record) has also
increased dramatically. At least, here in the US. I haven't read
studies that may try to account for variations in methods and rates of
identification elsewhere. It's possible that there would be something
learned there. But within the US, it appears this can't be explained
only by 'greater detection' (either a greater awareness by
professionals or by a greater range of deficits being labeled as
autism.) But it's a part of the picture.
>maybe also on
>increased known risk factors for *bad things for children in general* such
>as increased smoking by women, decreased breastfeeding, worsening diet
>over the decades, children born to older parents, increase over the
>decades in children born by mothers using recreational drugs, and increase
>in single parent poverty households (where health and childrearing
>generally suffer).
><snip>
Well, there is that. Lots of stuff in the news might be suggestive --
bisphenols, greater importation of foodstuffs (go to Costco, for
example, and see where the Trio "health" bars are made) where food
controls today probably aren't nearly what they have been here in the
US even some decades back, of course the "mercury preservatives"
debate still rages on, there is definitely a genetic component but
also definitely a non-genetic component too from good, recent research
coming out of Canada, and I even remember reading a convincing looking
article showing geographical correlations of autism in the US with
measured emissions profiles (I don't know what source they used for
that) by coal-fired power plants (the article suggested Pb, I think.)
I don't find it very persuasive, though, that your list of
possibilities cuts much sway. There is too much money and interest in
'the system' now, top notch researchers are becoming increasingly
involved, and most of the low hanging fruit has been picked at. The
stuff you mention, each one I think, is low hanging fruit. Keep also
in mind that one of the earlier correlations that was written about is
that the parents of autistic children were more intelligent than the
general public, at large, and with better incomes -- statistically
speaking. I just don't think you got the answer nailed.
If you want to argue about this, focus on considering what used to be
the "whole pie" but is today merely a subset -- profoundly autistic
individuals. The identification of those individuals has been
relatively unchanged for over 30 years .. perhaps more. The first
time the term was used was perhaps in the late 1940's, I think. But
the lists of deficits, check-off boxes, and processes for evaluating
profoundly autistic individuals was very solidly in place by the time
my daughter was identified at 2 years of age. And I'm told for some
years before that. (Not to mention the fact that I've become quite an
expert in my own right on that score.) These rates have similarly
climbed rapidly and there is a much longer history of the rates.
I'm actually interested in good ideas on this score, though.
Jon
dalai lamah
>> Probably if you lower your average driving speed of 5 km/h, your survival
>> rate will be improved a lot more than worrying about microwaves. :)
>
> True, but its another cumulative risk factor.
> And it seems that cumulative risk factors might already be showing
> epidemiologically in everything from asthma and allergies increasing, to
> the phenomenal rise of autism to sperm counts in men decreasing by 60%
> in 50 years.
You are right, but I have very few hope that we can solve the problem "one
risk factor at a time", either individually or as a society. It would be
better to pick the most proven factors and concentrate on them. For example
I mostly blame pollution and the stuff we eat into food (from food colorers
to pesticides, from GMOs to animal drugs...).
krw
antoni...@hotmail.com says...>
Of course you have no evidence for this conclusion. Might just as
well be n-rays.
Dirk Bruere at NeoPax
True, but I'm betting multiple evil synergies.
However, pthalates have got to be high on the list.
--
Dirk
http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
Dirk Bruere at NeoPax
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/its-official-men-really-are-the-weaker-sex-1055688.html
http://tinyurl.com/68n8km
The research – to be detailed tomorrow in the most comprehensive report
yet published – shows that a host of common chemicals is feminising
males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals,
including people.
Backed by some of the world's leading scientists, who say that it "waves
a red flag" for humanity and shows that evolution itself is being
disrupted, the report comes out at a particularly sensitive time for
ministers. On Wednesday, Britain will lead opposition to proposed new
European controls on pesticides, many of which have been found to have
"gender-bending" effects.
It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows
that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in
pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminised genitals.
"This research shows that the basic male tool kit is under threat," says
Gwynne Lyons, a former government adviser on the health effects of
chemicals, who wrote the report.
Wildlife and people have been exposed to more than 100,000 new chemicals
in recent years, and the European Commission has admitted that 99 per
cent of them are not adequately regulated. There is not even proper
safety information on 85 per cent of them.
Many have been identified as "endocrine disrupters" – or gender-benders
– because they interfere with hormones. These include phthalates, used
in food wrapping, cosmetics and baby powders among other applications;
flame retardants in furniture and electrical goods; PCBs, a now banned
group of substances still widespread in food and the environment; and
many pesticides.
The report – published by the charity CHEMTrust and drawing on more than
250 scientific studies from around the world – concentrates mainly on
wildlife, identifying effects in species ranging from the polar bears of
the Arctic to the eland of the South African plains, and from whales in
the depths of the oceans to high-flying falcons and eagles.
It concludes: "Males of species from each of the main classes of
vertebrate animals (including bony fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and
mammals) have been affected by chemicals in the environment.
"Feminisation of the males of numerous vertebrate species is now a
widespread occurrence. All vertebrates have similar sex hormone
receptors, which have been conserved in evolution. Therefore,
observations in one species may serve to highlight pollution issues of
concern for other vertebrates, including humans."
Fish, it says, are particularly affected by pollutants as they are
immersed in them when they swim in contaminated water, taking them in
not just in their food but through their gills and skin. They were among
the first to show widespread gender-bending effects.
Half the male fish in British lowland rivers have been found to be
developing eggs in their testes; in some stretches all male roaches have
been found to be changing sex in this way. Female hormones – largely
from the contraceptive pills which pass unaltered through sewage
treatment – are partly responsible, while more than three-quarters of
sewage works have been found also to be discharging demasculinising
man-made chemicals. Feminising effects have now been discovered in a
host of freshwater fish species as far away as Japan and Benin, in
Africa, and in sea fish in the North Sea, the Mediterranean, Osaka Bay
in Japan and Puget Sound on the US west coast.
Research at the University of Florida earlier this year found that 40
per cent of the male cane toads – a species so indestructible that it
has become a plague in Australia – had become hermaphrodites in a
heavily farmed part of the state, with another 20 per cent undergoing
lesser feminisation. A similar link between farming and sex changes in
northern leopard frogs has been revealed by Canadian research, adding to
suspicions that pesticides may be to blame.
Male alligators exposed to pesticides in Florida have suffered from
lower testosterone and higher oestrogen levels, abnormal testes, smaller
penises and reproductive failures. Male snapping turtles have been found
with female characteristics in the same state and around the Great
Lakes, where wildlife has been found to be contaminated with more than
400 different chemicals. Male herring gulls and peregrine falcons have
produced the female protein used to make egg yolks, while bald eagles
have had difficulty reproducing in areas highly contaminated with chemicals.
Scientists at Cardiff University have found that the brains of male
starlings who ate worms contaminated by female hormones at a sewage
works in south-west England were subtly changed so that they sang at
greater length and with increased virtuosity.
Even more ominously for humanity, mammals have also been found to be
widely affected.
Two-thirds of male Sitka black-tailed deer in Alaska have been found to
have undescended testes and deformed antler growth, and roughly the same
proportion of white-tailed deer in Montana were discovered to have
genital abnormalities.
In South Africa, eland have been revealed to have damaged testicles
while being contaminated by high levels of gender-bender chemicals, and
striped mice from one polluted nature reserved were discovered to be
producing no sperm at all.
At the other end of the world, hermaphrodite polar bears – with penises
and vaginas – have been discovered and gender-benders have been found to
reduce sperm counts and penis lengths in those that remained male. Many
of the small, endangered populations of Florida panthers have been found
to have abnormal sperm.
Other research has revealed otters from polluted areas with smaller
testicles and mink exposed to PCBs with shorter penises. Beluga whales
in Canada's St Lawrence estuary and killer whales off its north-west
coast – two of the wildlife populations most contaminated by PCBs – are
reproducing poorly, as are exposed porpoises, seals and dolphins.
Scientists warned yesterday that the mass of evidence added up to a
grave warning for both wildlife and humans. Professor Charles Tyler, an
expert on endocrine disrupters at the University of Exeter, says that
the evidence in the report "set off alarm bells". Whole wildlife
populations could be at risk, he said, because their gene pool would be
reduced, making them less able to withstand disease and putting them at
risk from hazards such as global warming.
Dr Pete Myers, chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences, one of
the world's foremost authorities on gender-bender chemicals, added: "We
have thrown 100, 000 chemicals against a finely balanced hormone system,
so it's not surprising that we are seeing some serious results. It is
leading to the most rapid pace of evolution in the history of the world.
Professor Lou Gillette of Florida University, one of the most respected
academics in the field, warned that the report waved "a large red flag"
at humanity. He said: "If we are seeing problems in wildlife, we can be
concerned that something similar is happening to a proportion of human
males"
Indeed, new research at the University of Rochester in New York state
shows that boys born to mothers with raised levels of phthalates were
more likely to have smaller penises and undescended testicles. They also
had a shorter distance between their anus and genitalia, a classic sign
of feminisation. And a study at Rotterdam's Erasmus University showed
that boys whose mothers had been exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play
with dolls and tea sets rather than with traditionally male toys.
Communities heavily polluted with gender-benders in Canada, Russia and
Italy have given birth to twice as many girls than boys, which may offer
a clue to the reason for a mysterious shift in sex ratios worldwide.
Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls, but the ratio is
slipping. It is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys
have been born as girls instead in the US and Japan alone.
And sperm counts are dropping precipitously. Studies in more than 20
countries have shown that they have dropped from 150 million per
millilitre of sperm fluid to 60 million over 50 years. (Hamsters produce
nearly three times as much, at 160 million.) Professor Nil Basu of
Michigan University says that this adds up to "pretty compelling
evidence for effects in humans".
Michael A. Terrell
This explains why so many of you Europeans are on the rag and
bitching like an old woman going through menopause all the time.
--
http://improve-usenet.org/index.html
aioe.org, Goggle Groups, and Web TV users must request to be white
listed, or I will not see your messages.
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There are two kinds of people on this earth:
The crazy, and the insane.
The first sign of insanity is denying that you're crazy.
Dirk Bruere at NeoPax
And why the USA is the world leader in feminisation.
Don't worry - you'll be whining about your Chinese masters soon enough
Dirk Bruere at NeoPax
There's plenty of evidence piling up for some plasticizers used in the
food industry being rather bad for the health.
Why do you think once widely used chemicals get banned from the food system?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phthalate
"Phthalates are being phased out of many products in the United States
and European Union over health concerns."
Remember that old "Signal toothpaste" boasting that it had
"hexachlorophene in the stripe"? Turns out it causes brain damage in
children. Wonder why we don't hear much of it these days? Did you ever
use it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexachlorophene
Don Klipstein
in part:
>Don Klipstein wrote:
<What I wrote>
>
>At the other end of the world, hermaphrodite polar bears with penises
>and vaginas
Can you cite?
Having both a penis and a vagina means some major plumbing rerouting.
Maybe easier to do to a female - urethra gets rerouted through the
clitoris.
To do to a male - the duct from the utricle has to go to an opening
on the skin instead of joining the urethra close to (or maybe even within)
the prostate.
You did post a bunch of aberrations that I suspect mainly recently
upticked due to recent upticks in ability and willingness to find them.
One of those had to do with alligators - whose physiological gender is
far from being always hard-coded by genes, but notably having a high rate
of being heavily influenced by incubation temperature.
- Don Klipstein (d...@misty.com)
Don Klipstein
>krw wrote:
>> In article <1bc2j1goac6o1.100qd8nh1sgid$.d...@40tude.net>,
>> antoni...@hotmail.com says...>
>>> Un bel giorno Dirk Bruere at NeoPax digitò:
>>>
>>>>> Probably if you lower your average driving speed of 5 km/h, your survival
>>>>> rate will be improved a lot more than worrying about microwaves. :)
>>>> True, but its another cumulative risk factor.
>>>> And it seems that cumulative risk factors might already be showing
>>>> epidemiologically in everything from asthma and allergies increasing, to
>>>> the phenomenal rise of autism to sperm counts in men decreasing by 60%
>>>> in 50 years.
>>> You are right, but I have very few hope that we can solve the problem "one
>>> risk factor at a time", either individually or as a society. It would be
>>> better to pick the most proven factors and concentrate on them. For example
>>> I mostly blame pollution and the stuff we eat into food (from food colorers
>>> to pesticides, from GMOs to animal drugs...).
>>
>> Of course you have no evidence for this conclusion. Might just as
>> well be n-rays.
>
>There's plenty of evidence piling up for some plasticizers used in the
>food industry being rather bad for the health.
Plasticizers aren't used by "food industry" - they are used to soften
plastic objects.
There is slightly significant concern that bisphenol-A is "significantly
actually a bad thing". That is mainly present and of concern in plastic
objects having recycling symbols, especially #6 and/or whatever
polycarbonate gets, along with anything with any recycling symbol
and especially soft-and-flexible in comparison to "usual fare of same
recycling symbol".
I still think that reducing exposure to BPA from "average American
exposure level" to zero makes about as much difference as reducing smoking
by 1/2 cigarette per day.
And it apears to me that about 98,950-98,975 of the other 99,000
chemicals of modern life not existing in the Garden of Eden or not known
to the Luddites to have existed in the Garden of Eden (such as
formaldehyde) are more truly harmless still. If I double my intake rate
of the all of them except the worst-1/8% of those not already subject to
regulations, I suspect that I merely have to drink 1 beer less per week or
eat 1-per-week fewer units of processed food to co pensate.
>Why do you think once widely used chemicals get banned from the food system?
99% either on scientific grounds becoming obvious long ago or on
political grounds low on scientific foundation.
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phthalate
>
>"Phthalates are being phased out of many products in the United States
>and European Union over health concerns."
Sounds to me like an unusual now-remaining area where bathwater is being
thrown out instead of babies. I still consider that a hazard comparable
to bisphenol-A - not as bad as smoking even half a cigarette per day.
>Remember that old "Signal toothpaste" boasting that it had
>"hexachlorophene in the stripe"?
And when was that from? I remember it - from when I was still living
with my parents! I moved out in 1986!
> Turns out it causes brain damage in children. Wonder why we don't hear
>much of it these days? Did you ever use it?
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexachlorophene
Not that I actually followed that link, but it sounds like an older-tech
"organochlorine" type pesticide to me. Too similar to DDT and "Agent
Orange" for me to want to put into my mouth!
I actually did not use it when I was a child. Please look for other
explanations for any signs of brain damage that I exhibit! :) :)
- Don Klipstein (d...@misty.com)
Jon Kirwan
Klipstein) wrote:
><snip>
> Sounds to me like an unusual now-remaining area where bathwater is being
>thrown out instead of babies. I still consider that a hazard comparable
>to bisphenol-A - not as bad as smoking even half a cigarette per day.
><snip>
I'd only heard about bisphenol-A recently when Canada was in the news
about planning to ban it -- a few months ago. I read a little bit.
Most of the science about it seemed to suggest that it was very
harmful, but mostly for those in the process of active development
(axon and dendrite rapid growth, dendritic pruning, etc) of nervous
tissue -- in other words, in humans prior to perhaps 5 years of age.
It probably also has much more effect on some indicator species that
live in or close to water ways. In adults, I'd probably agree with
what you wrote. It's just that you seemed to have missed the fact
that agencies weren't warning adults about their own consumption, but
instead that of their young children as well as prior to birth.
Jon
Martin Brown
> "Rene Tschaggelar" <no...@none.net> wrote in message
> news:49602...@news.bluewin.ch...
>> I'm having a continuous argument with a colleague of mine about the harm
>> of microwaves. While he considers them harmful at any level, I tend to
>> be caring less when the level is below -10dBm. We're talking about
>> frequencies between 10 and 40GHz. I don't have a problem to have the
>> coax to waveguide coupler open (and operational at -10dBm) while
>> mounting gear at the network analyzer. Beside that a part of the -10dBm
>> is reflected, I consider such little power is not harmful on the basis
>> orders of magnitude stronger than these -10dBm distributes over a
>> radian or so. And we can stand the sunlight occasionally over shorter
>> periods of time unharmed.
>>
>> How do you guys regard that subject ? Strictly no exposure at no level
>> at all ?
There is a slight difference between incoherent white sunlight and
coherent monochromatic radiation that also needs to be taken into
account. Personally I would only worry about it if there was a risk of
internal heating or of wearing a ring at the wrong resonant
frequency.
OTOH A friend in the microwave telecoms industry died alarmingly young
of a brain tumour.
Many microwave ovens are unable to adequately shield a mobile phone so
the permitted leakage level cannot be exactly zero. Worth pointing out
here that your WiFi is at worst case producing around 100mW of 2.4GHz
or 200mW 5GHz (some can go upto 1W EIRP at 5.5GHz).
>>
>> {BTW. I'm aware of the so called microwave solders in WW2}
>
> FWIW they taught us that some RF bands are considered to be more harmful
> then the others (5GHz the worst), and the most sensitive parts of the body
> are the eyes and the endocrine system. Although the effect is essentially
> the heating, the protection was recommended when working with the levels of
> +10dBm or higher.
I once walked into a lab where a researcher was adjusting a ~1kW
microwave induced Helium plasma on the open bench with all safety
interlocks defeated by pieces of the right sized mesh. I remember
wondering how long his eyes would last as I quickly left the room.
Some universities played with this stuff in the 90's by cannibalising
microwave ovens and flying on a wing and a prayer...
I was struck by how pretty translucent pinky orange the flame looked
(compared to the dazzling 9000K optically dense RF induced Ar ICP).
Regards,
Martin Brown
Martin Brown
> >> antonio12...@hotmail.com says...>
> >>> Un bel giorno Dirk Bruere at NeoPax digitò:
>
> >>>> And it seems that cumulative risk factors might already be showing
> >>>> epidemiologically in everything from asthma and allergies increasing, to
> >>>> the phenomenal rise of autism to sperm counts in men decreasing by 60%
> >>>> in 50 years.
> >>> You are right, but I have very few hope that we can solve the problem "one
> >>> risk factor at a time", either individually or as a society. It would be
> >>> better to pick the most proven factors and concentrate on them. For example
> >>> I mostly blame pollution and the stuff we eat into food (from food colorers
> >>> to pesticides, from GMOs to animal drugs...).
>
> >> Of course you have no evidence for this conclusion. Might just as
> >> well be n-rays.
