This article originally appeared in the August 24, 2021, edition of Spirit of Change Magazine.
Please join us on December 5th at 12 noon ET for BioBites when Cecilia Doucette will be our guest presenter speaking on “EMF Safety in a Wireless World.”
Published August 24, 2021 by CAROL BEDROSIAN, SPIRIT OF CHANGE MAGAZINE
While I’ve shared articles and reports for several years in Spirit of Change about the dangers of 5G technology, smart meters, and cell phones, I have to admit I’ve also harbored my share of tinfoil hat uneasiness. How can cell phones and wireless mobility be a bad thing? However, I feel a deep compassion for those clearly suffering from an invisible and inescapable attacker in the form of electromagnetic radiation sensitivity — the canaries in the coal mine — as the source of their illness is still a mystery to the general public.
I was shocked to discover in 2017 when my daughter had surgery to remove a brain tumor from behind her right eye/ear, that at least a dozen of these benign meningiomas (the majority from young adults) were removed weekly in just that one hospital! Didn’t brain tumor used to be a rare diagnosis?
Reports that cell phones cause brain cancer have circulated since cell phones first appeared, and along with them the denials. Wireless technology has brought unparalleled convenience, communication, and mobility into our lives. No one wants to give those things up.
At the same time, its domineering presence has blunted our awareness to people, places and things outside the device box. And, now, as we are discovering, the EMF radiation emitted by wireless technology is blunting our mental and physical health as well. 24/7 connectivity might not be so healthy for humans after all, even though the much-hyped 5G rollout in our lives is touted as the fastest, the clearest, the best super highway of communications ever, which is supposed to be a good thing, right?
No one could imagine in the 40s, 50s, or 60s that cigarettes could be bad for your health. Doctors smoked, dentists smoked, everyone smoked! Or in the 70s that lead in water pipes, paint and gasoline could be that much of a problem. But they were. First people had to become educated about these problems, and then choose new behaviors.
We are faced with exactly this type of watershed moment right now regarding the use of wireless technology in our lives. Should we go all in for the convenience a fully wired future can provide or are there some inconvenient truths about 5G and wireless technology we need to know about first?
Cecelia (Cece) Doucette spent eight years fundraising to bring wireless technology into her schools. Then she learned it was harmful, investigated the non-industry funded science, and helped her children’s schools in the Ashland, Massachusetts School District become the first in the nation to take precautionary measures with wireless technology in 2015.
Since then, Cece has educated, legislated and tirelessly advocated to bring to light the dangers of wireless technology by exposing the thousands of suppressed studies, expert testimonies, and voices of those suffering from EMF sickness. She established Massachusetts for Safe Technology to bring communities together on this vital issue, and works with schools, communities, municipalities and legislatures to address wireless radiation and public health.
She is also the Education Services Director with the international non-profit Wireless Education, which offers affordable 30-minute online training programs specifically for Schools & Families and Corporate Safety Induction. She has been featured on Genius of Wellness, Boston25 News, O’Dwyer’s, EMF Warriors, and in the films “Generation Zapped” and “Wi-Fi Refugees.”
Blending her expert skills in technical writing with a passionate dedication to motivating others, Cece has successfully mobilized an EMF awareness movement in both public discourse and New England state legislatures. Like lead and asbestos and cigarettes and trans fats before it, we still have time to protect public health, but only if we identify wireless technology as a problem now and take steps to remediate it.
CAROL BEDROSIAN: What is EMF? What is 5G?
CECE DOUCETTE: To put it in simple terms, EMF stands for the electromagnetic fields of radio frequency, the radiation that comes out of everything wireless. Some find it easier to talk about this in terms of it being microwave radiation, which it is. While I know that can be startling to those who are first learning about this, when we look at something called the electromagnetic spectrum, which shows us the waves and the wavelengths that are carrying our data back and forth, all of this wireless technology does fall into the microwave segment of the electromagnetic spectrum. That’s probably as technical as we need to get, but it just shows how fast these waves are coming at us and how long they are. As we move up the range into 5G, which simply means fifth generation technology, those wavelengths are getting shorter and shorter, so they’re coming at us as faster and faster pulses. It’s that pulsing that the science shows is really biologically destructive.
CAROL BEDROSIAN: What kind of science are you referring to?
CECE DOUCETTE: Well, we wouldn’t know it, but there are literally thousands of peer-reviewed, published, scientific studies that show great biological harm. I think the reason we don’t hear about it is because we used to have maybe 50 or more mainstream media outlets in the U.S. Over recent years, we’ve seen that many sources for investigative journalists have been bought up by the very companies that are promoting these toxic wireless products and infrastructures. So, we don’t actually get true investigative journalism on this issue anymore because our journalists and their network executives can’t afford to bite the hand that feeds them. But when you do a little bit of investigation — I know when I did — I was just completely astounded to find literally thousands of peer-reviewed studies that link the constant pulsing of this radiation to long-term effects such as cancers and DNA damage, and DNA is the roadmap to grow anything from humans to plants, to animals. This affects not just us, but every living cell in our world.
