1. The History of “Radio Wave Sickness” Studies

Posted on May 15, 2025 by Multerland

“The term “electromagnetic hypersensitivity” (“EHS”) was invented because no health authority in any Western country admits that electromagnetic radiation has any effect on the health of any normal person. EHS, therefore, refers to those people who have happened accidentally to find out what is making them sick, and who have bought into the fiction that they are abnormal and different from everyone else.“

From: “Radio Wave Packet“
What You Need to Know about Wireless Technology
By: Arthur Firstenberg1 (1950-2025)
President, Cellular Phone Task Force2
First published: September 2001
Revised: August 2022

Series about EHS

  1. Dr. Erica Mallery-Blythe on Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity and EMF Limits
  2. Radio Wave Packet

The history of the study of radio wave sickness started during the 1950s in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

Thousands of workers suffered from a new occupational disease – During the 1950s clinics were established in Moscow, Leningrad, and other cities in the Soviet Union3 and Eastern Europe to study and treat thousands of workers suffering from a new occupational disease—a disease which was also reported in the United States but which was neither studied nor treated there. The new disease was named radio wave sickness. These patients manufactured, inspected, repaired or operated microwave equipment. Some worked at radar facilities, others for radio or TV stations, or telephone companies. Still others operated radio frequency heaters and sealers being used in an expanding number of industries using technology developed during World War II. These workers were exposed to microwave radiation only during working hours. And they were exposed to levels of radiation that were less than what the general public is exposed to now for hours per day, or even all the time, from their cell phones and other wireless devices.

The symptoms of the new disease – The patients at these clinics suffered from headaches, fatigue, weakness, sleep disturbance, irritability, dizziness, memory difficulty, sexual dysfunction, skin rash, hair loss, decreased appetite, indigestion, and occasionally sensitivity to sunlight. Some had heart palpitations, stabbing pains in the region of the heart, and shortness of breath after exertion. Many developed emotional instability, anxiety or depression, and a few had mania or paranoia. On physical exam they had acrocyanosis (blue fingers and toes), impaired sense of smell, sweating, tremors, altered reflexes, unequal pupil size, heart arrhythmias, and unstable pulse and blood pressure. They had abnormal EEGs and EKGs and, in advanced stages, signs of oxygen deprivation to the heart and brain. Some developed cataracts. Blood work showed hyperactive thyroid, elevated histamine, elevated blood sugar, elevated cholesterol and triglycerides, an increase in blood proteins, a decrease in the albumin-globulin ratio, decreased platelets and red blood cells, and abnormally high or low white blood cell count.

Abnormalities in the majority of the workers – Although only about 15% of microwave workers complained of their illness, and only 2% ceased working (Sadchikova 1960, Klimková-Deutschová 1974), laboratory work revealed abnormalities in the majority of workers. Blood cholesterol was elevated in 40% of microwave workers (Klimkova-Deutschova 1974), triglycerides were elevated in 63% (Sadchikova et al. 1980), fasting blood sugar was increased in 74% (Klimkova-Deutschova 1974), and 70% had abnormal thyroid activity. (Smirnova and Sadchikova 1960; Drogichina 1960). Objective cardiac changes were found in 18% to 35% of microwave workers, depending on the length of time worked.

US/USSR scientific exchange on microwave radiation research was begun in the mid-1970s – US government, US Army, US Airforce

Dr. Zorach Glaser4 – Because of the large number of publications about radio wave sickness coming out of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, a US/USSR scientific exchange on microwave radiation research was begun in the mid-1970s5. And the US government commissioned Dr. Zorach Glaser to catalogue the world’s scientific literature—journal articles, books, conference proceedings—on reported biological and health effects of radio frequency and microwave radiation. By the end of the 1970s, Glaser’s bibliography included 5,083 documents (Glaser 1984).