>
> >There's plenty of evidence piling up for some plasticizers used in the
> >food industry being rather bad for the health.
>
> Plasticizers aren't used by "food industry" - they are used to soften
> plastic objects.
And one of the main applications is to soften the plastic containers
that fast food and cook chill microwavable junk food is served in.
Fatty foods can leach the plasticiser when hot. A sedentary lifestyle
combined with a fat rich junk food diet almost certainly plays its
part in the demise of Western fertility.
>
> There is slightly significant concern that bisphenol-A is "significantly
> actually a bad thing". That is mainly present and of concern in plastic
> objects having recycling symbols, especially #6 and/or whatever
> polycarbonate gets, along with anything with any recycling symbol
> and especially soft-and-flexible in comparison to "usual fare of same
> recycling symbol".
>
> I still think that reducing exposure to BPA from "average American
> exposure level" to zero makes about as much difference as reducing smoking
> by 1/2 cigarette per day.
I would prefer not to smoke an unnecessary 1/2 cigarette per day. YMMV
>
> And it apears to me that about 98,950-98,975 of the other 99,000
> chemicals of modern life not existing in the Garden of Eden or not known
> to the Luddites to have existed in the Garden of Eden (such as
> formaldehyde) are more truly harmless still. If I double my intake rate
> of the all of them except the worst-1/8% of those not already subject to
> regulations, I suspect that I merely have to drink 1 beer less per week or
> eat 1-per-week fewer units of processed food to co pensate.
Don't be too sure of that. The really nasty ones are those that only
hit a small fraction of the population a very long time after first
exposure. One such really bad example in the dyestuffs industry was
beta-naphthylamine in the 1960's. Some guys shovelled it around for
years without harm others visited the site once and died later.
>
> >Why do you think once widely used chemicals get banned from the food system?
>
> 99% either on scientific grounds becoming obvious long ago or on
> political grounds low on scientific foundation.
You do have to worry a bit about the high incidence of certain
illnesses in the orchard areas of Belgium for instance. And you don't
have to look that far for modern food adulteration like the milk with
melamine to fake the protein content in China last year. It also made
it into US pet food killing a fair few pets by kidney stone/renal
failure.
http://www.who.int/foodsafety/fs_management/infosan_events/en/index.html
Same for various dodgy toxic azo dyes that turn up in Indian spices
with monotonous regularity.
The flip side of this is that some additives are very important to
ensure food safety. Use the wrong pH for things like herbs stored in
oil and you can end up dying of botulism. And Organic(TM) peanut
butter stored incorrectly is capable of harbouring and very likely
already growing fungi that create extremely nasty aflotoxins. The
preservative(s) are a much lesser evil than the entirely natural
deadly poison.
>
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phthalate
>
> >"Phthalates are being phased out of many products in the United States
> >and European Union over health concerns."
>
> Sounds to me like an unusual now-remaining area where bathwater is being
> thrown out instead of babies. I still consider that a hazard comparable
> to bisphenol-A - not as bad as smoking even half a cigarette per day.
If you already smoke 40 a day then it doesn't alter your life
expectancy by much.
But what about non-smokers?
> >Remember that old "Signal toothpaste" boasting that it had
> >"hexachlorophene in the stripe"?
>
> And when was that from? I remember it - from when I was still living
> with my parents! I moved out in 1986!
We may well live to regret the fashion for obsessively hygenic worktop
surfaces and wipes with bactericides that leach out. The technology is
clever, but the benefits pander to the super clean modern life with an
unchallenged immune system in infants. Autoimmune diseases are on the
increase. Adding trace soya bean and peanut proteins to almost all
processed food also appears to have created a huge increase in
allergies to peanuts and other nuts.
And I really love the bakery now with such insanities as "Walnut Cake"
and "Peanut Brittle" that "may contain nuts".
>
> > Turns out it causes brain damage in children. Wonder why we don't hear
> >much of it these days? Did you ever use it?
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexachlorophene
>
> Not that I actually followed that link, but it sounds like an older-tech
> "organochlorine" type pesticide to me. Too similar to DDT and "Agent
> Orange" for me to want to put into my mouth!
DDT is amazingly safe to mammals considering its potency as a
insecticide. Unless you are an avian raptor it isn't really much of a
problem it just accumulates in your fatty tissue (and poisons any egg
laying birds that eat you).
Even for the dioxins that always get a very bad press some are much
more deadly than others (and the polychlorinated biphenol transformer
oils that they are impurities in are much more of an acute threat).
Typically most victims end up with a bad case of chloracne. I lived in
Belgium during their dioxins in eggs & poultry scandal. Barely noticed
it apart from all the gaps in the supermarket shelves as we had our
own chickens. But it was obscene the way their government hid the
information from the general population until eventually a
whistleblower broke the story. These sorts of incidents do colour how
mainland Europe looks at food and farming.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/jun1999/belg-j08.shtml
An entire population around Seveso in Italy was exposed to a massive
dose of dioxins when the local chemical plant exploded. Again it
didn't help that they failed to warn or evacuate the population in a
timely manner.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveso_disaster
Regards,
Martin Brown
dalai lamah
>>> True, but its another cumulative risk factor.
>>> And it seems that cumulative risk factors might already be showing
>>> epidemiologically in everything from asthma and allergies increasing, to
>>> the phenomenal rise of autism to sperm counts in men decreasing by 60%
>>> in 50 years.
>>
>> You are right, but I have very few hope that we can solve the problem "one
>> risk factor at a time", either individually or as a society. It would be
>> better to pick the most proven factors and concentrate on them. For example
>> I mostly blame pollution and the stuff we eat into food (from food colorers
>> to pesticides, from GMOs to animal drugs...).
>
> Of course you have no evidence for this conclusion. Might just as
> well be n-rays.
I haven't hard evidences that the combination of thousands of different
polluters and food additives has a big impact on human health. It seems
very hard to conduct such a wide-spectrum, long-term epidemiological study,
there are too many interfering factors. But while we wait some scientific
breakthroughs on the analysis techniques for such complex phenomenas, I
think it's wise to listen at the warning bells and apply precautionary
limits, especially on the number of allowed chemicals.
Martin Brown
> Un bel giorno krw digitò:
>
> >>> True, but its another cumulative risk factor.
> >>> And it seems that cumulative risk factors might already be showing
> >>> epidemiologically in everything from asthma and allergies increasing, to
> >>> the phenomenal rise of autism to sperm counts in men decreasing by 60%
> >>> in 50 years.
>
> >> You are right, but I have very few hope that we can solve the problem "one
> >> risk factor at a time", either individually or as a society. It would be
> >> better to pick the most proven factors and concentrate on them. For example
> >> I mostly blame pollution and the stuff we eat into food (from food colorers
> >> to pesticides, from GMOs to animal drugs...).
>
> > Of course you have no evidence for this conclusion. Might just as
> > well be n-rays.
>
> I haven't hard evidences that the combination of thousands of different
> polluters and food additives has a big impact on human health. It seems
Fortunately most of them do not have any significant harmful effects.
And new chemicals are screened extensively before they are allowed out
of the lab. Sometimes they miss dangerous side effects like with
Thalidomide, and I have my suspicions about some artificial sweeteners
like cyclamates and most recently sucralose. But tests suggest that
they are OK in moderation and maybe better than having even more
people morbidly obese...
Most people in the West are hooked on excessively salty and sweetened
processed food.
> very hard to conduct such a wide-spectrum, long-term epidemiological study,
> there are too many interfering factors. But while we wait some scientific
> breakthroughs on the analysis techniques for such complex phenomenas, I
> think it's wise to listen at the warning bells and apply precautionary
> limits, especially on the number of allowed chemicals.
Do you have any idea about the number of distinct chemicals in a
decent bottle of wine?
The precautionary principle when applied to industrial chemicals makes
no sense at all.
Limiting the ones that the public come into contact with makes a lot
of sense though. And some of the modern lifestyle synthetic chemicals
that allow wierd and wonderful Aardark and Hedgehog flavored crisps to
be manufactured or mask the pong of wet dog or cat litter in the house
are not among my favourites.
The really dodgy stuff is marketted in the alternative therapies
sector where by listing it as a food supplement they can get away with
selling things that are in some cases positively dangerous. There was
a fad in the expat community in Belgium for one particular Chinese
slimming pill that caused renal failure.
http://www.hkmj.org/article_pdfs/hkm0610p394.pdf
Natural does not equal safe. There are plenty of natural poisons
around in the world. Most plants are in a permanent state of chemical
warfare with sap sucking insects, herbivores, rodents and fungi. It is
astonishing that soya beans are safe for humans to eat given their
effect on rodents. And real good quality chocolate could kill your
dog.
Mercifully only a handful of plants in Australia, Africa and South
America have mastered organofluorine chemistry.
Regards,
Martin Brown
dalai lamah
>> I haven't hard evidences that the combination of thousands of different
>> polluters and food additives has a big impact on human health. It seems
>
> Fortunately most of them do not have any significant harmful effects.
Even if chemical A and chemical B are harmless if taken alone, this doesn't
prove that chemical A+B will be harmless.