There are thousands of peer-reviewed studies that link the constant pulsing of this radiation to long-term effects such as cancers and DNA damage. This affects not just us, but every living cell in our world.
Dr. Martha Herbert, who founded the autism program at Massachusetts General Hospital, has identified huge correlations between what we know scientifically happens with this microwave radiation exposure and what she sees among the children and the families for whom she cares. ADHD is linked into that, and we know scientifically that electromagnetic radiation is both neurotoxic and an immune suppressant. As we live here now in this era of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s not just about that virus. It’s about doing everything we can as individuals to strengthen our own immune system and remove the wireless radiation.
One of the long-term impacts that really got my attention when I started investigating this around 2012/2013, was when I started reading the reproductive science studies. They’ve taken male human sperm and exposed it to a laptop with the antennas turned on, and it changed the DNA. It slowed the motility, and it caused far fewer sperm to be viable with just four hours of wireless exposure. And we had just given our youngest daughter a laptop to go into high school with. Of course, where was she using it, but right on top of her reproductive organs.
That was the day that I found my voice and started speaking up to my schools. Long-term effects aside, what the science also shows is that a lot of people are currently suffering from microwave sickness symptoms, but they would never think to consider whether it’s connected to the exposure from their wireless technology. Microwave sicknesses can also be called electromagnetic sensitivities. For those who think this may all be psychological, our own government already recognizes electrical sensitivities through the Americans With Disabilities Act, although it provides little protection.
Of the symptoms that people are experiencing right now, one of the biggest is sleep issues. The insomnia, the nightmares, night terrors — again, this is a neurotoxin. The science indicates this affects our sleep in the wee hours of darkness. The pineal gland in the brain is meant to release melatonin, which regulates our sleep. It also helps to escort the toxins of the day out of our body, through the bloodstream. What the science is showing us is that this light energy form of microwave radiation — it’s invisible — but it’s still pulsing all night, and our brain perceives that. The brain thinks that the lights are on and it never gets to the wee hours of darkness. And the brain doesn’t release the melatonin from the pineal gland. Then we have this whole downstream effect that starts happening when we don’t get good sleep.
One of the other things that the science has indicated as a mechanism of harm is something called the Rouleaux effect. The way I remember it is when I was a kid, I used to love eating the candies called Rolos — those little caramel chocolates that come in a sleeve that are all stacked up together. Well, that’s kind of what’s happening with our blood. For some people, when they’re exposed to this radio frequency radiation, and then you look at their blood under a microscope, those red blood cells that are meant to be free-floating and oxygenating all of our biological systems are starting to magnetize and clump together like a row of these Rolos. Once you’ve got this whole glomming chain going on, the red blood cells can’t get to where they need to be oxygenating properly. It’s no wonder that so many people get headaches and nosebleeds and nausea and dizziness and anxiety.
Another effect we see is in a controlled medical setting. We know that we can use this radiofrequency radiation technology in a really positive way to stimulate stem cells, to stimulate bone cell growth. But in this now ubiquitous way that we have immersed our society in electrosmog, we have no control, we have no break unless we know how to mindfully assess what the exposures are in our environment and remove or reduce the exposures. This gives our bodies a break, which is especially during the sleeping hours; otherwise, we never get a chance to recover and repair from some of those symptoms — the headaches, the insomnia, the nosebleeds, the nausea, the dizziness.
Dr. Pal Pacher and some of his colleagues have done studies that show we have membranes in our body, including our brain, that are meant to protect sensitive areas from toxins getting in as they’re being escorted out of the body through the blood. What the science shows is that our blood brain barrier is meant to protect our brain from toxins, but when we’re exposed to this radio frequency microwave radiation, it can permeate that blood-brain barrier. As toxins are traveling through our blood on their way out of the body, they can take a turn and go into these sensitive tissues in our brain.
Even before the pandemic, we were literally at epidemic proportions of anxiety and depression in our country, and especially among children, no less. And what did we do during the pandemic? We gave every student, every child, a wireless device with absolutely no safe technology training. If we’re seeing those numbers escalate, if we’re seeing more and more children develop anxiety and depression and panic attacks and suicidal ideation, we really need to take a hard look environmentally at what we’re doing to our children.
As we age our own cognitive abilities begin to decline a little bit. The science also shows that this constant pulsing of microwave radiation causes cognitive impairments. So, for all ages, we need to be very careful and choose to have safe technology. Safe technology is not rocket science. We had it about 10 years ago when we used to run all of our data signals through wires and cables.
In my house, for example, when I fell down the rabbit hole with this issue, I didn’t have anybody I could talk to. And I certainly didn’t want to believe that there was anything wrong with wireless, so I kind of circled my tail for a few months as I investigated the science. But once I really looked at what this radiation is doing to us, I plucked up enough courage to say, not in my house. I have a family and it’s my job to protect them. One of the first things I did was I looked at all those cordless phones — and I had probably five of them all over my house — because I had learned that is like your own private little cell tower sitting there pulsing 24/7 all day, all night. How many of us have those on our nightstands with the base station pulsing all night long? I eventually replaced those with ones that plug right into the phone and a jack in the wall, and then you have a safe landline.
