Cell phone towers cause ‘irreversible DNA damage’ in humans, according to a newly published peer-reviewed study.
The study, entitled ‘Human‑made electromagnetic fields: Ion forced‑oscillation and voltage‑gated ion channel dysfunction, oxidative stress and DNA damage (Review) published in the International Journal of Oncology by biophysicist Dimitris J. Panagopoulos et. al., warned that electromagnetic radiation from wireless technology damages DNA. This DNA damage causesinfertility, sterility, mutations and extinctions, and it explains the loss of biodiversity that we are currently experiencing on this planet.
Activistpost.com reports: DNA damage from wireless radiation is not a new discovery. It has been confirmed over and over by numerous scientists using a variety of experimental subjects and frequencies. But do observations in the laboratory translate into the same effects in the real world? If these scientists are correct, they must do. In the real-world things might be a lot worse, because in the real world we are not exposed to a single frequency or bandwidth but to a whole soup of them, from multiple sources. In the real world, exposure time is not limited to a few minutes or hours per day or week; the cell towers are on day and night. DNA damage from wireless radiation is not a laboratory phenomenon; it is real. We are losing the insects—among them, the pollinators. We are losing the birds. Animals are dying out. We are wiping ourselves out.
The damage to DNA, says Panagopoulos, is being done by the Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) components of the wavebands used in wireless communications. For decades, regulatory bodies such as ICNIRP, SCENIHR (EU), the FCC (USA) and others have insisted that the only way wireless technology can cause damage is by heating tissue, and that the power levels which are allowed protect us from being harmed. This is not true for human beings, and these regulatory bodies have never even considered nature.
Is DNA damage from wireless radiation visible? There have probably been DNA-damaged plants, insects, birds, animals, and people since the first generation of cell towers was erected, but would we recognize what we are seeing? A 2003 study performed by a pair of scientists from the University of Thessaloniki, Greece, studied the effects of exposure to electromagnetic fields on mice exposed at various sites around an antenna park. The newborn mice weighed more than normal newborn mice, and they all had extra vertebrae in the posterior sections of their spines, making them longer than normal mice. This is DNA damage. The mother mice, the dams, produced fewer—and bigger—babies with each litter, and after six months they became irreversibly sterile. This is also DNA damage.
A mouse runs by in a field; would you know that its spine is ever so slightly longer than it should be? I wouldn’t. Would you recognize that a great tit’s eggs are ever so slightly bigger than they ought to be? I wouldn’t. A study of great tits found that birds which made nests near power lines laid bigger eggs with a higher volume of yolk and albumen. That too is DNA damage, and this damaged DNA will be passed on. unless the bird becomes sterile as did the mice in the antenna park study described above.
In 2006, Spanish biologist Alfonso Balmori wrote4that amphibians were the most seriously endangered creatures on the planet, and a great many of them were grossly deformed, with missing or extra limbs. Balmori ascribed this to interference with embryogenesis during development—in other words, developmental damage. This problem began after 1995 in many parts of the world (about the time that mobile phones started to become popular and cell towers started going up everywhere) and Balmori argued that electromagnetic radiation from wireless technology was, at the very least, a major contributing factor. The rate of deformity jumped to 25% in some populations, and such deformities were found even in pristine places such as national parks where pesticides and other pollutants could be excluded as the cause.
DNA damage doesn’t always cause deformities. It can affect living creatures in a great many ways, some of them invisible or unnoticeable. Numerous studies have shown that wireless radiation causes both impaired fertility and sterility, but you can’t see these with the naked eye; you’d have to autopsy the creature’s sexual organs. What we do notice is the results of infertility and sterility: a decrease in egg-laying or live births; a decline in the numbers of a given population until the species in question becomes extinct. This is what is happening to the fireflies, the bees, the beetles—indeed to all the insects. This is what is happening to the birds and to other, mostly small creatures. The rise in the number of people seeking help from fertility clinics says this is happening to us, too.
Insects and birds are declining rapidly worldwide. It’s no good trying to throw all the blame on pesticides or other chemical toxins, because there are still enough places in the world where pesticides and other such poisons are not in the environment, such as where I live. If pesticides were the problem, we wouldn’t be seeing huge declines in insect and bird populations here, and particularly not in the area where I live. But we do have one source of man-man pollution in our environment, and it is both mutagenic and genotoxic: electromagnetic radiation (EMR). We are surrounded by cell towers, and insect, bird and animal populations are plummeting here, too. EMR from the cell towers is causing DNA and developmental damage in insects, plants and other creatures. This damage is becoming, not just visible, but all too obvious.
DNA and Developmental Damage in Insects Observed on Samos, Summer of 2023
When 4G came in, we saw big declines in many species of insects, among them fireflies and certain types of spiders, which seemed to vanish overnight. And it was after 4G came in that in one area of our property we started to see carrion flies with damaged wings. Some of these flies had deformed wings, some had vestigial wings, and some had no wings at all. For generation after generation, they have bred and produced more flies with the same defects. By now, the number of carrion flies in this area has fallen dramatically. See the picture below for an example:
Carrion fly with deformed wings. |
There ought to have been carrion flies, as well as bluebottles and greenbottles, on the corpse of the baby jackal I found late last summer. These flies lay eggs in open orifices to begin the process of decomposition, which however unpleasant, is necessary. We don’t know what killed the little jackal, though a spot of blood on one foreleg suggests he might have encountered a poisonous snake. But there were no flies or any other insects buzzing around the little corpse, only a stream of tiny ants making their way to and from the open eyes. Where are these flies? We have seen very few of any of them lately.
