Health Canada's misuse of EMR guidelines is a case in point. When Canadians inquire as to what a safe EMR exposure level would be Health Canada quotes Safety Code Six. These are thermal guidelines designed to protect humans from the heating of their tissue. However, Alzheimers, cancer and numerous other diseases are associated with non-thermal effects of EMR and occur at exposure levels thousands of times less than what it takes to heat tissue. Safety Code Six has nothing to do with these diseases and Health Canada knows it - they just don't tell you that! Health Canada will tell you that your exposure is thousands of times below what will cause harm, but what they don't tell you is that their definition of harm only means the heating of your body. They artfully avoid making this distinction when communicating with the public. Consequently, the public then believes that extremely high EMR exposures are safe and they do not demand lower regulations which would cost the industry plenty.
Locked into this corporatist ideology, Health Canada claims that only EMR exposures that heat human tissue are dangerous. Basically their policy on EMR exposure is (if it can't cook you it can't hurt you). Thermal exposures created by extremely powerful EMR are possible in situations like using a cellular phone and are extremely serious but the non-thermal, low level EMR exposures which promote cancer growth are being ignored.
Consequently Health Canada uses only thermal guidelines such as those created by the US military and industry after World War II. However studies and expert opinions are telling us that cancer is caused by non-thermal exposures to EMR. We are getting cancer from exposure levels thousands of times less than what it takes to heat tissue. We are unwittingly immersed in EMR at these levels daily. Safety Code Six are thermal guidelines for EMR. They pertain to the heating of tissue. Our health officials trick us into believing that extremely high EMR exposures are safe by referring to their thermal guidelines when what are dealing with in fact are non-thermal effects.
To help explain how we are deceived let's use smoking cigarettes as an analogy. We know that cigarettes can harm us in two ways; by directly burning our skin (a thermal effect) and by inhaling the smoke (a non-thermal effect). In this analogy we do not know that our health officials believe that cigarette smoke is harmless. We do not know that they believe that the only health hazard presented by a cigarette is being burnt by the hot ash. So when we ask about the hazards of smoking our health officials quote thermal guidelines on how far to stay away from a burning cigarette. They do not tell us that these guidelines only pertain to being burnt by the hot ash and have nothing to do with the non-thermal effects of inhaling smoke. So we are told that we can have a thousand cigarettes going at once in the same room before it is hazardous to us.
At this point we would know that something is terribly wrong and that level of exposure to smoke is too high no matter what our health officials say. Unfortunately we can not see and smell EMR like we can smoke. If we could we would know that our exposures are too high and our health officials are not protecting us. We could be exposed to radiation at levels a thousand times higher than what has been shown to promote cancer and Health Canada would say that we are safe. This is because the EMR is not burning our flesh and that is the only health effect they recognize. What is deceiving is they just go ahead and quote their thermal guidelines with no effort to make this distinction. According to their corporatist ideology non-thermal health effects can not exist
This situation reminds me of the Titanic. The owners of that illustrious ship insisted the Titanic was unsinkable. They kept insisting the Titanic could not sink even days after she had settled on the floor of the North Atlantic. They had constructed a reality in which the Titanic could not sink. Any evidence to the contrary was outside the parameters of their reasoning and therefore could not exist. Equally, our Health officials are convinced that low level exposures to EMR cannot promote cancer and they refuse to be influenced by the facts. Although desperately needed, there are no national guidelines for the non-thermal health effects of EMR.