The next thing that I did was I started looking at our computing technology at home. I’m a technical writer, and my tool is my PC. Fortunately, it was already hardwired, running through an Ethernet cable and plugged into the Ethernet jack in the wall. And my printer was already hooked up to my computer using another cable, so I just had to go into the printer settings and turn off all the wireless antennas. Then I went down to a box I had in the basement where my old keyboard and mouse were, and I just plugged in my old wired keyboard and mouse, and then I had perfectly safe technology.
At some point, my computer must have been through a software update and there was a little WiFi signal that popped up on my computer screen. So, I just went into the settings on my computer, found where that wireless symbol was coming from, and I turned it off. It’s a two-step process. You have to plug everything back in to hardwire it, and then you have to go into your device and turn off those wireless antennas.
For people who are starting fresh, the first thing they might want to do is go to wherever their router is and look at the back of the router. You’ll see that there are jacks there for Ethernet cables; that’s how you get started. You buy Ethernet cables. You might need to buy one big, long one. My router is down in the basement. So, you would run the cables up the walls with an electrician into whatever rooms you use technology, and then put a jack in the wall. Look for a shielded Ethernet cable, for as long as whatever length you need to reach your devices. I say shielded because another form of electromagnetic field is dirty electricity. In our building codes here in the U.S., when you do a commercial build, they have to use shielded Ethernet cable, but in residential areas they don’t have to use shielded cables, which is unfortunate.
Shielding means there’s a foil liner inside that Ethernet cable; what the foil liner does is prevent the electric field and the magnetic field from your electricity and your technology from bleeding out into the room. For people who become electrically sensitive, oftentimes they can feel that electromagnetic field coming off the wires in their homes. If you’re going to buy any internet cable, get a shielded Ethernet cable.
When my daughter got to the age where she was going off to college, in her second year she got an apartment and I sent her a kit that would allow her to hardwire in her apartment. I sent her a 50 foot Ethernet cable and Ethernet switch box. She plugged in the long Ethernet cable to the switch box, and then two short cables, both of them shielded — one for her cell phone and one for her laptop. You can buy these little adapters for $20 or $30 that allow you to hardwire your cell phone, your laptop, your tablet or whatever it is that you use. I know it’s not your typical care package you’d send to your college student, but I threw some chocolate in there, too.
I said, “Take a picture and let me know you’ve got it done.” She did me one better and videotaped from her living room where the router was. She showed me how she had taped down the long Ethernet cable from the living room through the kitchen, her hallway and into the bedroom. Then she showed me how she had plugged in the other end of the long Ethernet cable to the switch box and then plugged in the two short cables for her devices. Then she hooked those up using those little adapters. Once her devices were hard-wired, she went into her cell phone and her MacBook and she turned off all the antennas.
When I was first teaching her about this, she was in high school and, you know, she wasn’t crazy to hear about it. When you’re 15, you want to be just like every other kid, and you certainly don’t want to be the kid of the mom who’s figuring out that wireless is harmful. She was a little reluctant to follow along with me as I was figuring this out. But here we were, hardwiring her new apartment. After she went into her settings and turned everything off, I said, “Okay, do something and see if it’s working.” And she goes, “Oh my gosh, Mom, it’s so much faster!”
CAROL BEDROSIAN: How do you hardwire a cell phone? Doesn’t this mean you cannot move away from the plug-in?
CECE DOUCETTE: That’s a great question, Carol, because one of the things we need to adjust in our minds is the convenience factor. Right now, I’m talking to you on a land line. I can’t get up and walk all over the house with that, so I’ve adjusted my behavior. With a cell phone you get to make the choice: Do I want to expose myself to radio frequency radiation for the convenience of walking around with it, or do I want to set up new behavior patterns where, maybe in my living room, I have an Ethernet cable hooked up with the adapter that goes to my cell phone?
Most of what kids do today on their phones is not making phone calls. Mostly what kids are doing is connecting with their friends and their social media outlet through the internet. And anything that you can do on the internet, you can do through a hardwired connection. What you can also do with your cell phone is forward your calls to a land line, or you can plug your phone right in and use the internet through a cable.
It’s freeing not to be tethered to your cell phone all the time. It’s so unhealthy for our central nervous system to be constantly at the beck and call of that little ping that’s coming in, somebody is looking for you. They want something from you and they want it now. It’s just not a healthy way to live our lives. We’ve been on this all-WiFi-all-the-time honeymoon that the industry has perpetuated. And now with a little bit of education, we can say, “Hmm, there are some choices to be made here. Is it really good for me to be on a device in front of a screen all the time, or knowing what I know now or do I want to start taking my life back and taking control over what is important to me in my life, instead of just being at the beck and call of that device all the time?”
