Many
diseases of civilization, especially cancer, are related to an artifact
of electricity: electromagnetic interference (EMI) or “dirty
electricity.” Historical data also suggests electrification has lowered
life expectancy
EMI
is biologically active and affects mitochondrial function, which we’ve
now come to appreciate is at the heart of virtually all chronic disease
Cancers
appear to be frequency-specific, meaning certain frequencies cause
specific cancers. Male breast cancer is a sentinel for EMI exposure
By Dr. Mercola
Did you know that a significant percentage of the diseases we now
face is related to an artifact of electricity? In this interview, Dr.
Sam Milham, author of ”Dirty Electricity: Electrification and the Diseases of Civilization,” explains the health hazards of dirty electricity or electromagnetic interference (EMI).
Milham is a physician and an epidemiologist, and has spent decades (he’s
now 85 years old) doing pioneering research in this field. In his book,
he details the extensive journey he took to uncover the link between dirty electricity
and human disease. In a nutshell, dirty electricity, or more accurately
stated, EMI, impacts your biology, specifically your mitochondrial
function, which we’ve now come to appreciate is at the heart of
virtually all chronic disease.
What Is Dirty Electricity?
Sunlight is a natural or native form of electromagnetic frequency
(EMF). There are also four basic non-native or artificial EMF
exposures: magnetic, artificial light, electrical and microwave (which
includes not only your microwave oven but also cellphones, routers and
portable phones).
Dirty electricity refers to the electrical component of this EMF
spectrum. A more precise term is electromagnetic interference or EMI.
“Dirty” is more of a descriptive layman’s term. But what exactly is EMI
and how is it generated? Milham explains:
“The electric grid began with Edison in 1892 at the Pearl Street
Generating Station. It turns out that from the very second he started
generating electricity, he was making dirty electricity. The way I know
that is because if you read his publications, he had a big problem with
his original generators … They had brush arcing. The way they made
electricity was by spinning magnets that had brushes to pick up their
contact points.
All electric motors have brushes. Generators have them. They’re
made out of graphite … Arcing and sparking makes dirty electricity,
which are really high-frequency electric transients. They come and go.
They’re spikey. They have very short latency times.
From the outset of the grid, we’ve been exposed to this. It’s not
the 60-cycle stuff. We’re talking about frequencies up in the kilohertz
and higher; thousands of cycles per second.”
EMI Microwaves Travel Far and Wide
There are also microwaves, and this is not just your microwave oven, but your portable phone, cellphone and cellphone towers.
“All transmitters, AM, frequency modulation (FM) and especially
cell towers [produce microwaves]. Your cellphone works because there’s a
transmitter out there that transmits to you. They all run on DC.
Every cell tower in the world has a huge inverter in it to make
the DC to run the transmitter, and also to charge the backup batteries.
They make dirty electricity by the ton. Lots of schools have cell towers
on campus. What they’re doing is they’re bathing the kids [with EMI].
It gets back into the wires; the ground (lot)wires and power
wires that service it. The grid becomes an antenna for all this dirty
electricity. It extends miles downstream … [A Brazilian study] looked at
deaths from cancer [and] distance of residence from the base of the
cell tower.
They got effects out to 500 meters. That’s 1,500 feet. I’ll tell
you, the cell tower can’t talk that far. It’s the dirty electricity —
the EMI in the grid, in the wires running into your house, through the
ground and through your power cords — that’s doing it.”
Dirty Electricity Is Biologically Active
A classic example of EMI is AM radio wave transmission interruption,
as demonstrated in Milham’s video above. But why exactly should we be
concerned about EMI in our homes?
“Over the 50 years I’ve been doing this, it’s become super clear
that EMI or dirty electricity is very biologically active. I wrote the
book to warn the population because nobody seemed to pay attention to
it. This is the major cause of all the so-called diseases of
civilization,”1Milham says.
I myself am becoming quite passionate about this issue. I’ve known
about dirty electricity or EMI for nearly two decades, but I never fully
appreciated the impact it has until I read Milham’s book. Then, the
connections suddenly became apparent to me.
For the last year, I’ve been diving deep into the scientific
literature of mitochondrial function, and it appears this is how EMI
affects your health. In other words, it likely increases mitochondrial
free radical damage and contributes to mitochondrial dysfunction.
Certainly, other variables contribute to disease as well, such as the
processing of food, unbalanced nutrient ratios, pesticide contamination
and so on. Still, the impact of EMI may be foolhardy to overlook.
All Solar Panels Generate Dirty Electricity
On a side note, many who use solar panels (photovoltaic panels) are
completely unaware of the fact that they are a source of dirty
electricity. I’ve had 15 kilowatt solar panels on my home for the last
five years. Photovoltaic panels generate direct current (DC), which is
essentially unusable in most homes.