> And new chemicals are screened extensively before they are allowed out
> of the lab. Sometimes they miss dangerous side effects like with
> Thalidomide, and I have my suspicions about some artificial sweeteners
> like cyclamates and most recently sucralose. But tests suggest that
> they are OK in moderation
Food additives tests are done just like drug tests: by giving to animals or
persons (depending on the trial stage) extreme dosages of a single
chemical, and studying the effects. As far as I know, there isn't any real
effort in finding possible new interactions with others chemicals (apart
those already known in literature).
>> very hard to conduct such a wide-spectrum, long-term epidemiological study,
>> there are too many interfering factors. But while we wait some scientific
>> breakthroughs on the analysis techniques for such complex phenomenas, I
>> think it's wise to listen at the warning bells and apply precautionary
>> limits, especially on the number of allowed chemicals.
>
> Do you have any idea about the number of distinct chemicals in a
> decent bottle of wine?
I mean the chemicals that you artificially put into food, from the field to
the factory. Actually the wine is a very good example of this; grapes are
one of the cultures most abused with pesticides, and several of them are
already classified as mutagenic or toxic. Even if we take the leap of faith
to believe that a carcinogenic chemical is almost harmless at a
concentration lower than X (...), the problem of interactions between
chemicals still stands, even at very small amounts.
This is a biased source, but it contains several interesting informations
(all the site does, actually):
http://www.pan-europe.info/Resources/Briefings/Message_in_a_Bottle.pdf
If wines were subjected to the same limitations used for water, they would
be all rejected. I don't know if laugh or stop drinking wine.
> Natural does not equal safe.
Of course not. Who have you taken me for, some kind of hippie? :)
I'm not one of those nutjobs/luddites/whatever that blame the tecnology for
each one of their miseries, "chemicals are bad, let's ban them all and go
live on trees!". IMHO chemical industry is the second great technological
advance of our era, right after microelectronics. But just like we can't be
scared of each technological improvement, we can't embrace it blindfolded
either.
Dirk Bruere at NeoPax
But it's not just in the West.
Don Klipstein
>> In <6sg0nlF5lgt...@mid.individual.net>, Dirk Bruere at NeoPax wrote:
<And I admit snipping to edit for space>
>> >There's plenty of evidence piling up for some plasticizers used in the
>> >food industry being rather bad for the health.
>>
>> Plasticizers aren't used by "food industry" - they are used to soften
>> plastic objects.
>
>And one of the main applications is to soften the plastic containers
>that fast food and cook chill microwavable junk food is served in.
Though most of those ar not softened by plasticizers.
The few that are are detectably softer/more-flexible than usual of
plastic items with same number within the recycling symbol. Although
polycarbonate (whatever recycling number that has? 6? 7? ) is suspect,
but not used much for food containers other than baby bottles.
>Fatty foods can leach the plasticiser when hot. A sedentary lifestyle
>combined with a fat rich junk food diet almost certainly plays its
>part in the demise of Western fertility.
Western society appears to me to have too many people dying too young
and otherwise aging too poorly with big ticket medical bills due to
sedentary lifestyle and bad diet (eating excessive calories and/or
insufficient veggies, though high intake of animal and/or tropical fats
and/or worse-still hydrogenated-anything [especially if partially] is a
*Bad Thing*!).
>> There is slightly significant concern that bisphenol-A is "significantly
>> actually a bad thing". That is mainly present and of concern in plastic
>> objects having recycling symbols, especially #6 and/or whatever
>> polycarbonate gets, along with anything with any recycling symbol
>> and especially soft-and-flexible in comparison to "usual fare of same
>> recycling symbol".
>>
>> I still think that reducing exposure to BPA from "average American
>> exposure level" to zero makes about as much difference as reducing smoking
>> by 1/2 cigarette per day.
>
>I would prefer not to smoke an unnecessary 1/2 cigarette per day. YMMV
I do not smoke those or other tobacco products or other inhaled
recreational drugs at all. I also do not use any nicotine products in any
form.
I am bad enough with caffeine. :)
>> And it apears to me that about 98,950-98,975 of the other 99,000
>> chemicals of modern life not existing in the Garden of Eden or not known
>> to the Luddites to have existed in the Garden of Eden (such as
>> formaldehyde) are more truly harmless still. If I double my intake rate
>> of the all of them except the worst-1/8% of those not already subject to
>> regulations, I suspect that I merely have to drink 1 beer less per week or
>> eat 1-per-week fewer units of processed food to co pensate.
>
>Don't be too sure of that. The really nasty ones are those that only
>hit a small fraction of the population a very long time after first
>exposure. One such really bad example in the dyestuffs industry was
>beta-naphthylamine in the 1960's. Some guys shovelled it around for
>years without harm others visited the site once and died later.
I still expect that one and at least 100, probaly thousands of others,
to affect me less than 1 beer per week.
>> >Why do you think once widely used chemicals get banned from the food
>> >system?
>>
>> 99% either on scientific grounds becoming obvious long ago or on
>> political grounds low on scientific foundation.
>
>You do have to worry a bit about the high incidence of certain
>illnesses in the orchard areas of Belgium for instance.
Can you tell me what the illness specific to there is, preferably with
what it is to be blamed by?
> And you don't have to look that far for modern food adulteration like
>the milk with melamine to fake the protein content in China last year. It
>also made it into US pet food killing a fair few pets by kidney
>stone/renal failure.
That one is a specific small range of problems from a specific chemical
well-known to be poisonous, used by outlaws to achieve higher protein
scoring by common cheap tests that don't discern melamine from protein.
The offenders have forced American suppliers of impacted foodstuffs to
tighten their monitoring of low-bid imports from China, in order to avoid
business failures that such scandal (which actually did occur) can lead
to.
It appears to me that a few of the worse offenders in China for that
case had to take in bullets fired into the lower-rear of their heads.
>http://www.who.int/foodsafety/fs_management/infosan_events/en/index.html
Quick read tells me related to melamine.
>Same for various dodgy toxic azo dyes that turn up in Indian spices
>with monotonous regularity.
I would not trade my entire consumption of food dyes azo or otherwise
for 1/2 of 1 cigarette per day.
So are the peanut allergies increasing as a result of trying to make
Western society "more-peanut-safe"? Or are those increasing as a result
of increased detection and reduced embarassment-to-have-been-detected as
having peanut allergy or autism or homosexuality or
partially-hermaphrodyte reproduction equipment dimensions?
>> > Turns out it causes brain damage in children. Wonder why we don't hear
>> >much of it these days? Did you ever use it?
>> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexachlorophene
>>
>> Not that I actually followed that link, but it sounds like an older-tech
>> "organochlorine" type pesticide to me. Too similar to DDT and "Agent
>> Orange" for me to want to put into my mouth!
>
>DDT is amazingly safe to mammals considering its potency as a
>insecticide. Unless you are an avian raptor it isn't really much of a
>problem it just accumulates in your fatty tissue (and poisons any egg
>laying birds that eat you).
I do remember well that DDT was especially bad for avian raptors -
notably including "bald eagles". USA has a particular liking for that
specific species of bird!
>Even for the dioxins that always get a very bad press some are much
>more deadly than others (and the polychlorinated biphenol transformer
>oils that they are impurities in are much more of an acute threat).
>Typically most victims end up with a bad case of chloracne. I lived in
>Belgium during their dioxins in eggs & poultry scandal. Barely noticed
>it apart from all the gaps in the supermarket shelves as we had our
>own chickens. But it was obscene the way their government hid the
>information from the general population until eventually a
>whistleblower broke the story. These sorts of incidents do colour how
>mainland Europe looks at food and farming.
>
>http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/jun1999/belg-j08.shtml
>
>An entire population around Seveso in Italy was exposed to a massive
>dose of dioxins when the local chemical plant exploded. Again it
>didn't help that they failed to warn or evacuate the population in a
>timely manner.
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveso_disaster
Thanks for that link.
It appears to me that those having dioxin and/or other organochlorine
exposure at least 1-2 orders of magnitude less have little to fear.
>Regards, Martin Brown
- Don Klipstein (d...@misty.com)
Don Klipstein
>Un bel giorno Martin Brown digitň:
>
>>> I haven't hard evidences that the combination of thousands of different
>>> polluters and food additives has a big impact on human health. It seems
>>
>> Fortunately most of them do not have any significant harmful effects.
>
>Even if chemical A and chemical B are harmless if taken alone, this doesn't
>prove that chemical A+B will be harmless.
Can't prove a negative!
Meanwhile, most of the ill effects increasing in western society in
recent decades I blame highly on overeating, sedentary lifestyle,
undereating veggies, excessive alcohol consumption, sunbathing, criminal
lifestyle, radon in post-mid-1970's-more-airtight homes, aggressive
driving, and fight-rather-than-flight when presented with barroom brawls
or domestic abuse situations. Next after that - probably promiscuity.
Despite the above and 1/3 of a bazillion chemicals and modern radiation
hazards, members of "western" societies have their life expectancies
increasing.
Despite the above including chemicals and radiation as well as in
addition abortion and increased acceptance of non-reproductive lifestyles
(such as homosexual couples and heterosexual couples using
contraceptives), the human population still manages to increase.