Do I want to start taking my life back and taking control over what is important to me in my life, instead of just being at the beck and call of that device all the time?
I realize that wireless radiation harm comes out of left field for most people, especially when you’re talking with professionals like engineers and physicists, even doctors, nurses, technologists, most have only been taught that you have to have heat from a device before there can be any biological risk. That’s because when our Federal Communications Commission set the public radiation exposure limits, they set them based on this thermal factor of heat. What the science is showing is you don’t have to have heat in order to have harm. So, we have these radiation exposure safety limits that are really high, and the industry can keep pumping out all these infrastructure solutions and personal devices that are throwing off an incredible amount of these microwave pulses. Yet the science is showing that the harm is happening biologically at hundreds of thousands of times below what the FCC is allowing as safe.
There was a federal docket opened up in 2012 or 2013, where the Government Accountability Office indicated to the FCC that we need to reassess what our exposure limits are. So, the FCC opened up a docket and scientists and doctors and the public who have become ill from this, or who have lost loved ones from the glioblastoma brain tumors or acoustic neuromas or thyroid cancers, or who are just simply suffering day by day from microwave sicknesses, they all put their testimony into this docket, literally hundreds upon hundreds. They left that docket open for six years while the public got more and more saturated in this microwave radiation. And then at the end of the day, they closed their docket in 2019, and summarized that we don’t really need to change any of these radiation exposure limits. Once that ruling was put into something called the Federal Register, it was officially filed, and then the lawsuits began.
There’s an incredible group of doctors and scientists at the Environmental Health Trust. Their founder, Dr. Devra Davis, is a Nobel Peace Prize Co-Laureate on climate change. She’s been on this issue for years and has figured out what this wireless issue is. She and her executive director, Theodora Scarato, sued the FCC. And at the same time, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense also sued the FCC for neglecting the science. Those two law suits were combined in the federal court and they printed out all of this scientific evidence that was given to the FCC. There were 11,000 pages of testimony that were given to three federal judges in 27 volumes of binders.
They had oral arguments this past January [2021] in front of these judges. After the folks suing the industry had their oral arguments, then the FCC gave their oral arguments. One of the judges indicated he was inclined to rule against the FCC. A judge almost never says that during oral arguments. He asked the FCC attorneys what due diligence they did to come to the conclusion that we don’t need to update the public radiation exposure limits. The FCC said the Food and Drug Administration said those limits are fine. So, the judge asked what due diligence the FDA did to come to that conclusion.
I think they’re going to be hard pressed to come up with anything there because two decades ago the FDA commissioned the U.S. National Toxicology Program, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, to do a study to see if cell phones were harmful. Twenty years ago, cell phones were using 2G and 3G, which is second and third generation technology. For two decades they conducted this study on rodents, and then they had an unprecedented three-day peer-review at the National Institutes of Health with world-leading experts whose life’s work is to investigate microwave radiation.
At the end of that three-day peer review, the National Toxicology Program wrote their final report, and in it they concluded clear evidence of cancerous tumors and DNA damage. Clear evidence is the highest of five categories that they can assign to an investigation; so, one might ask if the NTP is telling us, there’s clear evidence of cancerous tumors and DNA damage, why didn’t they take that and translate it into public policy to protect the public?
Well, there’s somebody new heading up that portion of the FDA, and it’s a Dr. Jeffrey Shuren. When you dig around a little bit, you discover that Dr. Shuren is married to a woman who is a partner in a law firm that represents the wireless industry. There’s a huge conflict of interest with Dr. Jeffrey Shuren. Then, when you look to see who’s running the FCC these days, we see additional conflicts of interest; Ajit Pai, who was the FCC chairman at the time that this NTP study came out, used to be a senior lawyer for Verizon.
And his predecessor was Tom Wheeler. Tom Wheeler used to be the head of the Cellular Telephone Industry Association, which rebranded to call itself CTIA — the Wireless Association. And before that, he was the head of the cable association. Way back in the nineties, a woman died of brain tumors, and her husband or oncologist got on “Larry King Live” to describe her unique case because her tumors were on the side of her brain where they lined up with the antennas in her cell phone instead of developing somewhere in the middle of the brain. When this came out on “Larry King Live,” it became a public relations nightmare for the wireless industry.
So, the industry leaders stepped up and said, “This is horrible. We’ve got the funding. Let us do a study and see what this is all about.” They partnered with our government and they hired Dr. George Carlo, who put a team of about 200 scientists in place. They investigated for a couple of years, and at the end of their investigation, they reported back to the head of the wireless industry that the cell phone likely did kill that woman, and children are especially vulnerable because their systems are still under development.