In order to use the DC current the solar panels generate, you need to
use an inverter that converts it to alternating current (AC). The
problem is, the inverter used to generate AC is a phenomenal source of
dirty electricity. I remediated mine and radically decreased the EMI
generated when the inverters are on during the day.
Large, commercial solar arrays have a similar problem. They use
inverters — sometimes thousands of them if they’re really big arrays —
and they all generate EMI or dirty electricity.
“If your utility has an appreciable wind or solar component, it is, by definition, giving you dirty electricity,” Milham notes. “[W]hen
I first discovered this business, I went online; I studied commercial
sources of photovoltaic inverters … I found this statement … [which]
said that all photovoltaic inverters create amplitude modulation (AM)
radio interference. What does that tell you? It says it’s all dirty.”
This EMI connects or affects your biology when it’s on a circuit or in
the earth. For example, if you have a solar panel in your house, not all
circuits in your house will be hooked up to it. The only circuits
affected by EMI will be the ones hooked up to the solar panel inverter.
The EMI gets into the ground and can also affect your neighbors.
Chronic EMI Exposure Raises Your Cancer Risk
Once EMI is generated, how far away must you be from the wire in
question in order to avoid biological interference? According to Milham,
the distance can be quite significant. In many cases, entire areas of
ground can be a source of EMI, raising the current in your body.
“About three years ago, [the late professor] Martin H. Graham …
and Dave Stetzer, who pioneered and studied this field and trained me …
sent me an off-the-shelf fluke multimeter, which measures volts, amps
and ohms. He showed me how to use it to measure current in my body.
That’s been a mindblower … I put an electrocardiogram (EKG) patch
on my chest for one lead … and the other [fluke multimeter lead] goes
to an electrical outlet ground … It then measures the current in my body
…
The meter comes with everything you need. All you’ve got to do is
take a 12-gauge wire and put a three-prong plug on it, where you only
contact the round plug. That’s attached to your black electrode. That’s
for the ground. The red one goes to your EKG patch on your chest (or to
your mouth).
I find that just walking on the pavement in an area, I could get
very, very high, probably carcinogenic fields of current in my body.
We’re talking millivolts [and] microamps …
The National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)
studied this years ago. They concluded that 18 microamps is sufficient
to put enough voltage in your body to give you cancer with chronic
exposure. You want to keep [your body current] under 18 microamps. The
higher it is, the worse it is …
I find 200 to 300 microamps in lots of places, just standing on
the floor … One of my favorite places is a local farmers market here.
Last year, I was horrified to find out that just walking or standing in
that place, I was putting 200 microamps of current into my body2 …
I was sitting at a Hewlett-Packard laptop and was measuring
myself. I just touched the case of the laptop and found it was putting
80 microamps into my body. I finally got rid of it by putting a USB to
an outlet ground. That fixes it.”
Beware of Fluorescent and LED Lights
Milham also discovered that almost all non-incandescent lighting puts
high current into your body, directly from the light. This includes
fluorescents, compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) and light emitting
diodes (LED) light bulbs. Dr. Alexander Wunsch, a world class expert on photobiology,
details many of the health hazards associated with LED lights, but the
dirty electricity component is yet another reason to avoid these types
of light bulbs in your home and office space. As noted by Milham:
“This explains a lot. I started doing occupational mortality
[investigations] 30 years ago … I was puzzled as to why the highest
cancer rates [occur in] teachers, professors and office workers. Why is
melanoma more common in people who work indoors than outdoors?
Why is it more common in teachers and professors than in
lifeguards or farmers? Why do you get it on parts of your body that
never see the sun? It’s due to [nonnative artificial] EMF, as I’ve been
measuring in schools and colleges. There’s just no place to hide.”
In the 1950s, photobiologist John Ott studied children in a Florida
school who had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He believed
these kinds of behavioral problems were associated with the fluorescent
lighting, and was able to improve the children’s condition by placing an
EMF-blocking wire mesh screen in front of the lights that was then
grounded. This and other findings are discussed in Ott’s book, “Health
and Light: The Effects of Natural and Artificial Light on Man and Other
Living Things.”
Male Breast Cancer — A Sentinel for EMI Exposure
Interestingly, Milham’s work suggests cancers are frequency-specific,3 meaning certain frequencies cause specific cancers. He also notes that male breast cancer is a sentinel for EMI exposure,4 just like mesothelioma is a sentinel for asbestos exposure. Unfortunately, few are willing to take the issue seriously.
“In the second edition of my book I comment (willfully) that
there’s an epidemic of male breast cancer in Camp Lejeune in the Marine
Corps. I wrote to them and said, ‘Look at these 15 studies that link EMF
to [male breast cancer].’ They were saying it was due to the drinking
water contamination. There’s no way. It’s due to EMF for sure. They just
ignored me.”