<I snip from there including a reference to the infamous thalidomide
that I thought got banned around 40-45 years ago after single-digit years
of usage>
- Don Klipstein (d...@misty.com)
Martin Brown
> In <af8e1dba-b0e7-4358-996d-7c136de23...@a26g2000prf.googlegroups.com>,Martin Brown wrote:
> >On Jan 6, 5:14 am, d...@manx.misty.com (Don Klipstein) wrote:
> >> In <6sg0nlF5lgt...@mid.individual.net>, Dirk Bruere at NeoPax wrote:
>
> <And I admit snipping to edit for space>
>
> >> >There's plenty of evidence piling up for some plasticizers used in the
> >> >food industry being rather bad for the health.
>
> >> Plasticizers aren't used by "food industry" - they are used to soften
> >> plastic objects.
>
> >And one of the main applications is to soften the plastic containers
> >that fast food and cook chill microwavable junk food is served in.
>
> Though most of those ar not softened by plasticizers.
Yes. Although home freezer containers do tend to be softened.
> but not used much for food containers other than baby bottles.
That is a fairly important case though.
>
> >Fatty foods can leach the plasticiser when hot. A sedentary lifestyle
> >combined with a fat rich junk food diet almost certainly plays its
> >part in the demise of Western fertility.
>
> Western society appears to me to have too many people dying too young
> and otherwise aging too poorly with big ticket medical bills due to
> sedentary lifestyle and bad diet (eating excessive calories and/or
> insufficient veggies, though high intake of animal and/or tropical fats
> and/or worse-still hydrogenated-anything [especially if partially] is a
> *Bad Thing*!).
Dunno what can be done about it though. Some people are determined to
eat badly and excercise not at all.
[snip]
> >> And it apears to me that about 98,950-98,975 of the other 99,000
> >> chemicals of modern life not existing in the Garden of Eden or not known
> >> to the Luddites to have existed in the Garden of Eden (such as
> >> formaldehyde) are more truly harmless still. If I double my intake rate
> >> of the all of them except the worst-1/8% of those not already subject to
> >> regulations, I suspect that I merely have to drink 1 beer less per week or
> >> eat 1-per-week fewer units of processed food to co pensate.
>
> >Don't be too sure of that. The really nasty ones are those that only
> >hit a small fraction of the population a very long time after first
> >exposure. One such really bad example in the dyestuffs industry was
> >beta-naphthylamine in the 1960's. Some guys shovelled it around for
> >years without harm others visited the site once and died later.
>
> I still expect that one and at least 100, probaly thousands of others,
> to affect me less than 1 beer per week.
If you are male then the odds would not be good. It eventually caused
bladder cancer in a high proportion of the men exposed to it (and was
considered so bad that all industrial processes using it were
abandonned). The symptoms were so distinctive that cases were traced
back to the plant (or other exposure).
> >> >Why do you think once widely used chemicals get banned from the food
> >> >system?
>
> >> 99% either on scientific grounds becoming obvious long ago or on
> >> political grounds low on scientific foundation.
>
> >You do have to worry a bit about the high incidence of certain
> >illnesses in the orchard areas of Belgium for instance.
>
> Can you tell me what the illness specific to there is, preferably with
> what it is to be blamed by?
Thought to be due to spraying of pesticides affecting workers and
drifting onto domestic premises and school playgrounds. I don't recall
the full details (it would be mostly reported in French speaking
Belgian press).
> >Same for various dodgy toxic azo dyes that turn up in Indian spices
> >with monotonous regularity.
>
> I would not trade my entire consumption of food dyes azo or otherwise
> for 1/2 of 1 cigarette per day.
Again there are some (cheap) azo dyes that you really do not want to
eat. The approved ones for food colouring have a reputation for
causing hyperactivity these days but I am not sure if it is the dye or
the other ingredients of the soft drinks. The brominated oils that go
into some of soft drinks are not something I would want to consume
either.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brominated_vegetable_oil
> >clever, but the benefits pander to the super clean modern life with an
> >unchallenged immune system in infants. Autoimmune diseases are on the
> >increase. Adding trace soya bean and peanut proteins to almost all
> >processed food also appears to have created a huge increase in
> >allergies to peanuts and other nuts.
>
> >And I really love the bakery now with such insanities as "Walnut Cake"
> >and "Peanut Brittle" that "may contain nuts".
>
> So are the peanut allergies increasing as a result of trying to make
> Western society "more-peanut-safe"? Or are those increasing as a result
> of increased detection and reduced embarassment-to-have-been-detected as
> having peanut allergy or autism or homosexuality or
> partially-hermaphrodyte reproduction equipment dimensions?
I am fairly convinced that the rising Western peanut allergy is self
inflicted. Societies that live on significant quantities of peanuts in
their diet do not have the same problem. The conjecture is that by
adding peanut and soya proteins to flour and thence to processed foods
a low level of exposure primes the immune system of young children
against it.
> >> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexachlorophene
>
> >> Not that I actually followed that link, but it sounds like an older-tech
> >> "organochlorine" type pesticide to me. Too similar to DDT and "Agent
> >> Orange" for me to want to put into my mouth!
>
> >DDT is amazingly safe to mammals considering its potency as a
> >insecticide. Unless you are an avian raptor it isn't really much of a
> >problem it just accumulates in your fatty tissue (and poisons any egg
> >laying birds that eat you).
>
> I do remember well that DDT was especially bad for avian raptors -
> notably including "bald eagles". USA has a particular liking for that
> specific species of bird!
Understandably. I saw one once on a tree in the grounds of the Scripps
Institute. Very impressive but it flew off before I could get my
camera.
> >Even for the dioxins that always get a very bad press some are much
> >more deadly than others (and the polychlorinated biphenol transformer
> >oils that they are impurities in are much more of an acute threat).
> >Typically most victims end up with a bad case of chloracne. I lived in
> >Belgium during their dioxins in eggs & poultry scandal. Barely noticed
> >it apart from all the gaps in the supermarket shelves as we had our
> >own chickens. But it was obscene the way their government hid the
> >information from the general population until eventually a
> >whistleblower broke the story. These sorts of incidents do colour how
> >mainland Europe looks at food and farming.
>
> >http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/jun1999/belg-j08.shtml
>
> >An entire population around Seveso in Italy was exposed to a massive
> >dose of dioxins when the local chemical plant exploded. Again it
> >didn't help that they failed to warn or evacuate the population in a
> >timely manner.
>
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveso_disaster
>
> Thanks for that link.
>
> It appears to me that those having dioxin and/or other organochlorine
> exposure at least 1-2 orders of magnitude less have little to fear.
The dose makes the poison. But also so does the structure. There are a
handful of dioxins that really are extremely nasty carcinogens whereas
the rest are just very unpleasant. PCBs (transformer oils) are nasty
but useful. You don't really want to ingest organochlorines
unecessarily. That said I have lived in a semitropical country where
the tapwater often smelled of chloroalkanes (a trade off for killing
the sewage content in the water).
Regards,
Martin Brown
Martin Brown
> Un bel giorno Martin Brown digitò:
>
> >> I haven't hard evidences that the combination of thousands of different
> >> polluters and food additives has a big impact on human health. It seems
>
> > Fortunately most of them do not have any significant harmful effects.
>
> Even if chemical A and chemical B are harmless if taken alone, this doesn't
> prove that chemical A+B will be harmless.
You can never prove a negative.
You can only observe if there are any unforseen consequences when A+B
are used together.
There are just too many permutations to test them all. One typical
scenario is where people are self medicating with some random health
food shop plant extract and taking a conventional prescibed medicine.
Either on its own would be OK but both together and the kidneys give
up the ghost. But in most of these cases neither A nor B is totally
harmless - just tolerated without permanent damage at the dose level
used.
I can think offhand of a few very simple combinations of A and B that
would get you into serious trouble. Again neither of A or B are
entirely harmless on their own but reacting them together is extremely
bad.
>
> > And new chemicals are screened extensively before they are allowed out
> > of the lab. Sometimes they miss dangerous side effects like with
> > Thalidomide, and I have my suspicions about some artificial sweeteners
> > like cyclamates and most recently sucralose. But tests suggest that
> > they are OK in moderation
>
> Food additives tests are done just like drug tests: by giving to animals or
> persons (depending on the trial stage) extreme dosages of a single
> chemical, and studying the effects. As far as I know, there isn't any real
> effort in finding possible new interactions with others chemicals (apart
> those already known in literature).
It is done by watching out for side effects.
>
> >> very hard to conduct such a wide-spectrum, long-term epidemiological study,
> >> there are too many interfering factors. But while we wait some scientific
> >> breakthroughs on the analysis techniques for such complex phenomenas, I
> >> think it's wise to listen at the warning bells and apply precautionary
> >> limits, especially on the number of allowed chemicals.
>
> > Do you have any idea about the number of distinct chemicals in a
> > decent bottle of wine?
>
> I mean the chemicals that you artificially put into food, from the field to
> the factory. Actually the wine is a very good example of this; grapes are
> one of the cultures most abused with pesticides, and several of them are
> already classified as mutagenic or toxic. Even if we take the leap of faith
> to believe that a carcinogenic chemical is almost harmless at a
> concentration lower than X (...), the problem of interactions between
> chemicals still stands, even at very small amounts.
>
> This is a biased source, but it contains several interesting informations
> (all the site does, actually):
>
> http://www.pan-europe.info/Resources/Briefings/Message_in_a_Bottle.pdf
>
> If wines were subjected to the same limitations used for water, they would
> be all rejected. I don't know if laugh or stop drinking wine.