And at that point in time back in the 90’s, rather than invoking the precautionary principle, which would lead us to get to as low as reasonably achievable with any kind of radiation, they buried Dr. Carlo’s findings. The gentleman who commissioned that study was none other than Tom Wheeler, who years later became the chairman of the FCC. So, we have huge conflict of interest with our federal agencies in the industry. And now that the industry and their parent companies have bought up all of our mainstream media, we don’t hear about wireless radiation risks. But it doesn’t take long to identify the science; it is readily available once you know how to look for it.
On this journey here in Massachusetts, I’ve had the privilege of connecting with others across the state who were also figuring this out, and may have a loved one who became ill or somebody in their family who died of the brain tumors or other cancers that develop over time. So, we have formed an organization under the umbrella of a nonprofit called Massachusetts for Safe Technology. Anybody is welcome to go www.ma4safetech.org and poke around there. If you sign up on the website, you’ll receive notices when there are actions you can take to help transition our communities to safe technology
What we’re doing at the state level is having meetings with the legislature. We have 11 bills that are directly sponsored by legislators this session, and there’s a handful of others that were introduced by constituents. We have bills to form a commission to get the right minds at the state level to the table and investigate this issue. We have a bill that would require every energy company to give rate payers the right to refuse the utility smart meters, because those meters that they’re swapping out on our homes for water, gas, electric, and now, solar, pulse this radiation into our homes 24/7. Anybody who’s on the other side of that wall — a pregnant woman, a baby or a child, an elderly person, or anybody with any kind of a health compromise, is especially vulnerable.
All the rest of us are vulnerable to this radio frequency as well. But with no informed consent, they’re swapping out these meters on our homes that used to have working, safe analog meters that the meter readers came to read every month, and then do our billing. We don’t need to have those new devices pulsing at us thousands of times a day; let them pulse once a month for the reading.
Instead, what the industry is doing is data harvesting. They’re harvesting our patterns, and now they’re pushing 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT) so that every product that we bring home will have a radio frequency transmitter in it. They’re harvesting our data to capture our usage patterns on our personal private devices, which for those who care about privacy raises a huge red flag. But for those who care about our health, as well, every time you buy a new television set or a new appliance, it may have a wireless antenna in it. Or goodness, the potty seat to potty train your child, they’re now encouraging you to hook up an iPad to it, so your kid can sit there and potty train and play on a computer that’s radiating them. If we want technology, we can have all the technology we want, but it should be hardwired and skip the wireless.
We have a bill that’s been around for several sessions to get our Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to start protecting the kids in school. We have testified before the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education on a number of occasions, too. I sat with the interim commissioner one day and said, “Are you guys doing anything to protect our kids?” And he said, “We’re waiting for higher authorities.” And I said, “I actually wrote EMF fact sheets with our Department of Public Health at the state level back in 2016, and I was told that they would be released to the public in three months.” Here we are in 2021, five years later, and they have never seen the light of day.
Dr. Joel Moskowitz is the director of the Center for Family and Community Health for the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley, and he tried to get that fact sheet released too. The Department of Public Health would not release it to him, so He went to the Boston Globe editor and they reported on it. Then, instead of issuing the fact-based EMF guidance, the DPH put up an EMF page on the state’s Radiation Control website pointing to false information posted by our captured federal agencies. Earlier, Dr. Moskowitz got some lawyers at Berkeley to do pro bono work for him, and he had to sue the California Department of Public Health in order for them to release a similar public health fact sheet written in 2009. That lawsuit was in December of 2017. It should have been front page news all over our world — that cell phones bring risks — and while some of the local outlets in California covered it, generally it was suppressed by mainstream corporate media.
CAROL BEDROSIAN: It’s more than just a health risk. It’s a huge behavior change. Think about when people had to give up smoking. Smoking was a huge part of our social culture. It took a long time when it was introduced as a health hazard before it was finally recognized as such and banned in places.
CECE DOUCETTE: That’s a great example because we did know for decades that smoking was hazardous, and it wasn’t until 1964, I think, when our Surgeon General finally held a press conference indicating that we need to take precautions around tobacco products. It’s another right to choose issue, but because we’re not giving the facts to the public, the public has no idea.
CAROL BEDROSIAN: Right. If people have this information, perhaps they would be more motivated to change, because many people do not like being slaves to their wireless devices, and would like to take control of their lives back again. There would be more incentive
CECE DOUCETTE: I think a lot of people sense that something is not right here, but because we only hear the industry messaging — more and better and faster — we just go with the flow on that. But once we get the opportunity to become educated, then we can take charge of our own usage.
I’ve had the privilege of connecting with many of the world’s leading scientists and doctors on this journey. There was a couple in Europe I was introduced to, Brett and Lynn West, who started doing some work on this issue, and recognized that we can’t fix it because people don’t know about it. You have to get the education out in front of people, so we formed a little nonprofit called wirelesseducation.org with one of the world’s leading bioelectromagnetic scientists, Dr. Mikko Ahonen of Finland. We’ve distilled this massive volume of science, the risks, what other countries are doing, and the medical best practices into courses that can be completed in about half an hour online.