Dr. Milton Zaret6 – During the 1960s and 1970s, ophthalmologist Milton Zaret, under contract with the US Army and US Air Force, examined the eyes of thousands of military and civilian personnel working at radar installations in the US and Greenland. Large numbers of them, he found, were developing cataracts. Most of these cataracts were caused by chronic exposure of the eye to radiation at power densities around one milliwatt per square centimeter—a level which is regularly exceeded by each of the 15 billion cell phones in use today (Birenbaum et al. 1969; Zaret 1973).

Dr. Allan Frey7 – During those years American biologist Allan Frey discovered that microwave radiation damages the blood-brain barrier (Frey et al. 1975), and he proved that humans and animals can hear microwaves (Frey 1961). One of the most active American researchers during the 1960s and 1970s, Frey caused rats to become docile by irradiating them at a power density of 50 microwatts per square centimeter (Frey and Spector 1976). He altered specific behaviors at 8 microwatts per square centimeter (Frey and Wesler 1979). He altered the heart rate of live frogs at 3 microwatts per square centimeter (Frey and Eichert 1986). At only 0.6 microwatts per square centimeter, 15 times less than levels commonly encountered today at a normal operating distance from a wireless laptop, he caused frogs’ hearts to develop arrhythmias, and sometimes caused the hearts to stop beating, by timing the microwave pulses at a precise point during the heart’s rhythm (Frey and Seifert 1968). Frey’s work was funded by the US Navy.

The year 1977

Paul Brodeur8 writes his book: “The Zapping of America9, Microwaves, Their Deadly Risk, and the Coverup“- In 1977 Paul Brodeur, in his book, “The Zapping of America, Microwaves, Their Deadly Risk, and the Coverup” warned that proliferating microwave towers and radar facilities were endangering public health. But compared to today, microwave and radio facilities were still very rare indeed.

Apple’s first wired computers – When in 1977 Apple sold its first (wired) personal computers, exposure to high levels of electromagnetic radiation spread to the general population, and electromagnetic illness ceased being only an occupational disease. In that year deaths from asthma in the US, which had been declining steadily for decades, began to rise for the first time.

The 1980s

The Health Hazards of Video Display Terminals10 – In 1981, Representative Al Gore11 chaired the first of a number of US Congressional hearings on the health effects of (wired) video display terminals (VDTs). These were held because two editors at The New York Times, young men in their 20s and 30s, had developed cataracts; half of all surveyed UPI and AP employees were complaining of visual problems or headaches; an unusual number of babies with birth defects had been born to employees at The Toronto Star; and clusters of miscarriages were occurring among female VDT operators all over the US and Canada.

The newspaper industry had been the earliest industry to be transformed by computer technology. During the 1981 hearings by the House Committee on Science and Technology, Charles A. Perlik, Jr., president of the Newspaper Guild, testified that had his membership known that VDTs were capable of dangerous emissions, “We would not have quietly permitted the transformation of an essentially benign workplace into a hazardous one.” In 1985 Canadian author Bob DeMatteo published a popular book titled Terminal Shock: The Health Hazards of Video Display Terminals.

Olle Johansson12, neuroscientist, discovered a new skin disease – In the mid-1980s Olle Johansson, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, discovered a new skin disease. Since only people who worked in front of computer screens got it, he named it screen dermatitis. Such patients often complained also of neurological symptoms such as memory loss, fatigue, insomnia, dizziness, nausea, headache and heart palpitations—the same neurological symptoms written about three decades earlier by Soviet doctors—but since Johansson’s specialty was skin diseases, he studied the skin of computer operators. His subjects ranged from those with only redness and itching, to those with severe, disfiguring skin lesions.

The 1990s

The microwaving of our planet starts – In the mid-1990s the telecommunications industry embarked on a project that was to result in the exposure of the entire world to microwave radiation on a previously unimagined scale. They planned to place a cell phone and a wireless computer in the hands of every man, woman and child on Earth—and to dot our world with so many broadcast antennas that those phones and computers would work in every home and every office, on every street, in every country, on the highest mountain and in the deepest valley, on every lake, and in every national park, wilderness area and wildlife refuge, without exception. And so during the next decades every human being has become a source of microwave radiation wherever he or she goes. And ambient levels of radiation have increased a thousand fold or more, everywhere on Earth.

