Since I began lecturing on this subject in 2004 the most common question I am asked is what are THEY going to do about it?
Bear with me whilst I try to answer the biggest question on the subject.
Disregard Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Genghis Khan, Vlad the Impaler and Ivan the Terrible. It is Thomas Midgley Jr. who could claim the rather dubious honor of being the most destructive human being that ever lived (after he invented the process for adding lead to petrol). Until 1973, that is.
I’m sure he never intended to hold this position, in fact I’m pretty convinced he only wanted to act for the benefit of mankind, but nevertheless he has caused a great deal of damage.
The process of adding lead to fuel was very toxic, and a number of workers at production facilities died of lead poisoning. This pales in significance, however, when compared to the global impact that leaded petrol has had on the quality of our air. It is estimated that as many as 5,000 people in the USA alone died every year from lead-related heart disease prior to leaded petrol’s phase-out in 1986.
One study claimed that lead pollution damaged the intelligence of 10% of British children, rising to 17% in USA and it was conservatively estimated that a total of about 68 million young children had toxic exposures to lead from gasoline between 1927 and 1987.
It’s hard to credit any one person with the invention of the cigarette but prices fell sharply after American inventor James A. Bonsack patented a machine to roll cigarettes in 1880 which speeded up and made the process more commercially attractive.
Cigarette smoking has been until recently the single most preventable cause of premature death in the United States today. Each year, more than 400,000 Americans die from cigarette smoking. In fact, one in every five deaths in the United States is smoking related. Every year, smoking kills more than 276,000 men and 142,000 women. ‘Why is it still going on?’ I hear you say. Well, let’s consider the money involved!
Over 6 million tons of commercial tobacco are grown each year. Leading tobacco-growing countries are China, Brazil, India, the United States, Zimbabwe and Turkey. Tobacco is an economically important crop for many nations—more than 2 million tons of tobacco leaf, at a value of more than $6 billion, are exported each year worldwide.
So the precedent for slowly murdering people on a commercial scale for the sake of profit was set by the tobacco industry during the last two centuries. Also invented in the 20th century was the equation to balance tax revenue against tax expenditure on health and popularity (votes) as governments began to weigh up the effects of banning this lethal substance.
The generally held belief of those knowledgeable on this subject is that the meager difference between the tax dollars/pounds received by western governments against expenditure on tobacco-related illness was insignificant enough for votes and reduced pension expenditure to have been the deciding factors for most if not all of modern governments’ lack of enthusiasm for a complete ban on tobacco.
So then let’s look at what man has come up with to make all that went before seem like a tea party.
In 1973 Dr Martin Cooper was responsible - again unintentionally - for the invention that would make Thomas Midgley Jr (leaded petrol) James A. Bonsack (cigarette manufacturing machine) look like armatures in the field of unintentional exponents of mass destruction when he made the first-ever phone call on a mobile phone. That first call, placed to Cooper's rival at AT&T's Bell Labs from the streets of New York City, caused a fundamental technology and communications market shift toward the person and away from the place. Not that many years later Vodafone (name derived from voice and data phone)was born at a time when almost no one had access to or any understanding of computing/data and then, the now the unstoppable march towards a completely wireless voice and data world was on.
Amazingly, it was 19 years from 1973 before someone in the US government asked the ‘Is this technology safe?’ question and Dr George Carlo was handed $28 million dollars to find out. It took Carlo five years to find out that it definitely was not safe but by 1997 with already 30% of US pensions reliant on the mobile phone industry and the US FDA and government in general suspiciously entangled with the industry, it was too late and the western world continued on a path towards destruction the like and scale of which has never been seen before and I include World War Two in that statement.
When Carlo presented his findings to the US government, they included his estimations of 500,000 US citizens a year by 2010 contracting cancer and 25% of the population by 2014 as a direct result of mobile phone abuse. Wirelessfacts.co.uk believe this is a gross underestimation (see... dectphones and wireless networks). Carlo and his family were threatened physically, his finances were threatened, one of his homes was burned down and the fire brigade suspected arson.
One of the things Carlo was supposed to ratify was SAR (specific absorption rates) based on thermal effects as a method or guideline for handset safety. This, like the ICNIRP guidelines for mobile phone mast safety, as Carlo discovered, was completely the wrong issue to look at. |