We have a Schools and Families Course, and then we have a Corporate Safety Induction Course for the workplace. After you take this little course and answer some questions along the way to help reinforce important concepts, it will allow you to print out a certificate of completion. It also allows you to print out a handy tip sheet at the end with reminders of what the steps are you need to take to create a sleep sanctuary at home and other common sense reminders for transitioning to safe technology.
The one really bright shining light we have here in the U.S. came through a constituent, Deb Hodgdon, up in New Hampshire. She joined us for a screening in Massachusetts of an award winning film called “Generation Zapped,” where we hear from leading scientists and doctors, as well as people who have become ill from EMFs. Deb was just so grateful to be with others talking about EMFs because she had gotten to the point where she was nearly on her death bed. She had gone to her doctors and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong. She paid — as most people wind up doing — thousands of dollars out of pocket to go to specialists who can’t figure out where all these crazy symptoms are coming from, until somebody finally recognized that she had microwave sickness symptoms.
So, she took all the remediation measures and got wireless out of her living and work space. Then she began to re-inoculate her system and build up all the healthy things that had been depleted. When her State Representative came knocking on her door asking to be re-elected, she invited him into her home and shared what she had been through. Representative Patrick Abrami in New Hampshire is an engineer, and engineers are one of those groups who have been taught you have to have a lot of heat from a device before there can be any harm. She shared with him the non-thermal science evidence that shows harm, and Representative Patrick Abrami went back and actually did the deep dive. He started reading the peer-reviewed scientific literature, instead of just defaulting to whatever messaging the industry had been giving him.
Eventually, he had this major wow moment, like, “Wow, what are we doing here?” Then he wrote a bill to start addressing this. After we spent an afternoon at my kitchen table, I helped him to connect the dots further, and he went back and beefed up the language in his bill with very pointed questions. Like, why does the legal fine print of our devices tell us to keep them off of our bodies? Why have Lloyd’s of London and Swiss RE and other major insurers already recognized this as a leading risk and put exclusions in their policies that they will not cover damages from radio frequency or EMF? And then, why does the FCC ignore the science at the non-thermal level? And why do they allow more radiation, a hundred times more radiation to our public, than some other countries are doing? And why is nobody looking at the cumulative effect of this? What is happening to our kids when we put them in a classroom with 30 devices, beaming this radiation all over every child in that room, in addition to their personal devices, in addition to their wearables, in addition to the wireless access points in the ceiling? Nobody is looking at the cumulative effect.
Representative Abrami introduced that bill, and he asked me up to come up and testify along with a number of residents in New Hampshire, who understood this issue. A biologist testified to speak about the environmental impact it’s having on our birds and bees and plants. Dr. Paul Heroux drove down from Canada; he teaches electromagnetism in the medical school at McGill University.
And then there’s Frank Clegg. He’s the retired president of Microsoft Canada. He flew in on his own time and dime, and he testified. When he retired, he had heard enough being in the industry that he knew not to have wireless in his home, but he didn’t really understand what it meant. So, he started meeting with world-leading scientists and doctors globally, and when he returned, he said, “Our radiation limits in Canada and the U.S. here in North America are not safe.” Frank Clegg formed Canadians For Safe Technology, and he’s been up in Parliament trying to do what we’re doing here in the U.S., and that’s to get public policy that puts corporate profit behind public health. Because right now, corporate profits rule; what happens in public health is not even being addressed.
CAROL BEDROSIAN: You mentioned that 5G has a shorter wavelength. What we’re seeing with 5G installation is that the towers are located in residential neighborhoods and there are more of them. Why do they need to be so close? Does that have something to do with the short wavelengths?
CECE DOUCETTE: The way the industry is spinning up 5G, which by the way, technically hasn’t even been defined yet — every wireless provider is coming up with their own ways of doing this — we don’t have any standardization yet. They are just putting it out there and selling the heck out of it to get everybody’s mindset pre-conditioned that 5G is a great thing.
5G simply means fifth generation, but it’s not just a follow on to 3G and 4G. In fact, we still need 4G because it has the long wavelengths that can go through a building and connect with your devices indoors. All this cell infrastructure that we’ve already got with these big antennas on the cell towers called macro cell antennas that started in industrial parks 300 feet in the air, over the years we’ve seen them encroach closer and closer to where we live and work and play and go to school. (And if you can paint it the same color of a building, they’ll give the building owner a kickback to put up an antenna right on a building where people are on the other side of the wall or below rooftop antennas are getting sick.)
So, all that infrastructure stays. That’s the backbone for wireless, for 5G. With fifth generation, all that’s left of the wave are these crummy little millimeter waves, and they’re tiny. The industry is spinning it up that with all these new millimeter waves, we’ll be able to give you faster downloads and faster streaming and smart and super highways. But in order for 5G to fly, these little waves can’t go very far and they get disrupted by anything in their path. Their solution is to put new antennas, additional antennas, every two to 12 houses inside our neighborhoods at the curb in our public accessways. You see these things popping up on poles, literally right outside people’s bedrooms. And we see people getting sick from that. We see children getting sick from that, and they sit there pulsing 24/7.