Other than sterility, which is invisible to the naked eye, we have noticed four kinds of DNA damage and/or developmental abnormalities to insects where we live: damaged wings, deformity, miniaturization and a marked change in the ratio of males to females. It is not possible to tell DNA damage from developmental abnormality with the naked eye; you would have to take tissue samples and do DNA sequences on them. Both types of damage can produce deformations so bad that the creature cannot breed. But there is one clear difference: DNA damage produces heritable mutations; damage passes on from one generation to the next. The carrion flies which have passed damaged wings on to many successive generations are a good example of DNA damage; the defect has not prevented them from breeding, though numbers have severely declined.
Damage to wings is the most common visible problem in flying insects. It didn’t use to be a common phenomenon. Since childhood I have watched many insects hatch and always marveled at the miracle that turns incredibly fragile, crumpled wet balls of tissue into smooth, perfect organs of flight. The miracle almost never failed. These days, it often does. In some cases this defect could be developmental damage. Most insects that hatch with damaged wings do not survive to breed, like the Eastern Festoon butterfly pictured below. There were hardly any of these butterflies last spring, and many of the spring and summer butterflies were altogether missing. Butterflies have declined rapidly since the introduction of 5G on Samos.
Eastern Festoon with severely deformed wings |
Among our most common summer butterflies are the Swallowtail and the Scarce Swallowtail. Both of these butterflies are large and pretty, and they love the zinnias that we plant around our vegetable beds. However, the last generation of Scarce Swallowtails that we saw all had wing damage. One (usually the left) of the long tails was incomplete, ending in a point below the wing. One butterfly’s left tail, though of normal length, had an area that was so narrow it could not support the white disc at the end, which flopped about as it flew.
Compare the picture of the normal Scarce Swallowtail (below) with the one beside it. I wasn’t able to photograph any of the damaged Scarce Swallowtails in the garden, but I did find a dead one which displayed the type of damage I am talking about. The left-hand tail, at the base of the wing near the body, is vestigial. The right-hand wing had a normal tail, which broke off after the butterfly died. It is not a good picture, but the left-hand tail is not broken; it is tiny and deformed.
Normal Scarce Swallowtail (left) versus deformed Scarce Swallowtail (right). Note the tiny tail on the inside of the left lower wing. |
We have also seen deformities to scorpion tails. The big one got away before I could photograph it, but I later found a little one (one of its babies?) nearby with the same deformity, which suggests that the trait was passed on. The tails of these scorpions were very small and thin in proportion to the rest of their bodies.
The scorpion on the left’s tail is too small for its body. Compare this with a normal scorpion tail in the picture on the right.
The scorpion on the left’s tail is too small for its body. Compare this with a normal scorpion tail in the picture on the right. |
Deformity of body parts is not the only kind of DNA damage we are seeing in insects. This past summer two species of insects, swallowtail butterflies and carpenter bees, produced a brood of miniature versions of themselves. The last brood of swallowtail butterflies that hatched contained many butterflies that were much smaller than normal—between half and two-thirds the size of the normal insect. Unfortunately, I was not able to photograph a normal size butterfly together with a miniature, which is the only way to show how much smaller some of them were. The miniature butterflies did not appear to have any other defects. We have not had any more swallowtails since then (and I think we should have as they usually produce three broods). I wonder what will happen next year.
A normal swallowtail (left) has a wingspan of 6.5-7.6 cm. A carpenter bee (right) is a big insect—2.5- 3 cm. |
The other species that produced miniature versions of itself was carpenter bees. Again, the miniature versions appeared to be perfect, but they were between half and two-thirds the size of the normal carpenter bee. They were not a different species. There is a smaller species of carpenter bee, but the edges of its wings are whitish (these were not) and we don’t have it here. As with the swallowtails, we haven’t had any carpenter bees on this land since, though they should still be around and we have seen one or two elsewhere.
Is this type of damage happening to people too? A neighbor of ours had a baby that was born at eight months (which is considered full-term) and weighed only 900 grams (about two pounds) at birth. “He was so small he fit into one hand,” his mother told me. He was initially treated as a premature infant but is now a normal, healthy child—though he is still very small for his age and will probably always be. I don’t know if this is happening with other children. I asked a doctor at our local hospital but such statistics, even if recorded, would probably not be collated.
A fourth type of what is likely DNA damage is a marked change in the ratio of male to female insects. We have so few insects these days, and it is impossible to see, in many species, whether an insect is male or female. But we really noticed a difference in the ratio of male to female insects when the Scarlet Darter dragonflies arrived in October. With these colorful insects it is easy to tell the sex: the males are bright red, and the females are greenish yellow. Normally, there are about half males and half females. This year, there were far, far more females than males. One day in particular almost every dragonfly I saw was female; I estimated 100 females to one male.
DNA damage does not necessarily produce mutants. Sterility is the most likely outcome of serious DNA damage, because nature does not want to pass on disadvantageous traits to future generations. And sterility is only evident in the disappearance of species; they cannot breed, so they go extinct. If this is the gauge, then most of the insects we used to have must have become sterile, for most of them have died out and become—at least locally—extinct. We have lost almost all species of beetles, lacewing and other flies, most of the moths (and all the larger moths except for a few humming-bird moths), many butterflies, virtually all wasps and hornets, and many species of wild bees including wild honeybees. There are almost no mantises, no katydids, and very few grasshoppers and crickets. There are a few slugs, but no snails. There are very few woodlice, earwigs, millipedes, centipedes or silverfish, and very few web-spinning spiders. No species of insect remains unaffected; all species have either declined or vanished altogether, including soil insects such as earthworms (we have only seen two this year) grubs (none) and even ants. When the queens hatched after the first rain, there were very few of these flying ants compared to other years—a few dozen compared to hundreds. Many plants are not being pollinated properly.
(Article by Sean Adl-Tabatabai republished from ThePeoplesVoice.tv)