I think they are exaggerating. Hard to tell without knowing what
analytical technique they used to identify and quantify the pesticides
in the wine. I am surprised they didn't find any ethylene glycol ;-)
> > Natural does not equal safe.
>
> Of course not. Who have you taken me for, some kind of hippie? :)
I get a bit fed up with the "ban all chemicals brigade". The website
you quoted is an example. I favour minimum inputs farming where the
pesticides are used as needed - I do not approve of hairshirt
overpriced Organic(TM) produce that panders to the irrational fears of
the worried well.
UK has a serious measles problem because of a falsely claimed autism
link to the MMR vaccine. Herd immunity was broken in some areas and
the children now pay the price by catching the real diseases.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7633399.stm
>
> I'm not one of those nutjobs/luddites/whatever that blame the tecnology for
> each one of their miseries, "chemicals are bad, let's ban them all and go
> live on trees!". IMHO chemical industry is the second great technological
> advance of our era, right after microelectronics. But just like we can't be
> scared of each technological improvement, we can't embrace it blindfolded
> either.
Cleanroom work seems to engender certain health risks too. Never clear
to me why.
Regards,
Martin Brown
Rich Grise
> I'm having a continuous argument with a colleague of mine about the harm
> of microwaves. While he considers them harmful at any level, I tend to be
> caring less when the level is below -10dBm. We're talking about
> frequencies between 10 and 40GHz. I don't have a problem to have the coax
> to waveguide coupler open (and operational at -10dBm) while mounting gear
> at the network analyzer. Beside that a part of the -10dBm is reflected, I
> consider such little power is not harmful on the basis that sunlight
> coming with a density of 1kW/m^2 making 1mW/mm^2 is still orders of
> magnitude stronger than these -10dBm distributes over a radian or so. And
> we can stand the sunlight occasionally over shorter periods of time
> unharmed.
>
> How do you guys regard that subject ? Strictly no exposure at no level at
> all ?
>
When I was in the USAF, one of the systems I worked on "ECM Pods" - a self-
contained jamming transmitter that sticks to one of the airplane pylons.
When we finished one and buttoned it up, we used to check if it was
radiating with our hand - if it feels warm, the pod is transmitting.
This was at levels over 100 watts.
The adverse effect of "microwaves" is heating, and not much more. I'd
watch my eyes, though. (they don't like to be heated much).
I've heard about megawatt radar sites, where the antenna techs would
carry along a little ball of steel wool. To verify that they system
was off and safe, they'd throw the steel wool ball in front of the
antenna. If the steel wool didn't burn, it was safe to work on the
antenna. :-)
Have Fun!
Rich
Rich Grise
> On Sun, 04 Jan 2009 04:01:56 +0100, Rene Tschaggelar <no...@none.net>
>
>>I'm having a continuous argument with a colleague of mine about the harm
>>of microwaves. While he considers them harmful at any level, I tend to be
>>caring less when the level is below -10dBm. We're talking about
>>frequencies between 10 and 40GHz. I don't have a problem to have the coax
>>to waveguide coupler open (and operational at -10dBm) while mounting gear
>>at the network analyzer. Beside that a part of the -10dBm is reflected, I
>>consider such little power is not harmful on the basis that sunlight
>>coming with a density of 1kW/m^2 making 1mW/mm^2 is still orders of
>>magnitude stronger than these -10dBm distributes over a radian or so.
>>And we can stand the sunlight occasionally over shorter periods of time
>>unharmed.
>>
>>How do you guys regard that subject ? Strictly no exposure at no level at
>>all ?
>>
>
> in the brain, and the modulating signal is picked up at very low levels
> across billions of neurons, and triggers a seizure? Not saying it could
> happen, but...
Then you're going to die. Since you can't escape them, you might as well
just give up. ;-p
Have Fun!
Rich
Rich Grise
>
> True, but its another cumulative risk factor. And it seems that cumulative
> risk factors might already be showing epidemiologically in everything from
> asthma and allergies increasing, to the phenomenal rise of autism to sperm
> counts in men decreasing by 60% in 50 years.
Epidemiologists are idiots.
Thanks,
Rich
GregS
When I was in the Army we used to check the 440 mHz transmitter by touching the antenna
too. I got tired of that trick and made up a detector with part of an airplane fin, a rod and
some kind of lamp. Just to make sure the antenna was radiating and had good coax
connections. That could not insure the transmitter was tunned to the right
frequency, but it helped. When we shot off a drone aircraft it would keep flying
if everythibg was OK. If not the chute would come out and cut the engine.
Seems like the transmitter had around 100 watts. All about my RCAT life....
http://zekfrivolous.com/rcat/rcat.pdf
greg
GregS
It didn't seem that long ago, the first and only cruise I went on was a small
FUN ship in 1986. I thought I would cruise up to the radio room one evening and check it out.
Well I have a 2nd class radiotelegraph license.
I was suprised buy an old style station. really, a guy was using a straight key sending
morse code. I look up the wall where the antenna feedline was and there was a light bulb
in tune with the morse. I went back to crusin.
greg
Guy Macon
Rich Grise wrote:
>When I was in the USAF, one of the systems I worked on "ECM Pods" - a self-
>contained jamming transmitter that sticks to one of the airplane pylons.
>
>When we finished one and buttoned it up, we used to check if it was
>radiating with our hand - if it feels warm, the pod is transmitting.
>
>This was at levels over 100 watts.
>
>The adverse effect of "microwaves" is heating, and not much more. I'd
>watch my eyes, though. (they don't like to be heated much).
There are actually two parts of the human body that have a poor
ability to shed microwave-induced heat. The other body part is
only found on males.
--
Guy Macon
<http://www.GuyMacon.com/>
Rich Grise
> Rich Grise wrote:
>>
>>The adverse effect of "microwaves" is heating, and not much more. I'd
>>watch my eyes, though. (they don't like to be heated much).
>
> There are actually two parts of the human body that have a poor ability to
> shed microwave-induced heat. The other body part is only found on males.
The thought had crossed our minds, but we never got that close. On the
other hand, it'd be a cheap substitute for a vasectomy if you're done
breeding, or if you're childfree by choice. ;-)
Cheers!
Rich
dalai lamah
>> Even if chemical A and chemical B are harmless if taken alone, this doesn't
>> prove that chemical A+B will be harmless.
>
> You can never prove a negative.
Of course you can, if you have a finite set of parameters. When the
parameters are too much, you have two ways:
1) Make some sensible assumptions to preventively rule out most of them,
then use statistics to confirm your assumptions (the so called "null
hypotesis tests").
2) Improve analysis techniques (either by brute force - e.g. computerized
simulation models - or not), so that you can make less arbitrary
assumptions. Even if we can't test everything, it doesn't mean that there
is no point in testing more.
The way (1) is widely used, but it has several practical and
epistemiological (I hope that the english spelling is correct :)) limits.
If the assumptions are wrong, it is very likely that the results will be
contradictory or useless.
A silly example (but not too much): the use of the helmet when riding the
bike. There are several studies that demonstrate that the helmet is
credited for a significant reduction of bike injuries; there are several
other studies that demonstrate that it hasn't any effect above statistical
significance. These studies have been mostly conducted by universities and
important organizations; how come that their results are opposite?
> You can only observe if there are any unforseen consequences when A+B
> are used together.
In the same way, one can't predict that he won't have an accident the next
time he drives. But this doesn't mean that it's useless to improve your
driving skills, to use the seatbelts (by the way, some studies deny also
their effectiveness), etc. The unforeseen can't be ruled out, but it can be
made less influent.
> I think they are exaggerating. Hard to tell without knowing what
> analytical technique they used to identify and quantify the pesticides
> in the wine.
What do you mean? They have just sent some wine samples to commercial (and
independent, I presume) laboratories, and asked to test them against the
most common pesticides. How can it could have been more straightforward?
I know, you can lie also with good data and good statistics if you want to,
but still...
>>> Natural does not equal safe.
>>
>> Of course not. Who have you taken me for, some kind of hippie? :)
>
> I get a bit fed up with the "ban all chemicals brigade".
I frequently make jokes on them. :)
In some italian health-themed newsgroups there was (or still is, I don't
follow them anymore) a legendary netkook that supported almost every
"natural" cure and conspiracy theory involving chemicals, from the most
popular (SLS, mercury into vaccines, etc) to the most disturbing (urine
therapy, curing cancer with sodium bicarbonate, etc). Well, years ago some
clever group participants make him believe that there was this deadly
chemical, present in huge amounts in food, air and rivers (even in
Antarctica, below kilometers of ice!). Easily absorbed by human body, it
could kill a man (or even an elephant!) in few minutes: the dreadful
"dihydrogen monoxide"! He took the bait and wrote a concerned article on
its site, with some expert proposals on how eliminate this horrible
substance from your body by using natural medicine.
This prank has become a legend. :)
Martin Brown
> Un bel giorno Martin Brown digitò:
>
> >> Even if chemical A and chemical B are harmless if taken alone, this doesn't
> >> prove that chemical A+B will be harmless.
>
> > You can never prove a negative.
>
> Of course you can, if you have a finite set of parameters. When the
> parameters are too much, you have two ways:
>
> 1) Make some sensible assumptions to preventively rule out most of them,
> then use statistics to confirm your assumptions (the so called "null
> hypotesis tests").