What the industry did with the FCC, as they told our towns through some new rulings that they made, is that you can’t say anything, you can’t do anything, it’s coming and you have no legal recourse — which actually isn’t true, but our towns just roll over. Town lawyers are not experts in telecom law. But when you get a lawyer who is a telecom expert, they will tell you 20 different ways that your town can strengthen your town bylaws and codify it so that you do not have to roll over when the industry comes in with these applications.
I’ll give you an example right here in Burlington, Massachusetts. About three years ago, Verizon came in with an application for seven small cell antennas. The town had more questions than Verizon could answer, so they formed a Small Cell Committee, and for a year or so, they investigated. In addition to their town lawyer, they hired special counsel who had telecom expertise, so that they could be advised on what they could do to protect their community within the constraints of the current law.
Burlington came up with a Small Cell Policy that said common sense things like if they allow this application to be permitted, then anything the wireless industry puts in has to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Because they call these things “small cells,” the industry will spin it that, “It’s just the size of a backpack up on a pole.” But what they’re not telling you is it comes with a refrigerator-sized box or two that has cooling fans, backup batteries and more in it on the ground. So, Burlington said industry can’t put that equipment where it’s going to block somebody in a wheelchair from passing by a sidewalk. And then they said aesthetically, anything you put in has to blend in with the environment.
But then Burlington established that industry cannot just come into the community with this wireless equipment and drop and run. If they approve a small cell application, the wireless provider has to agree to come back every single year and pay to have a recertification done by an independent party that the equipment is still within the FCC limits for public radiation exposure. Verizon did not want to set precedent for coming back and doing an annual recertification, so they actually withdrew their seven small cell applications. We have seen a pattern that if citizens speak up to their towns and work with them and point them in the right direction, and a town starts strengthening their bylaws or puts a policy in place, the industry oftentimes will just move along because they don’t want to spend the money and the time to have to fight what the town is doing to protect itself.
Every one of us in our towns should be speaking up in our towns. We know that’s a tall ask because most of us are not experts on this, but if you go to www.AmericansForResponsibleTechnology.org, they have gathered all of the best practices from around the country. They have a sample bylaw that you can take to your town lawyer and say, “Look, we have a big issue here. And here’s how we can learn about it. And here’s what our bylaws need to be changed to include.”
We need to have setbacks so that they cannot put these things right in front of our homes. The science indicates in epidemiological studies that look at what’s actually happening in society, that they find increases in cancers and sleep issues and neurological problems with anxiety and depression and so forth within 500 meters or 1,640 feet of a cell tower. Some towns will specify in their bylaws the setback of 1500 feet from anywhere that we’re living and hospitals and places where children play. Here in Shelburne, Massachusetts, I think they got a 1500-foot setback for residential, and then a 3000-foot setback from schools.
But we shouldn’t feel like we’re defeated because wireless is everywhere. We are just at one point in time and we need to get ourselves educated and then look to see what others have done. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but we’ve all got to take action on this, because with this lawsuit in play with the FCC, the industry is moving even faster to get their wireless infrastructure in for 5G before they get told that they have to fix it.
Plus the industry did another really slick move at the end of March. It used to be that if you wanted to have a satellite dish, that’s just a one-way signal between you and the satellite, and you can put it on your balcony or your rooftop. That was governed by something called the OTARD rule, the over-the-air-reception-device rule that controlled that one way signal to give you signal from a satellite. Now, the industry and the FCC have changed that rule, such that you can now put in a two-way transmitter or a cell antenna on your own property. Now we see out in Arizona and Nevada, they already have companies knocking on your door and saying, “Hey, we’ll give you the best cutting-edge technology if you’ll just let us put a cell antenna on your property.” That antenna is going to beam out and saturate you and your loved ones and your pets and your pollinators and every one of your neighbors 24/7.
And it doesn’t even have to go through the town. They’re stripping local control. The industry is moving fast and furious before they get caught, so it’s imperative that we all start learning about this and then come out of our comfort zone and speak up. Because even if you choose to hardwire everything in your house, when your next door neighbor puts that cell antenna up on their roof, you are going to be exposed at close range, 24/7.
There are growing voices all over the country. There may be groups already formed where you are. If you go to AmericansForResponsibleTech.org you might be able to just simply join a group that’s already in motion. Or if there is nobody near you, they have a whole toolkit for how to help you get started, so don’t feel like you have to do it on your own.
One of the biggest lessons I learned is not to go it alone. Get everyone around you informed first. Use the film “Generation Zapped” to have a screening in your living room or talk to your local library. If your library subscribes to Kanopy or Hoopla, that film is part of their collection, and you can watch it for free through your local library. Maybe ask your library to do a screening and get people in the community educated at the same time.