The correlation between the wireless technology symptoms and the symptoms of the Soviet workers

Researchers began correlating symptoms such as sleep disturbance, fatigue, memory loss, headaches, depression, dizziness and tremors—the same symptoms reported to both Soviet and American doctors half a century previously—with both cell phone use and proximity to communication towers.

2007: 75% of the Earth’s population significantly affected by wireless technology

By 2007, teams of scientists in 14 countries concluded that the health of as much as three quarters of the population of the Earth was significantly affected by wireless technology (Haugsdal 1998, Hocking 1998, Cao 2000, Oftedahl 2000, Chia 2000, Sandström 2001, Santini 2002, Navarro 2003, Santini 2003, Zwamborn 2003, Wilén 2003, Oberfeld 2004, Bortkiewicz 2004, Al-Khlaiwi 2004, Salama 2004, Meo 2005, Preece 2005, Waldmann-Selsam 2005, Szykjowska 2005, Balikci 2005, Balik 2005, Hutter 2006, Abdel-Rassoul 2007).

Other scientists have reported that cell phones cause eczema (Kimata 2002), blindness (Ye et al. 2001), childhood asthma (Li et al. 2001), Alzheimer’s disease (Salford et al. 2003, Şahin et al. 2015), deafness (Oktay and Dasdag 2006, Panda et al. 2011, Velayutham et al. 2014, Mishra 2010, Mishra 2011), and multiple sclerosis (İkinci et al. 2015).

The term “electromagnetic hypersensitivity”

The term “electromagnetic hypersensitivity” (“EHS”) was invented because no health authority in any Western country admits that electromagnetic radiation has any effect on the health of any normal person. EHS, therefore, refers to those people who have happened accidentally to find out what is making them sick, and who have bought into the fiction that they are abnormal and different from everyone else.

From: RADIO WAVE PACKET – What You Need to Know about Wireless Technology
English / Nederlands / norsk  / français / svenska / italiano / 日本語 ↩︎
By: Arthur Firstenberg (1950-2025)
President, Cellular Phone Task Force
First published: September 2001
Revised: August 2022

Series about EHS:

  1. Intro: Dr. Erica Mallery-Blythe on Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity and EMF Limits
  2. Radio Wave Packet

Footnotes

  1. Arthur Firstenberg – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Firstenberg ↩︎
  2. Cellular Phone Task Force – https://cellphonetaskforce.org/about-us/ ↩︎
  3. Soviet Union – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union ↩︎
  4. Dr. Zory Glaser – https://zoryglaser.com ↩︎
  5. PDF, Zory Glaser, 1976, https://mdsafetech.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/naval-research-bibliography-zory-glaser-1976-.pdf ↩︎
  6. Dr. Milton Zaret – https://microwavenews.com/news-center/milton-zaret-early-prophet-microwave-hazards-dies-91 ↩︎
  7. Dr. Allan Frey – https://cellphonetaskforce.org/the-work-of-allan-h-frey/ ↩︎
  8. Paul Brodeur – https://www.microwavenews.com/news-center/paul-brodeur-dies-92 ↩︎
  9. The Zapping of America, Microwaves, Their Deadly Risk, and the Coverup – https://www.amazon.com/Zapping-America-Microwaves-Deadly-Coverup/dp/0393064271 ↩︎
  10. Video Display Terminals – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_terminal ↩︎
  11. Al Gore – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore ↩︎
  12. Olle Johansson – https://cellphonetaskforce.org/the-work-of-olle-johansson/ ↩︎

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About Multerland

Multerland is a blog about care for nature, natural health, holistic medicine, holistic therapies, deep ecology, sustainability, climate change, life processes, psychology, spirituality, and awareness. Since 2017 only articles about the hidden dangers of wireless and cell phone radiation have been published. Since April 2023 a new branch has been added: "Sustainable Politics". URL: backups.blog
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