>
> 2) Improve analysis techniques (either by brute force - e.g. computerized
> simulation models - or not), so that you can make less arbitrary
> assumptions. Even if we can't test everything, it doesn't mean that there
> is no point in testing more.
It is worth looking closely at any that might be expected to be
tricky. But you cannot realistically hope to prove that for every
possible permutation of even a three component mixture that there is
not one dangerous one.
Famously there was an A level school science experiment on eutectic
mixtures that had such a sting in the tail. It actually required an
odd sequence of events to trigger including leaving the mixtures over
a weekend in sunlight but eventually it happened and one mix exploded
after an organic peroxide formed.
> A silly example (but not too much): the use of the helmet when riding the
> bike. There are several studies that demonstrate that the helmet is
> credited for a significant reduction of bike injuries; there are several
> other studies that demonstrate that it hasn't any effect above statistical
> significance. These studies have been mostly conducted by universities and
> important organizations; how come that their results are opposite?
Usually one lot a sponsored by the freedom to be stupid brigade and
the other by manufacturers of safety helmets. It is even more bizarre
for seatbelts. I would charge anyone injured through not wearing a
seatbelt for any cosmetic surgery needed because of their own
stupidity. Freedom to act stupidly comes at a price. I would also
reduce the explosive charge in US airbags to be sub-lethal for small
women and teenage drivers.
>
> > You can only observe if there are any unforseen consequences when A+B
> > are used together.
>
> In the same way, one can't predict that he won't have an accident the next
> time he drives. But this doesn't mean that it's useless to improve your
> driving skills, to use the seatbelts (by the way, some studies deny also
> their effectiveness), etc. The unforeseen can't be ruled out, but it can be
> made less influent.
The ones that claim seatbelts don't help are definitely in the lunatic
fringe. Rally or racing car 4 or 5 point restraint harness would be
better still. You can contrive a situation where they are damaging but
compared to the horrific injuries people incur when unrestrainted
limbs go out through car windows as the car rolls or someones head
goes through a laminated windscreen and is garotted on the recoil. The
latter happened at the end of my road - very messy.
I was an unrestrained back seat passenger in a serious car smash once.
Now I always wear a seatbelt. The driver wearing his seatbelt
incorrectly suffered internal bleeding, but the front passenger
wearing a seatbelt correctly went on to have lunch.
I doubt if Ronaldo would have walked away from his wrecked Ferrari
yesterday had he not been wearing a seatbelt.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/premier_league/manchester_united/article5474171.ece
>
> > I think they are exaggerating. Hard to tell without knowing what
> > analytical technique they used to identify and quantify the pesticides
> > in the wine.
>
> What do you mean? They have just sent some wine samples to commercial (and
> independent, I presume) laboratories, and asked to test them against the
> most common pesticides. How can it could have been more straightforward?
It isn't that easy to do ultra trace organic chemical analysis in
complex matrices like wine and they have an incentive to report any
false positives as true detections. Without knowing the methodology
employed it is hard to decide whether their claims are genuine or
simply a reflection of systematic failures in the analysis procedure.
The most sensitive ultratrace methods are at best semiquantitative and
you need to know the instrument detection limit for the method(s)
used.
Regards,
Martin Brown
Don Klipstein
Though destroying those glands may cause some impairment to males
participating in activities that they and/or their partners may desire
and desire to be not prone to generating children.
Then again, back in a time when there were castrato male singers,
supposedly there were some ladies desiring those - such men had to work
harder to "climax" and got their ladies farther along the way with more
time having a vigorous good time than "entire men" did. Though a castrato
supposedly required physical stimulation to manage a "stiffie".
Meanwhile, I suspect permanent complete impairment of sperm production
by microwaves would be extremely painful.
The lenses of the eyes, on the other hand, lack pain receptors (and
nerveendings of all kinds including ones for temperature sensation) and
also lack blood vessels. Those things can overheat awfully easily from
multiple milliwatts per square centimeter of microwave/RF and first
indication that you are cooking those things could be vision getting
foggier-permanently. And effects may be delayed a bit (hours?) and can
easily be more severe with seeing conditions more revealing of the damage
than those of when the damage was done. (Fogging parts of the/any light
path portion of your eyeballs shows up a lot worse when you are driving at
night!)
- Don Klipstein (d...@misty.com)
JosephKK
wrote:
>I'm having a continuous argument with a colleague of mine about the harm
>of microwaves. While he considers them harmful at any level, I tend to
>be caring less when the level is below -10dBm. We're talking about
>frequencies between 10 and 40GHz. I don't have a problem to have the
>coax to waveguide coupler open (and operational at -10dBm) while
>mounting gear at the network analyzer. Beside that a part of the -10dBm
>is reflected, I consider such little power is not harmful on the basis
>that sunlight coming with a density of 1kW/m^2 making 1mW/mm^2 is still
>orders of magnitude stronger than these -10dBm distributes over a
>radian or so. And we can stand the sunlight occasionally over shorter
>periods of time unharmed.
>
>How do you guys regard that subject ? Strictly no exposure at no level
>at all ?
>
>{BTW. I'm aware of the so called microwave solders in WW2}
>
>Rene
The exposure does not bother me in the least. The potential damage to
the (possibly very complex) signal generators does. I have read some
quality work about microwave exposure biophysics, that does not make
me an expert though.
JosephKK
<dirk....@gmail.com> wrote:
>Tim Wescott wrote:
>> On Sun, 04 Jan 2009 04:01:56 +0100, Rene Tschaggelar wrote:
>>
>>> I'm having a continuous argument with a colleague of mine about the harm
>>> of microwaves. While he considers them harmful at any level, I tend to
>>> be caring less when the level is below -10dBm. We're talking about
>>> frequencies between 10 and 40GHz. I don't have a problem to have the
>>> coax to waveguide coupler open (and operational at -10dBm) while
>>> mounting gear at the network analyzer. Beside that a part of the -10dBm
>>> is reflected, I consider such little power is not harmful on the basis
>>> that sunlight coming with a density of 1kW/m^2 making 1mW/mm^2 is still
>>> orders of magnitude stronger than these -10dBm distributes over a
>>> radian or so. And we can stand the sunlight occasionally over shorter
>>> periods of time unharmed.
>>>
>>> How do you guys regard that subject ? Strictly no exposure at no level
>>> at all ?
>>>
>>> {BTW. I'm aware of the so called microwave solders in WW2}
>>>
>>> Rene
>>
>> AFAIK the only scientifically proven harmful effects of RF is heating. I
>> have heard (anecdotaly, but not from a member of the tinfoil hat brigade)
>> that this heating can happen in the brain without the victim noticing it
>> -- but certainly not at those levels.
>>
>> But if someone is insisting on being afraid of invisible waves, you
>> aren't going to convince them.
>>
>
>Microwave exposure increases bone demineralization rate independent of
>temperature
>http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bsc/jms/2004/00000215/00000003/art00003
I read the abstract, i am worried about the quality of the science
from that alone. YMMV
JosephKK
<dirk....@gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
>
>http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/its-official-men-really-are-the-weaker-sex-1055688.html
>http://tinyurl.com/68n8km
>
>The research – to be detailed tomorrow in the most comprehensive report
>yet published – shows that a host of common chemicals is feminising
>males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals,
>including people.
>
>Backed by some of the world's leading scientists, who say that it "waves
>a red flag" for humanity and shows that evolution itself is being
>disrupted, the report comes out at a particularly sensitive time for
>ministers. On Wednesday, Britain will lead opposition to proposed new
>European controls on pesticides, many of which have been found to have
>"gender-bending" effects.
>
>It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows
>that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in
>pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminised genitals.
>
>"This research shows that the basic male tool kit is under threat," says
>Gwynne Lyons, a former government adviser on the health effects of
>chemicals, who wrote the report.
>
>Wildlife and people have been exposed to more than 100,000 new chemicals
>in recent years, and the European Commission has admitted that 99 per
>cent of them are not adequately regulated. There is not even proper
>safety information on 85 per cent of them.
>
>Many have been identified as "endocrine disrupters" – or gender-benders
>– because they interfere with hormones. These include phthalates, used
>in food wrapping, cosmetics and baby powders among other applications;
>flame retardants in furniture and electrical goods; PCBs, a now banned
>group of substances still widespread in food and the environment; and
>many pesticides.
>
>The report – published by the charity CHEMTrust and drawing on more than
>250 scientific studies from around the world – concentrates mainly on
>wildlife, identifying effects in species ranging from the polar bears of
>the Arctic to the eland of the South African plains, and from whales in
>the depths of the oceans to high-flying falcons and eagles.
>
>It concludes: "Males of species from each of the main classes of
>vertebrate animals (including bony fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and
>mammals) have been affected by chemicals in the environment.
>
>"Feminisation of the males of numerous vertebrate species is now a
>widespread occurrence. All vertebrates have similar sex hormone
>receptors, which have been conserved in evolution. Therefore,
>observations in one species may serve to highlight pollution issues of
>concern for other vertebrates, including humans."
>
>Fish, it says, are particularly affected by pollutants as they are
>immersed in them when they swim in contaminated water, taking them in
>not just in their food but through their gills and skin. They were among
>the first to show widespread gender-bending effects.
