The Invisible Rainbow, by Arthur Firstenberg: Book Review
Very good scholarly book. These books that try to be both hard-core science AND have public appeal are tricky to write. AF did a very good job.
The basic premise - man-made electromagnetic pollution is very bad for our health, and bad for the health of many plants and animals. Firstenberg does not really entertain alternative causes, but that would have made the book three times longer.
Does he back up that argument? You bet. The references at the back span about 150 pages. And a great percentage of those references are peer reviewed scientific publications from government and private researchers.
What specific evidence is there about the ill effects of radio, radar, microwaves, cell phones? Plenty.
You might already know that the telecom companies have funded lots of studies that show there is no harm. So, of course, you can choose sides and be justified. That being said, the US Navy & the Russian scientific community have published a steady stream of reports clearly showing the harm; and it is only the telecom-funded studies that show no harm. But I am not going to get into that argument here. What I will point out that surprised me, again, from published studies
* Our various radio waves (cell phones, microwaves, radar, etc) can be used to give people diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. Yup, you heard that right. I also learned that these diseases were very, very rare before electricity & electric communication started.
* The symptoms of anxiety, depression, ADHD, that we in the West label psychological, can also be created in people using these various forms of radio frequencies. This was known back in the late 1800's. The single largest spike in reported diabetes cases in the US occurred the very two years that all the cell phone towers went up in the US metropolitan areas.
One of the highlights of the book is his treatment of influenza, going back to the 1800's. Yes, there were severe outbreaks before the 1917-8 flu. And he does show that every major outbreak of influenza corresponded exactly to major increases in the electrification of the planet. Some might argue the "correlation does not imply causation", but when it happens five times in 100 years, what are the chances of that?
I was impressed by the studies over the past 100 years to show how quickly people infect each other during a flu outbreak - they do not. Yes, you heard that right. Go read the studies. People do not infect each other with the flu. The studies took snot from sick people and swabbed it into healthy people's eyes, nose, and throat. They had sick people sneeze into healthy people's faces. They even took the sick-snot and injected it into healthy people's blood! In no case did the healthy person get the flu. At the same time, people were getting the flu all over the country, the flu was spreading much faster than any railroad or horse travel could spread it. Of course those two facts fly completely in the face of all existing theories about the flu & viruses.
One other point of note is the bees. The poor bees have been suffering because of electricity since the mid 1800's. Many studies, many reports. Each time new forms of electrification and RF are introduced the bees die. The latest bee die-off is only the latest, and the most severe.
The section about human hearing is very interesting. You may have heard there is a "controversy" about those people who claim they can hear hums or other noises. There is actually no uncertainty here - there are simply some people who can hear RF, and many people who cannot. Firstenberg's does a good scholarly job of showing that hearing is primarily electrical (not chemical as the reigning models say), again using studies, data, reports. These people who hear hums & whistles are actually hearing RF, you can prove it by turning the RF on and off at random, and having the people report when they hear the hum or not. They do it easily.
The last part of the book is a barrage of all the ills being caused by cell phones, 4G, 5G, and the armies of satellites going into orbit that will be filling the entire electro-magnetic body of Mother Earth in a never ending torrent of life-destroying pulsed radiation. As I said up top, the industry has paid for sufficient studies showing no hazards, so anyone can argue both sides. And in my experience, people have largely already made up their minds, so evidence does not make much difference.
Overall, great book.