It’s common knowledge that smoking, first-, second-, and third-hand, damages health. Sixty years ago, it was not common knowledge. Sixty years ago, it was not common knowledge that automobiles created air pollution that damages health, the environment, and threatens to alter our climate. Today it is common knowledge.

More than common knowledge, these and many other environmental exposures are the objects of citizen activism and government action. How does that happen? How does damage caused by environmental exposures become common knowledge?

In making damage to health from smoking common knowledge, the Surgeon General’s 1964 report “Smoking and Health” is often cited as a watershed event because the US Government took an official position. It made headlines. It caused my parents and my family doctor to stop smoking.

Last week, the Health Officer of Santa Cruz County California submitted a report to the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors reporting on the health risks of SmartMeters. The report finds that the scientific literature on health effects from wireless technologies supports the continued moratorium on SmartMeter installations on public health grounds.

The Santa Cruz report is not a watershed event in the way that the US Surgeon General’s 1964 report on smoking was. Nevertheless, it is continued progress in making the health damage caused by wireless technologies common knowledge. Of particular significance, the report notes two critical public health issues: wireless technologies are everywhere and exposure is involuntary.

In other words, the potential scope of health effects is extensive. A commonly cited statistic is that 30 percent of the population is electrosensitive. A smaller number, 3 percent, are so severely affected that those who recognize wireless technologies as the cause of their suffering become refugees seeking a place to live that isn’t saturated with electromagnetic radiation. More commonly, those who suffer don’t recognize the cause and simply become customers for pharmaceuticals that treat the symptoms.

But consider the numbers. You might think that 30 percent affected means that 70 percent are not affected and that 3 percent is a small proportion of the population. In fact, 3 percent of the US population is 10 million people. That’s greater than the population of New York City and almost the population of the state of Illinois.

That needs to be common knowledge. But the health effects of wireless exposures also need to be common knowledge.

The EMF researcher and activist Magda Havas proposes that we stop using the term “electrosensitivity” and instead use “Rapid Aging Syndrome.” There already exists a class of chronic illnesses that are referred to as accelerated aging largely caused by environmental exposures. What’s meant is that the body’s capacity to protect and heal itself is impaired. These impairments lead to symptoms commonly associated with conditions suffered in old age.

The following are symptoms common to both the elderly and to electrosensitives.

• Fatigue
• Difficult sleep
• Inability to concentrate
• Depression
• Memory loss
• Visual disruptions
• Inflammation
• Ringing in ears
• Skin problems
• Heart palpitations
• Dizziness
• Loss of appetite
• Difficulty in moving
• Gut problems
• Poor blood sugar regulation

EMF exposures are not alone in their ability to impair the body in protecting and healing itself. For example, the immune system is affected powerfully by electromagnetic radiation: exposures promote inflammation, which dampens the immune response to everything from viruses to cancer. But chemical exposures that cause oxidative stress have a similar effect.

That needs to be common knowledge too: the health problems of environmental exposures are not one-to-one between an exposure and an illness, but a generalized assault on our body’s capacity to prevent and heal.

Don’t interpret what I’ve said as simply a call to stock up on antioxidants and Omega 3 oils. It’s a call to change your environment. Stop using technologies that poison you—and other people. You too might have to become a refugee, so that changing your environment means get out, get out, get out. You can also, and at the same time, make trouble for the people who create those poisonous environmental exposures.

Above all, you can work to make it common knowledge that wireless technologies and other environmental exposures damage health.

An article in the journal Science Translational Medicine got me excited about a shift in how researcher ideology affects how we think about health and illness. “NEW: Network-Enabled Wisdom in Biology, Medicine, and Health Care” by Eric Schadt and Johan Björkegren describes how the vast amounts of data from the study of genes, proteins, and molecular biology generally can now be analyzed from a comprehensive, systematic perspective. Instead of being confined to looking at single pathways, we can now look at the complex set of relationships at work in us. In other words, we can look at the whole, not just the parts. Continue reading →

Don’t buy food from the center of the supermarket. That’s were processed and packaged foods live. However, you might feel better about buying processed and packaged food labeled as containing natural and organic ingredients at grocery chain stores such as Whole Foods Market®, which has spent considerable effort at developing a reputation for “selling the highest quality natural and organic products.” Continue reading →

In 2012, cigarette packages will have graphic pictures of the health consequences from smoking. One of the images is of a corpse. Also in 2012 we’ll celebrate the 50th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published a few years after the US Surgeon General officially warned us that cigarette smoking is hazardous to health. Despite all that, we remain at risk from tobacco and industrial chemicals—and for much the same reasons. Continue reading →

Researchers at Harvard are working on a way to predict adverse drug effects. You might think that clinical trials should do this since clinical trials are the basis for FDA approval. But that’s not how it works. Continue reading →

With austerity politics in full bloom, governments at all levels are eliminating a wide range of activities. Most of these affect our health. For example, over the last two years the state of Massachusetts has eliminated funding for the prevention of lead poisoning. According to the Boston Globe, the US Congress is likely to eliminate these programs as well. Continue reading →

“Can Preschoolers Be Depressed?” asked the title of a long article in last week’s New York Times Magazine. “Good grief,” I thought. “I know where this is headed.” So I set the article aside. But it kept calling to me, so I read the first page. It was about a four-year old named Kiran who, among other things, spent a day at a children’s museum but couldn’t remember anything fun that he’d done. His life seemed to be awash in that kind of feeling. And so I had another reason not to read the article—I was not drawn to reading about children in that kind of emotional pain. But still it called. Continue reading →

A study has shown that Metformin, a drug widely used in treating diabetics, is likely to reduce the risk of breast cancer. The researchers introduce the study by noting that it is now acknowledged that diabetes increases the risk of breast and other cancers—something we discussed two years ago in our book.

Continue reading →

When my daughter Laural started school, a friend of mine asked what she was learning. After a moment, Laural answered, “How to stand in line and how to take tests.” There you have it: social order and stability are the foundation of education—which should make us ponder the relationship between education and learning. Continue reading →

Why are people still smoking? Don’t they know it’s bad for their health? Continue reading →