>
>Half the male fish in British lowland rivers have been found to be
>developing eggs in their testes; in some stretches all male roaches have
>been found to be changing sex in this way. Female hormones – largely
>from the contraceptive pills which pass unaltered through sewage
>treatment – are partly responsible, while more than three-quarters of
>sewage works have been found also to be discharging demasculinising
>man-made chemicals. Feminising effects have now been discovered in a
>host of freshwater fish species as far away as Japan and Benin, in
>Africa, and in sea fish in the North Sea, the Mediterranean, Osaka Bay
>in Japan and Puget Sound on the US west coast.
>
>Research at the University of Florida earlier this year found that 40
>per cent of the male cane toads – a species so indestructible that it
>has become a plague in Australia – had become hermaphrodites in a
>heavily farmed part of the state, with another 20 per cent undergoing
>lesser feminisation. A similar link between farming and sex changes in
>northern leopard frogs has been revealed by Canadian research, adding to
>suspicions that pesticides may be to blame.
>
>Male alligators exposed to pesticides in Florida have suffered from
>lower testosterone and higher oestrogen levels, abnormal testes, smaller
>penises and reproductive failures. Male snapping turtles have been found
>with female characteristics in the same state and around the Great
>Lakes, where wildlife has been found to be contaminated with more than
>400 different chemicals. Male herring gulls and peregrine falcons have
>produced the female protein used to make egg yolks, while bald eagles
>have had difficulty reproducing in areas highly contaminated with chemicals.
>
>Scientists at Cardiff University have found that the brains of male
>starlings who ate worms contaminated by female hormones at a sewage
>works in south-west England were subtly changed so that they sang at
>greater length and with increased virtuosity.
>
>Even more ominously for humanity, mammals have also been found to be
>widely affected.
>
>Two-thirds of male Sitka black-tailed deer in Alaska have been found to
>have undescended testes and deformed antler growth, and roughly the same
>proportion of white-tailed deer in Montana were discovered to have
>genital abnormalities.
>
>In South Africa, eland have been revealed to have damaged testicles
>while being contaminated by high levels of gender-bender chemicals, and
>striped mice from one polluted nature reserved were discovered to be
>producing no sperm at all.
>
>At the other end of the world, hermaphrodite polar bears – with penises
>and vaginas – have been discovered and gender-benders have been found to
>reduce sperm counts and penis lengths in those that remained male. Many
>of the small, endangered populations of Florida panthers have been found
>to have abnormal sperm.
>
>Other research has revealed otters from polluted areas with smaller
>testicles and mink exposed to PCBs with shorter penises. Beluga whales
>in Canada's St Lawrence estuary and killer whales off its north-west
>coast – two of the wildlife populations most contaminated by PCBs – are
>reproducing poorly, as are exposed porpoises, seals and dolphins.
>
>Scientists warned yesterday that the mass of evidence added up to a
>grave warning for both wildlife and humans. Professor Charles Tyler, an
>expert on endocrine disrupters at the University of Exeter, says that
>the evidence in the report "set off alarm bells". Whole wildlife
>populations could be at risk, he said, because their gene pool would be
>reduced, making them less able to withstand disease and putting them at
>risk from hazards such as global warming.
>
>Dr Pete Myers, chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences, one of
>the world's foremost authorities on gender-bender chemicals, added: "We
>have thrown 100, 000 chemicals against a finely balanced hormone system,
>so it's not surprising that we are seeing some serious results. It is
>leading to the most rapid pace of evolution in the history of the world.
>
>Professor Lou Gillette of Florida University, one of the most respected
>academics in the field, warned that the report waved "a large red flag"
>at humanity. He said: "If we are seeing problems in wildlife, we can be
>concerned that something similar is happening to a proportion of human
>males"
>
>Indeed, new research at the University of Rochester in New York state
>shows that boys born to mothers with raised levels of phthalates were
>more likely to have smaller penises and undescended testicles. They also
>had a shorter distance between their anus and genitalia, a classic sign
>of feminisation. And a study at Rotterdam's Erasmus University showed
>that boys whose mothers had been exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play
>with dolls and tea sets rather than with traditionally male toys.
>
>Communities heavily polluted with gender-benders in Canada, Russia and
>Italy have given birth to twice as many girls than boys, which may offer
>a clue to the reason for a mysterious shift in sex ratios worldwide.
>Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls, but the ratio is
>slipping. It is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys
>have been born as girls instead in the US and Japan alone.
>
>And sperm counts are dropping precipitously. Studies in more than 20
>countries have shown that they have dropped from 150 million per
>millilitre of sperm fluid to 60 million over 50 years. (Hamsters produce
>nearly three times as much, at 160 million.) Professor Nil Basu of
>Michigan University says that this adds up to "pretty compelling
>evidence for effects in humans".
Wow, i haven't had that good of a laugh in a long time. That is even
more junk "science" than AGW.
What do i have to do to become hermaphrodite like the polar bears that
you mention twice?
JosephKK
Actually not all of them, just the ones that also have causes.
Dirk Bruere at NeoPax
Keep drinking water contaminated with oestrogenic chemicals.
Try a higher concentration like people in cities whose water is taken
from rivers polluted with treated sewage (the pill from women's urine
still being measurably present)
Jim Thompson
wrote:
>On Tue, 06 Jan 2009 02:09:22 +0000, Dirk Bruere at NeoPax
><dirk....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
><snip>
>
>>
>>http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/its-official-men-really-are-the-weaker-sex-1055688.html
>>http://tinyurl.com/68n8km
>>
>>The research – to be detailed tomorrow in the most comprehensive report
>>yet published – shows that a host of common chemicals is feminising
>>males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals,
>>including people.
>>
[snip]
>>
>>Communities heavily polluted with gender-benders in Canada, Russia and
>>Italy have given birth to twice as many girls than boys, which may offer
>>a clue to the reason for a mysterious shift in sex ratios worldwide.
>>Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls, but the ratio is
>>slipping. It is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys
>>have been born as girls instead in the US and Japan alone.
>>
>>And sperm counts are dropping precipitously. Studies in more than 20
>>countries have shown that they have dropped from 150 million per
>>millilitre of sperm fluid to 60 million over 50 years. (Hamsters produce
>>nearly three times as much, at 160 million.) Professor Nil Basu of
>>Michigan University says that this adds up to "pretty compelling
>>evidence for effects in humans".
>
>Wow, i haven't had that good of a laugh in a long time. That is even
>more junk "science" than AGW.
>
>What do i have to do to become hermaphrodite like the polar bears that
>you mention twice?
Dirk Bruere has obviously been subjected to excess pesticide exposure,
his dick turned black and fell off. Now his brain is turning black
;-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine Sometimes I even put it in the food
bo...@mailinator.com
wrote:
> Vladimir Vassilevsky wrote:
> > "Rene Tschaggelar" <n...@none.net> wrote in message
> >news:49602...@news.bluewin.ch...
> >> I'm having a continuous argument with a colleague of mine about the harm
> >> of microwaves. While he considers them harmful at any level, I tend to
> >> be caring less when the level is below -10dBm. We're talking about
> >> frequencies between 10 and 40GHz.
> >> at all ?
I don't worry about +30dBm at 1.9GHz in my pocket from my phone.
I have no paticular insight into microwave safety but +10dBm out of
a waveguide dosn't worry me at all. There are still automatic
door sensors using 10GHz at somthing like +10dBm.
> Many microwave ovens are unable to adequately shield a mobile phone so
> the permitted leakage level cannot be exactly zero. Worth pointing out
> here that your WiFi is at worst case producing around 100mW of 2.4GHz
> or 200mW 5GHz (some can go upto 1W EIRP at 5.5GHz).
Putting a mobile phone in a microwave oven is not a good test.
Most current models of microwave oven make the side of
the door a quarter of a wavelength long at 2.4GHz.
The shielding is much less effective at 800/900/1900MHz mobile
phone frequencys. Also in an urban area it would not be
surprising for the phone signal strength to be 50dB above
the minimum level the phone needs so even if the signal is
reduced a lot the phone can still ring inside a microwave.
I used to have a phone with a fun hidden menu that showed
things like the received signal strength of the cells it could hear,
the phone could just about make a call at -110dBm,
At a few places standing down the street from a cell
the reading pegged at the maximum reading of -40dBm.
My wifi access point can supply a low resolution graph of
signal+noise level across the channels.
When I did a quick test the carrier from
the microwave oven downstairs with a mug of water in it was
much stronger than the level from couple of laptops
transfering a test file (UK spec laptops so probably 5-10mW)
so there is certainly some leakage.
Bob
Michael A. Terrell
Dirk Bruere at NeoPax wrote:
>
> Don't worry - you'll be whining about your Chinese masters soon enough
Yawn.
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There are two kinds of people on this earth:
The crazy, and the insane.
The first sign of insanity is denying that you're crazy.
Charlie E.
Back when I worked for GTE, there was a microwave tower up on the
roof. On the ladder going up there, there was a big sign advising
about radiation danger (the tower was 60 feet high...)
One day, we had a window washing crew come in, and one of the guys
went up on the roof to get some of the windows from the top. When he
came down, there was a group of us at the bottom of the ladder,
looking solemn. We looked at him, said "Well, we won't charge you for
the vasecomy." and pointed at the sign.
Then we lost it... 8-)
Charlie
Jim Thompson
wrote:
YOU lost it? What about the victim? I hope he had a good sense of
humor ;-)