Milham was also involved in an investigation5
at La Quinta Middle School in Palm Springs. Teachers were convinced an
environmental problem was at fault for an epidemic of cancer among the
staff. In all, 18 teachers at the school had developed cancer. Other
schools in the system had at most two or three cases.
The superintendent of the school hired an expert from the local tumor
registry (cancer institute), who informed the teachers that their
cancers were due to sun exposure.
Milham initially spent months trying to contact the school, to no
avail. The superintendent told him they were satisfied with the answers
they’d received.
Eventually, at the request of the teachers, he was allowed into the
school for two nights to investigate, yet shortly thereafter, he was
accused of criminal trespass by the school district. They simply did not
want him to get involved. The state teacher’s association stonewalled
him as well.
“I tried to do another school that had a cell tower on campus and
an epidemic of mostly breast cancer in the staff. Once again, they
hired a University of California professor to come to a school board
meeting and try to shoot down my [research]. They wouldn’t cooperate, so
what are you going to do? You can lead these people to water but you
can’t make them drink.”
Historical Data Reveal Public Health Impact of Electrification
Clearly, there’s a strong negative incentive against this type of
information. What intrigued me is that when Milham did his initial
analysis and historical review,6
he found a strong correlation between electrification and mortality
from cancer, including female breast cancer and childhood leukemia7 — and this data dates back to 1900!
By the turn of the century, most big cities in the world had
electricity, while rural areas didn’t catch up until the mid-‘50s. So,
for half a century there were two large United States populations
covered by a good vital record system of deaths and births. One
population group was exposed to electricity and the other wasn’t. When
you compare these two groups, you discover some truly amazing
differences in vital statistics.
“At the turn of the century, if you lived in New York City or
most of the other cities in the country, your average life expectancy
was low-50s. If you were Amish and didn’t use electricity or if you
lived in rural Mississippi or rural New York State, your longevity was
in the 70s.
Fast forward to the 1930s … the urban cancer [mortality] was 50
to 80 percent higher than the rural cancer mortality. That’s enough to
blow your mind. It’s internally consistent.”
Today, the risks are greater than ever before, thanks to ground
currents. The electric grid in the U.S. is called a grounded Wye grid,
designed for protection against lighting. The neutral center taps of
their transformers are connected to the earth by a wire. In the U.S.
about 80 percent of the current delivered to loads like motors and
lights returns to the substation via the earth.
Dairy farmers were among the first to sound the alarm that something
was wrong. In the 1970s, they noticed cows were dying, weren’t producing
milk and had trouble reproducing. “This big old BACI (before-after
control-impact) is a wonderful canary in the coal mine for EMF,” Milham
notes.
Stetzer, Graham and others did a study in which they identified the
parts of the EMF spectrum that impact milk production in cows.
Interestingly, their findings reveal milk production is affected by
certain harmonics at multiples of 60 Hz. At these intervals, frequencies
have a harmful effect on the cows. Chances are, the same applies to
human beings.
Biological Mechanisms of EMI
As mentioned, dirty electricity or EMI are high-frequency electric
transients and harmonics that come and go. These aberrant peaks in
frequency are emitted quite a distance, typically greater than 10 feet.
This means that if you’re within range, these frequencies can resonate
with your body, causing some biological effect.
One suggested mechanism of harm is related to the production of a
reactive nitrogen species (RNS) called perioxynitrate. Evidence also
suggests it can affect mitochondrial function, which I believe is a
major mechanism of harm. More generally speaking, EMI acts as a
biological stressor. In one of Milham’s studies, he showed that by
cleaning up the electrical environment, they were able to reduce the
production of stress hormones.
He’s also shown that by filtering dirty electricity from a library,
the levels of neurotransmitters in people spending time in the library
were beneficially altered. Milham also cites a study by two German
researchers, who were able to demonstrate that the installation of a
cellphone tower in a previously pristine valley produced long-term
changes in a wide variety of measurable hormones, including stress
hormones.
More Information
If you’re intrigued by this information and want to learn more, be sure to pick up a copy of ”Dirty Electricity: Electrification and the Diseases of Civilization.” You can also find more information, including copies of Milham’s research papers and scientific reports on his website, SamMilham.com. I’ve also provided a number of those papers as supporting references throughout this article.
From my perspective, there’s no doubt dirty electricity is triggering
and/or exacerbating chronic disease, and if you care about your health
and longevity, I urge you to face this information head on, disturbing
and discouraging as it may be. While it may be impossible to avoid all
EMI exposure, there are ways to limit and minimize your exposure inside
your home and, potentially, at work. Doing so may go a long way toward
protecting your and your family’s health over the long term.