Once you have a group of people who are going to want to ensure safe technology, then go to your town boards of zoning and planning, and select boards, city councils, and your local lawyer, but do not go it alone because one voice can be very easily dismissed. Once you have a group of people who have done their homework and really understand that this needs to be addressed, talk to your schools. Start protecting the schools by going to TechSafeSchools.org and use their toolkit and get this conversation started because our schools have been told by industry that our kids have to have this technology to succeed in life.
That is absolutely not true. The New York Times did an expose on Silicon Valley executives and revealed that they are sending their children to schools with no technology. In fact, they’re having their nannies sign contracts that there will be no technology and no screens around their children because they know the harm that it causes. Kids certainly can use technology, but it should not be the core of how we’re teaching our children. They learn best from their teachers through human interpersonal interactions, from their natural environment, and from their peers, not from a screen.
CAROL BEDROSIAN: What is the status of the legislation in New Hampshire?
CECE DOUCETTE: We got that bill in New Hampshire through the House Committee on Science, Technology and Energy, and then through the Senate side with the Health and Human Services Committee, which was chaired by a medical doctor, who actually co-sponsored that bill. I think he’s a Democrat and Representative Patrick Abrami, who introduced the bill, is a Republican, so it was a beautiful example of bipartisan cooperation. The bill passed the House, we got it to pass the Senate, and then Governor Sununu signed it into law, all in seven months time in New Hampshire. And we’ve had similar bills languishing in Massachusetts, some of them for 10 years now.
So, we all need to really take notice of this and use the New Hampshire law. They published a groundbreaking report in November that calls out and documents the corruption and the conflicts of interest within our government at the federal level and with the industry. I love that New Hampshire report; they were very courageous to stand up to industry. Then it makes 15 recommendations to start educating the public, to hardwire technology, to start transitioning our communities and schools to fiber optics to the premises. Because, right now the industry will run high-speed fiber optics down the road, which is great, and then instead of bringing it right to the building and hardwiring it, they stop at the curb and throw up all these cheap, quick-to-install wireless small cell antennas that are very, very harmful to every living cell out there.
CAROL BEDROSIAN: What are the symptoms of microwave sickness?
CECE DOUCETTE: Early onset symptoms often start presenting as irregular sleep insomnia, for some people it’s nightmares or night terrors. Another big one is stabbing, searing headaches, oftentimes migraines that people can’t seem to figure out. Nosebleeds are common, sometimes ear bleeds, and then there is pain throughout the body from unidentified sources. Nausea is a big one. There’s also dizziness, anxiety and depression. A couple in New York contacted me. They had both gotten jobs in New York City, and had a friend who lived on the top floor of a building, and offered to give them a bedroom to sleep in until they got established. Once there, they started getting really sick and feeling very anxious and depressed. It turns out there were cell tower antennas right on the roof.
The public has to stand up and speak up and force a change, because if nothing changes in our behavior, nothing changes at the policy level. So yeah, those are very common symptoms that people are experiencing today. And the good news is, is that for many people, just by reading this interview, they might decide to take a chance and turn everything off at night. People say to me, “I didn’t want to believe this. I didn’t want to hear about it or know about it, but I recognized some of those symptoms.” And they’ll come back and say, “Wow, that headache that I’ve had is gone,” or, “Oh my gosh, I started sleeping through the night again,” or “My kid’s behavior issues are calming way down.”
Doctors tell us that with a two-week digital detox, even just by starting at night, some children with autism who are experiencing de novo mutations —which means it did not come through mom or dad’s genetics, but somehow through the environment — that even children who had been non-verbal, after a couple of weeks of cleaning out the constant bombardment of radio frequency, could connect.
Dr. Toril Jelter gives an example of a family in her care who did the digital detox. After a couple of weeks, this little boy looks at his mom and says, “Mom, will you hand me that…?” She had never heard his voice before, and neither had he, and here he comes out speaking full sentences. They were just all just blown out of the water that by simply removing the radiation exposure, it gives our bodies a chance to repair, and the children’s DNA to repair and regenerate, and actually do what our bodies are meant to do. Some people are fortunate to see a remediation of symptoms alongside the remediation of the radiation.
There’s lots of hope. As dismal as this sounds, I always tell people you’re certainly entitled to that freak out for 10 minutes as you begin to notice where all the exposures are in our lives. Then circle back and learn how to remediate the ones over which you have control. For the bigger ones in the environment like smart meters, and the small cells and the big cells, let’s start using our voices together. There’s so much already in motion that you don’t have to start at square one, but you do have to find the courage to speak up because nobody else is going to fix it in your town, except for you. Please join us at Massachusetts for Safe Technology and we’ll help you get started.
Cece Doucette can be contacted through Massachusetts for Safe Technology, www.ma4safetech.org.
Carol Bedrosian is the publisher of Spirit of Change Magazine. www.spiritofchange.org.
Resources: Another recent article on the subject from Natural Awakenings Magazine by Wendy Nadherny Fachon, “Tips for Safe Technology Holiday Gifting“.
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